How Ready Is Your Organisation for Maternity Return?
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The Return Readiness Scorecard is a free three minute tool from My Maternity Coach that scores how prepared an organisation actually is to support someone returning from maternity leave.
It covers five areas, policy and pay, manager readiness, staying in touch, the return itself, and culture and retention, and gives an honest score at the end rather than a vague impression.Most companies believe they support new mums well. I hear it all the time. The policy is solid. The culture is good. People are looked after here.Then a real return happens, and the gaps show up fast.
A woman comes back after a year away and nobody has trained her manager on how to have that first conversation. The keeping in touch plan turns out to be one email sent in month four. She is quietly managing a huge shift in confidence and identity, and on the surface it looks like nothing is happening at all, because she looks capable and fine.Research from The Female Lead, covered by HR Magazine, found that half of working mothers were not satisfied with the support they received on return, and more than a third felt their setup was unsustainable. Those gaps are not a failure. They are just gaps nobody has measured yet.
I kept having the same conversation on repeat. A company tells me their maternity support is strong. We look a little closer together. The policy looks great on paper. But no manager has ever had training on it. Nobody has checked whether women who return get promoted at the same rate as everyone else.So I built something that measures it properly, rather than guessing. Ten questions, three minutes, one honest score at the end.
The scorecard looks across five areas that genuinely determine how a return goes. Policy and pay, whether your maternity policy goes beyond the legal minimum, and whether you track how leave affects your gender pay gap. Manager readiness, whether managers get any training on supporting someone through leave, and whether they would feel confident having a return to work conversation today. Staying in touch, whether there is a keeping in touch plan the employee actually helped shape, not just one you send and hope lands well. The return itself, whether there is a proper reintroduction plan for the first few weeks back, and whether returners get one to one support beyond their line manager. Culture and retention, whether women who return get promoted at the same rate as everyone else, and whether you would know why if you lost one in her first year back.
Three minutes sounds small next to everything else on your plate. But this is not a survey that disappears into a spreadsheet. You get a score straight away, broken down by area, so you can see exactly where your organisation is strong and exactly where the gaps sit.
Most HR leaders I speak to are not short on good intentions. They are short on a clear picture of where to focus first. The scorecard gives you that picture in less time than it takes to make a coffee.
Take the Return Readiness Scorecard: https://return-readiness.netlify.app
How should I prepare for people coming back from maternity leave? Start with a keeping in touch plan the person actually helped shape, not one you send and hope lands well. Make sure their manager has had some guidance before the return, not just on the day. Build in a proper reintroduction period for the first few weeks rather than assuming they will slot straight back in, and check in on how included they feel, not just how much work they are getting through. The scorecard above is a quick way to see which of these you already have covered and where the real gaps are.If you would like to talk through what your score means and where to focus first, I would love to hear from you. Written by Zoe Scorah - August 2026
