eSignature Legality for Pregnancy Leave Policy in United Kingdom: Simplify Document Signing Process

How to eSign a document: e-signature legality for Pregnancy Leave Policy in United Kingdom

hello everybody um I am Jenny Jones I'm the managing director here at Dragon Origins um and this morning we have got a really interesting conversation that we'd like to share with you um one of the things which we believe is really important here at Dragon origin is to have interesting conversations with experts who know other stuff um so we've had a range of these recently um and one of and and we're going to continue that today with a conversation all about messent now um I'll introduce um Susanna shortly but the background to this is that we in you know for us it's really important that we have a culture and a workplace that is really inclusive and really welcoming for everybody um so this is a subject which is particularly close to my own heart um so on that note I shall introduce Susanna and then we'll introduce Dee um and then we'll go into into the conversation from there um so Susanna um is so you're the founder of the maternity pledge um would you like to give a bit of a flavor as to what that is yes definitely so the maternity pledge is a social Enterprise and it's been set up essentially to kind of cover two things so one is to help businesses have a more successful matern to leave and return to work program because all the data all the stories that come out show that not only is there a motherhood penalty but there is also lots and lots of women dropping out the workforce after they return from maternity leave so come back to maternity leave find that um it's not working for them anymore and they'll leave so that's a shame you're you're losing women from the workforce you're losing the opportunity for women to continue up the ladder and be in those leadership roles so it's trying to answer that problem but also it's addressing the wellness issue around perinal mental health and the fact that um you know 100% of women go through what is called mates but matress is not a term that is widely I had not heard about until we met exactly exactly and I think mat tressence is is described as the sort of the transition to Motherhood the process of becoming a mother and it's a developmental phase that you go through it's lik to adolescence very sort of similar in um in what's going on in your brain and your body and your hormones and your identity there's a real shift and what I often like to think about is there the stats for sort of a post dis kind of one intent which you know is higher than it should be anyway because no one wants to get that but it's there but what about the other nine like how are those people doing because it's not joyful all the time and they're experiencing mates which can be a bit of a gray area of motherhood so the idea is that there's a there's a wellness thing there and that if we can educate people on mat trenes they understand what they're going through they understand it's quite normal they don't feel like failures because their version of motherhood doesn't necessar match up with this sort of societal narrative and motherhood that we've been sold um and it improves their mental health improves their ability to talk about what they're experiencing and as such the maternity pledge is there to answer sort of those two parts of like let's keep women in the workplace who want to be in the workplace but let's also make sure they're mentally well and well to come back into the workplace so that's that's why exists yeah it is a complicated old thing and I remember when um and D come on to to talking about the employment side of things um and the rules and regulations um that are relevant in this space shortly um I remember before we had our first child going to going to lessons about how to change well how to you know the birth um but then also how to Bath them um and what sort of color of poo to look for um those sorts of things but none none of that actually talks about the process that would happen to me like actually becoming another um so obviously messen is sounds like it's about moms maternal how does it how does it impact people who haven't have biologically carried children does it relevant to them as well so this is where it gets a bit interesting so the it's a very understudied area so be quite honest in that because Women's Health in general is quite understood in um but there is definitely a belief that matrience occurs even you don't um carry a child biologically because you are still experiencing that huge identity shift so particularly if you're um a working woman and you enjoy get a workplace and most people are having children biologically and nonbiologically um later in life so you've got certain level of seniority to your career and then that is shifted away from you so you're experiencing that you're experiencing your identity shift you're experiencing the way you look at the world is is different the kind of environment they're going to inherit I mean I think more so now than mothers certainly would have felt beforehand you know what is this climate that they're going to be growing up in um from a technology perspective and from an environmental perspective all those things are happening and what's quite interesting at the moment is there is this sort of emerging sort of Neuroscience so when you become a mother so when you become a mother biologically there is neuroscience that says that your brain physically changes like it actually physically changed in a way they didn't use to think happen they thought it only happened in adolescence and then that's it your brain for life and now they're realizing your brain is more malleable than that and the idea of baby brain or mummy brain or whatever you want to call it um is real it does happen you do lose bits