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13 - Why Flexible Working isn't Working - solo episode

Episode 13 • 28th July 2026 • you've had a baby...not a lobotomy • Samantha Murrell

Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the You've Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy podcast. And this will be the first of probably three solo episodes that I will be doing in this season of the podcast, season two. So let's get into it. We are talking about why flexible working isn't working and what we need to do to actually properly support mothers who are coming back to work.

and have been through the biggest transition of their lives, whilst we are still seeing massive retention crisis and women dropping out of the workplace. Clearly what we are doing isn't working. So let's get into it.

So this episode is all about why flexible working isn't working. So essentially, I want to talk about the policies that organisations slap into their blueprints and say, this is what we're doing, you know, they're shouting it loud. It's all about, I call them PR stunts. It's, oh, look at us, aren't we really great? We have flexible working. And really the figures are speaking for themselves. I I talk to mothers day in, day out. So I know this isn't working.

But obviously we need figures to back this up for organisations to see it in real time and for them to see it on their bottom lines. And we are seeing more and more policies come into play and I think 91 % of organisations say they have flexible working in their policies. They offer some form of flexible working. But yet more than 50 % of employees are feeling pressured to spend more time in the office.

So flexible working in itself obviously encompasses such a wide range. Flexible working, what does that mean? Does that mean, you know, perhaps one day at home? Does it mean reduced hours? Does it mean part-time hours? Does it mean a hybrid structure? Does it mean a certain number of hours in the office? So obviously it is so nuanced. So even within flexible working itself, obviously it has to suit the employee and the employer, but we're seeing employers saying that they're offering it and it actually doesn't really work for the majority of their employees. I'm also talking about other policies that I see as just looking at the logistics. And again, organizations are really wowing everyone with the employee benefits that they have. And when actually again, they're really not supporting women through the biggest and the most monumental transformation of their lives.

So these are things like maternity pay and packages, which again are important and they are part of the whole package of support, but on their own, they are not enough to help women, to support women in the ways that they need. Yes, it's important to be spending that time with your baby to be able to be financially stable during that time. And it was something that I feel grateful that I had. I had over a year off with my daughter and financially we were able to do that.

to raise four children in the: 1960

That is partly due to fewer resources available, so fewer family members and support structures within society that are available. And that is also because of the higher expectations that are put on mothers now, the higher expectations really of the mother alone that the mother should be doing it all themselves and the high standards that we have that are exacerbated by things like social media and that kind of culture.

, their most recent report in: 2024

So what that means is that women are stepping down from managerial and leadership positions down to positions with lower responsibilities because they're being told they can't do this anymore or they feel they can't do them anymore because they don't have the support and resources. And this is a massive, massive shame because we are losing brilliant, brilliant women from the workplace. And we need these brilliant women in the workplace.

Women alone have brilliant leadership skills and when we become a mother these are amplified. Skills like empathy, improved communication, collaboration, resilience, thinking in more lateral ways and all of these are so important for engaging employees, engaging the team, for team morale, emotional intelligence and emotional connection that we can we often have as women like that intuition that we have is really really important and these are sometimes called soft skills and that really annoys me because these are fundamentally important and we know that these kind of leadership skills are going to become are going to are the gold standard for this year and beyond and we are seeing just just into hard just we're seeing just into Arden be a fellow at Harvard for her empathetic leadership. We know that those teams that are led by women, the figures are showing that they are outperforming those led by men. So yet why are we still not supporting women into and through their leadership roles when they become mothers?

So there's some statistics for you. And again, we need to talk about the actual physical cost in this. It's costing the UK annually more than 650 million pounds a year because of women leaving their roles within a year of maternity leave. And we know that it costs upwards of around 50,000 pounds per employee to replace them directly. So what we're losing, we're losing these brilliant women is taking time, energy and resources. And yet we are still not putting in place what we need, the proper support for women through this period of time in their lives.

What we need to do is really fully understand and embrace the value of mothering, of caregiving, and really improve the culture of understanding what happens to a woman when she becomes a mother. It is such a monumental transformation, yet we are treating women when they come back to work like they've just come back from a long holiday. We're not properly integrating them.

