What your employee surveys aren’t telling you about working parents

It's often said that what gets measured gets managed, but when it comes to working parents, many organisations simply don't measure at all.  Employee surveys regularly touch on employee engagement, belonging and wellbeing, and yet in my experience, few ask about the specific experience of returning from maternity leave or the ongoing realities of working parenthood.

This is a gap worth paying attention to because broad wellbeing questions can tell you how someone is feeling in general terms, but they rarely uncover what's actually happening beneath that feeling.  A maternity returner who scores low on a generic wellbeing question could be dealing with a dozen different issues from childcare logistics to a loss of confidence to a manager who hasn't adjusted expectations since she left.  Without specific questions, all of that nuance gets flattened into a single number that tells you something is wrong without telling you what.

The transition back to work after maternity leave is one of the most significant professional moments in a person's career and it's also one of the most consistently overlooked in organisational data.  Women returning often experience a real shift in identity and confidence, not because they've become less capable, but because they're navigating a version of their working life that looks and feels different from the one they left.  If employer surveys aren't asking about this transition directly, you're relying on returners to volunteer information that many assume they have to keep to themselves.

There's a genuine business case for closing this gap because understanding what people experience during key transitions like maternity leave gives you data that shapes culture rather than just describing it.  It can help you spot where your family-friendly policies look good on paper but aren't landing in practice.  It can highlight whether your flexible working offer is actually being used, or whether people feel unable to take it up without professional cost.  Finally, over time, it can help you understand whether your organisation is genuinely retaining and progressing women through these transitions or quietly losing them a year or two later when the data would show it, if you were collecting it.

This doesn't require an overhaul of your entire employee engagement survey, it just requires a handful of specific, well-considered questions aimed at the people going through this transition right now, alongside a willingness to look honestly at what the answers tell you.  Ask returners how prepared they felt for their first weeks back.  Ask working parents whether they feel able to raise flexibility needs without it affecting how they're perceived.  Ask what support existed and what didn't.

The organisations that get ahead of this aren't necessarily the ones with the most generous policies on paper.  They're the ones willing to ask the questions that reveal whether those policies are working for the people they're meant to serve.

Do your employee surveys currently capture the experience of maternity returners and working parents?  If not, that absence is itself a data point worth exploring internally.