of your brain I'm sorry um does happen sorry guys but it is the whole point is that it's trying to trim away those kind of things that maybe don't matter as much like the Spy skills lyrics to become one which I think matter a lot but you know you get rid of that so that you can become more efficient and more flexible in recognizing somebody else's I baby's needs and being able to look after them so but what they've now seen is happening is that even people that don't have a baby when they are um sort of caring for children their brains change so by caring for children interacting with children so fathers non-biological mothers even like they start looking to like Nursery nests and child minders their brain changes grandparents as well maybe maybe I don't I haven't seen any research specifically on grandparents but caregivers as a whole by interacting with with children your brain changes to adapt to that which I think is then really interesting from a evolutionary perspective of this idea of that it takes a village and the kind of push towards paternity leave being six weeks because actually anybody can do it your brain is going to adapt to care for this child the idea of it being a sort of maternal Instinct feels like maybe that's a bit of a myth perhaps we've been sold and it's kind of interesting to say that you know people that go through adoption through surrogacy fathers and grandparents they can care for children it doesn't have to be the mother and that's an interesting point but it is to kind of I guess slightly counter that mothers um and I guess non-biological mothers as well they go through messens and that is quite a profound and life-changing experience so you know it's it does work both ways but I think it's important to kind of make that argument that you know FS can care of children too yes yes indeed it's really interesting I didn't know about the I didn't know that um if you were not a mother that it actually changed your brain I didn't know I have no idea there you go yeah sign L it's all the be sitting and playing and having all the chats and all the patience that the the extra of the patience that you learn they're not putting their shoes on or brushing their teeth for the 10th time yes Happ game again example um so how does when we think about so I mean I've had two children they are six and nine um so I had two pregnancies um and was working both times um so I know that certainly from my perspective um it's I you get tired towards the end of the pregnancy my feet swirled up which was delightful um and it does become right at the end I found it hard at the end to concentrate you know right towards the end because your your brain is probably shifting but you know what else through all your work have you seen and for those who haven't gone through it themselves what is the impact of of pregnancy on working mothers I mean it it it's big it it's huge but it's not to say you can't do the work anymore it just be might mean that things need to be a little bit more flexible to be aware of the fact that your brain and your body and your hormones they're all kind of changing and you're kind of getting ready for this sort of big shift in in life really um I mean I think the concerning thing is that I think it's some 54,000 women are pushed out work for being pregnant for daring to procreate um which I think is a concerning statistic um and I think there can be more that can be done to support women but equally they're not fragile you know you can still work you can still do things it's just having those kind of open conversations of what each each individual person needs because pregnancy I mean I don't know anything else apart from like pregnancy and child birth that has a kind of longer list of some side effects but those side effects don't happen to everybody and your pregnancies will have been very different to my pregnancies and what you needed will have been different to what I needed so I think it's just making sure that you have those open lines of communication so you can check in on physical and on mental health and say what do you need how can I help you but but also as a business understanding how can the business still run effectively with you being part of it and valuing your productivity but be mindful that actually as you say as you start to get further and further into the pregnancy it's is a big strain on your body and I think it's recognizing that and understanding that particular if you're not been through it yourself you're not just getting larger there a there's a lot of other things that might be I think it been part of it making sure that you have environment where colleagues feel safe to share challenges is is is important whatever the challenge may be and then just being having the time to managers having the time and the space to and the skills to ask right questions and listen to the answers and provide the support exactly that they need so um D I'm going to bring you in here so would you like to introduce yourself first because I've got a related question which has just sparked in my head so um yes my name is De and I'm an employment offer here at dragon arent so what I will probably touch on isn't as interesting as yours because it's like the boring legal bit if you like but yeah equally as as important I guess so one of the things which DD I'd like to ask is about the protected characteristic side of questioning in the in the the recruitment or interview process which is quite the specific question um but is one that we're we talking about quite a lot ourselves so we've um in terms of in terms of hiring people who are pregnant or people who perhaps are of an age where pregnancy might be coming up what is the legal advice about how to do that properly so women in the UK can't be discriminated against because of the fact that they're pregnant and