We're treating them like they've had a lobotomy, like they've become stupid, like they've become less capable, like they have less ambition. We know this, we've all seen the side eye and actually I'm ashamed to admit it. I did it myself in my career when I was in my early twenties because I felt like that was a culture I was told, like as soon as a woman has a baby, she's less interested or she's off to get her child at five o'clock or four o'clock, whatever it may be and she's not really interested in promotion that is absolutely not the case.

Women are individuals and we're not collective like not everyone doesn't have the same desires and ambitions and then when we become mothers that's exactly the same doesn't mean that we necessarily don't want to go for promotions or or career pivots or go for something else or or or if we do want to step down for a while doesn't mean that we don't ever want to come back and step up it's such an individual choice and individual circumstances will also dictate this.

including financial situations and also things like mental health and the support behind the mother. So it's really really important that we need a culture change in how we value motherhood and actually how we understand it. As a mother myself and all the mothers that I speak to we all know what a monumental transformation is but I think we also all downplay it because we are often told that's just how it is, you just have to get on with it, you just have to muddle through, you just need to go back to work and juggle it all and it's really hard, yeah and it is really hard but there doesn't really seem to be much that's being done to actually change that, to change the culture of this and women are carrying the burden of this, trying to make it work, trying to squeeze themselves into different boxes, trying to prove at work that they are still capable, trying to juggle it at home, trying to be present with their kids.and it's absolutely exhausting, leading to burnout and overwhelm and really everybody, nobody's winning when it's like this.

So we need to really emphasize this huge and monumental transformation that it is when we become a mother and we can see in the MRI studies, the brain scan and actually these have only come out in the last few years. This transformation of becoming a mother known as matrescence is a huge developmental period in a woman's life. It's arguably as large or even larger than when a woman becomes an adult. So when she goes through adolescence, when she becomes a teenager, when she becomes a child through to adulthood, we know that's a monumental change. And the MRI studies that are comparing a woman's brain when she becomes pregnant and grows her baby and becomes a mother, we've compared them to adolescent girls.

And the changes are similar in terms of the amount of change, the structural change, obviously the changes are different in terms of what reasons, what specific reasons of the brain because when we become a mother our brain literally reorganises, it prunes itself. So actually if you think of a really messy bush, we all have a messy bush don't we, imagine that bush being trimmed and pruned and it becomes more efficient, we become more focused on those caregiving we become more attuned to our baby's cries and we actually become more attuned to the community around us so we effectively go from I and me as an individual to we and us and that is why women and mothers are often the ones that are really creating those communities and we see that it comes more it comes it's more innate and natural it doesn't mean that men don't do this or can't do this it just means that we are primed as women, especially when we become mothers for this, to do this. And then we, then everything in our life changes. It's a massive cascade all the way through everything. Physiological changes, as I've just mentioned, the emotional changes that we go through, the hormonal changes, our body changes, everything about us changes and it can really, really knock our confidence and our abilities.

Like physically we feel differently, like our clothes don't fit. We don't quite know what our position is in the world anymore because previously we were perhaps, you we were in a high achieving career. We were go, go, go, going for our goals. We knew the rules. We knew we had to behave a certain way to get where we wanted to. And then now when we become a mother, those lines are really blurred because we may not have the role models ahead of us or we're told that having a having a baby will ruin our careers or it will set our careers back or that it's just gonna be hard and juggle and people do look at you differently when you have a baby I felt it myself and I see it with the women that I work with and they're feeling like they're having to over explain they're feeling about they're having to apologize because they're not they feel like they're not quite up to speed like so many of my clients are saying I have to write so many more things down now I can't hold all the things in my head I when I'm writing notes and I have to tell people to slow down and they feel like they're having to explain themselves and if you are in a culture where people understand what you've been through and actually honor what you've been through you are held and you are supported and that transition is so much smoother when you're going back to work and you've just been on maternity leave and you have been through a really difficult year for many many women and that was the case for myself

I had some really difficult mental health struggles and I will talk about that in another episode. But, but, and many women have this, it's the sleep deprivation, your hormones are everywhere and then you come back to work and you're still processing all of that and it takes time for you to reintegrate and integrate yourself as this new mother and the career woman and for them to come together.

