A Blog For Mums
When I returned to my corporate job after maternity leave, my husband and I both decided to reduce our working weeks from five days to four. Our toddler would spend three days at nursery, one day with me and one day with her dad. It seemed like a fair and sensible way to divide things: we could both continue with our careers, share the childcare and each have some proper one-to-one time with our daughter.
We knew it would cost us. We would both lose a fifth of our salaries, and the reduction would also affect things such as workplace benefits and pension contributions. We were not under any illusion that it was a financially clever move. We simply decided that, while our daughter was still so young, the extra time with her was more important.
The problem was that our employers accepted the reduction in our pay far more readily than they accepted the reduction in our working hours.
My contract changed, but my job did not. I was still responsible for the same work, involved in the same projects and expected to meet the same deadlines. Nobody sat down with me before I returned and identified which responsibilities would need to be removed now that I was working 20% fewer hours.
That is the part many companies seem to miss when approving flexible working requests. They concentrate on the arrangement itself — which day you will be off and how your salary will be adjusted — without considering whether the role can realistically be completed in the time that remains.
There was no real plan for covering my work on my non-working day either. If something happened while I was away, it either waited for me or someone contacted me. By the time I returned, I could already be behind, even though I had not actually missed a day of work. I had simply taken the day off that my employer had agreed I would not work.
The four days I was in the office therefore became more intense. There was less room for unexpected problems, conversations that ran over or tasks that took longer than anticipated. A normal full-time week usually contains a little flexibility somewhere. A meeting can be moved, a less urgent job can wait until tomorrow, or an afternoon can be used to catch up. Once the fifth day disappeared, so did much of that breathing space.
I often felt as though I was racing towards my day off rather than finishing naturally for the week. Anything not completed had to be carried over, rushed through or dealt with when I was supposed to be away from work.
At first, the interruptions seemed fairly harmless. A colleague might send a quick message because they had forgotten which day I was off. Someone might ask a question that would “only take a minute”. A meeting invitation would appear in my calendar because the organiser had not checked my working pattern.
Individually, these things did not look serious enough to make a fuss about. That was partly why they continued.
A quick question still requires you to look at your phone, understand the issue and decide whether it can wait. Even when you do not answer, work has interrupted the day. You are no longer entirely focused on playing with your toddler, going to the park or doing whatever you had planned together. Part of your attention has been pulled back towards the office.
There was also the knowledge that ignoring a message could make the following morning harder. Answering it might take five minutes now, while leaving it could mean returning to a chain of emails, a delayed decision or a colleague who had spent the day waiting. It was often easier to respond, which is probably what everyone was relying on.
The most ridiculous moment came when I was asked to work on my day off because a schedule was particularly tight. This was not a day of annual leave or an unexpected absence. It was a regular non-working day for which I was not being paid.
I had accepted lower pay, lower benefits and reduced pension contributions specifically to create that time with my daughter. Yet when work became inconvenient, the company behaved as though the day still belonged to them.
I might have dismissed all of this as a problem with my particular employer if my husband had not experienced something very similar. He had also reduced his week to four days so that he could have a day alone with our toddler, and his workload did not meaningfully shrink either.
We worked in different corporate jobs, but both companies appeared to follow the same approach: pay the employee for four days while continuing to expect something much closer to five days of output.
That was when it began to feel less like a badly managed flexible working arrangement and more like a con. Between us, we had given up two days’ salary every week, along with the associated benefits and pension contributions. Our employers, meanwhile, had made few practical changes to what they expected from us.
There was another contradiction too. A four-day employee can easily be treated as part-time when opportunities arise, but full-time when work needs allocating. Your absence becomes relevant when somebody is considering whether you are available enough for a project, yet it is mysteriously forgotten when deadlines are being set.
None of this means I regret spending that weekday with my daughter. Those ordinary days together were exactly what my husband and I had hoped for when we made the decision. We did not want to look back and realise that we had both missed that stage of her life because we were frightened of losing money or slowing our careers.
The family arrangement worked. The employment arrangement did not.
What I regret is assuming that a reduction in contracted hours would automatically result in a reduction in expectations. It did not. The company adjusted what it paid me, but it did not properly redesign the role around my new availability.
Anyone considering returning from maternity leave on four days should therefore discuss much more than the chosen day off. Ask which responsibilities will be removed, how targets will be adjusted, who will provide cover and what colleagues should do when you are unavailable. It may also be worth arranging a formal review after a few months, once it becomes clear whether the job genuinely fits into the agreed hours.
Going down to four days can still be the right decision for your family. The extra time with your child can be worth far more than the salary you give up. But unless your workload falls alongside your pay, you are not really being offered flexible working.
You are simply being paid less to work faster.
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