It's not, often I use the analogy of people expecting us, of having a baby to be like having a backpack, just putting it on your back and getting on with it, but it's really not that. We have to reintegrate it into who we are. We lose some parts of ourselves, some parts that we don't want to lose, and there's grief in that. And also it can be a time of a huge awakening, of reprioritizing, and really thinking about what we want now is a really amazing time.

getting clear on that but there also is also some questioning of changing of priorities and and again I think I've said this before the the feeling of your ambition changing can be quite scary because you've been going towards something you've wanted for your whole life and then you get there or you get to have your baby and you go back to work and you think well I don't want the same anymore so so what now? Personally for me I was looking forward to going back to work and I had a really really tough postpartum and maternity leave and don't get me wrong it wasn't all 100 % difficult the whole time but it was a really difficult transition and I felt quite lonely on maternity leave and then I went back to work and then I remember going into the office and just crying because I just felt like my arm, my left arm was missing or my right arm was missing.

I knew she was with somebody that would be looking look after her as like their own and I missed her terribly. I also wanted to have some semblance of normality and getting back to something that was familiar and something that I felt like I was good at because I felt like I'd been failing as a new mum. I felt like I'd got it all wrong and I felt like because I wasn't loving every minute that I was doing something wrong and then when I got there and it wasn't the same I just didn't know what to do.

And I just, it was so disorientating and I really remember just thinking, well, I don't quite know what to do now because I can't really tell anybody that I don't quite have the same career goals because they're going to think that I've completely checked out and that wasn't the case at all. But I wanted to be with my daughter as well. And I was lucky. I do feel like I was lucky and that shouldn't be the case. It should be the case that people have access to this. I worked three days a week when I went back and that gave me a couple of days in the week to be with my daughter and then obviously at the weekends. But that alone was not enough to help me through this massive and monumental transformation. I just felt like people treated me differently. I felt like I had to downplay being a mother. There were some people I was really careful about speaking about motherhood too much in front of them. I didn't want to seem like that gushy mum and kind of I didn't want people to think that I was less capable and that, you know, again that was probably from some of my own mindset and beliefs there. But it was really, it was a really challenging time and I see this time and time again with women and it takes them so much courage to go back and say they need additional support with things and apologising and trying to explain to people around them when they don't really even understand what's happened to themselves throughout this time.

slapping on flex we're working and expecting it to be enough is just not the case. women and mothers are individuals and each person wants something different so we have to be putting in place support and resources that are tailored to the individual and as i mentioned before some women want to be pressing ahead for a promotion

Some women want to the foot off the gas for a little bit or a longer reintegration or a phased return. And they've come back to work after maybe over a year and not had any contact from work. So being in touch with your employees during that maternity leave, if they want to be, some women don't want to be contacted at all, but some want to have some contact with work or communication with work and having that contact with their managers. And the individual managers themselves have made such a difference. We need to train the managers and the leaders and the senior leadership team. They need to understand this monumental change. They need to understand what proper support looks like and that each woman will need something different. But it's understanding that we can't just slap the same thing on for each woman, expecting her to come back, have a phased return, give her a couple of weeks to get back into it and then just literally shove the files onto her desk and then expect her to get on with it or assume that she doesn't want to run the big account that she had before just because she's a mum and give it to somebody else without even asking her or having a discussion with her or just assuming that she's not capable anymore. I these stories day in day out and it's heartbreaking because women themselves are suffering, organisations are suffering, their teams are suffering and nobody's winning in this situation. So my story and all the stories of women that I come across is just proving and the stats are proving themselves that what we are doing, what organisations are doing by slapping flex we're working on and expecting it to be the holy grail, the stats are proving that this is not the case. We need properly coordinated support, resources for each woman and we need the culture to change around motherhood and what value motherhood and mothering brings to society.

So thank you for joining me for this solo episode. I hope you found it useful. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and see you next time.

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13. 13 - Why Flexible Working isn't Working - solo episode