that happens all the way from Recruitment and into their employment so if for example they were in an interview and the interviewer is asking them of like you know when you expecting to maybe give birth or have a child you need to be very careful the way that they're asking about it about it because you don't want it to appear that you've not maybe given somebody a job because made fact that they're pregnant because it's just it's direct discrimination essentially and you've got to be very careful so the 54,000 people that you mentioned that have been discriminated against presumably in in an instance where people don't know the right questions whether inadvertently or or kind of deliberately they they do discriminate against people what what would what would somebody in that position do so in terms of the employee like a candidate for example well they could bring a claim for discrimination um and they can do that even if they're not an employee so they could go to the tribunal and say look I've been discriminated against because um I'm pregnant or I was thinking of want to be pregnant and potentially the cost to the business reputationally and then the actual cost for paying out for that sort of claim it's going be really high yeah so making sure that making sure that the people who are interviewing and every stage of conversations are aware of the main facts of the equality act for example is something which is important because that does cover maternity but it also does cover race and other various you know various other parts of discrimination and what's really interesting is even if a candidate wasn't pregnant they would still be captured by the equality act because that means that you've discriminated against them because maybe they were a woman a woman who was thinking of being pregnant so it would capture them either on the pregnancy side or for the fact of their sex yeah um so back to the maternity pledge what exactly is it please good question good question so the M pledge I was speaking to lots of women and we naturally ended up talking about about their maternity experience and a lot of women were telling me that their return to work hadn't been so great and it wasn't sort of Sensational stories that you read in the headlines or anything like that it wasn't really anything to do with their pay or their lent of leave it was the fact that they didn't feel valued and it's was the fact they didn't feel supported and it the fact that they didn't feel like they've been well communicated with but obviously all those things are really hard to put into a policy because they're not really tangible so then what the maternity pledge is is it's more like a framework so it's five pillars that focus on communication support and empathy and the idea is that you can follow these five pillars and therefore are all points through pregnancy maternity leave and the return to work you are showing those things and you as an the as the employer are leading the dialogue so for example one of the pillars of the Pledge is to create a maternity leave and return to work action plan of which there is a template within the pledge to use and it's about when that person confirms their pregnancy at work asking them how do you feel mentally how do you feel Pally is there anything we can do um let's have a conversation now about what you feel like your return to work you might want it to be you might want it to look like now I'm not saying that that's what you have to stick with especially when you're first pregnant you still think nothing will change and then you realize that it does but it's just it means that that employee knows they can have the conversation and really it's about those soft touches and those human touches not necessarily coming to like this is the exact thing that we're going to do is about saying you can have a conversation with us about it especially if maybe they're one of the first pregnancies in the business or they don't know anybody else in the business that has gone through it so they're not really sure what to ask and when you are pregnant you don't know what to ask and you don't necessarily know what you um are allowed to have and you need your employer to lead the way so that's kind of what the pledge is about it's about saying we are going to kind of give you a blue blueprint of how to kind of navigate this and ensure that by being part of the Pledge that you feel valued you feel supported and if because this is just how life goes if that person your your point person your line manager or your HR person um you know finds some of the job or gets moved to a different part of the business while you're on maternity leave because let's face it that happens it's nobody's fault that's just the way life works there is a record of all the conversations that you've had so that whoever kind of come into that role as your point person can pick up and go oh okay so you were talking about this and do you still feel this way you know you've come in on a keeping in touch day and we're going to make sure that this is planned for and you're doing this and do you still feel like when you when you come back you know want to we want to approach it this way and this has worked really well in the past just it's just about openness and about support and then that person slot do slot back in it takes six months to assimilate back into the workplace let's be honest but you know this they come back in feeling valued and they being listened to all the way through the process and actually it's just the human touches but they're so easily forgotten and they're just not easy to write into a policy and that's kind of what the pledge is there to do yeah um having um having templates and um sort of structure for our managers is something which we we work quite hard on because I think it's it's really hard if you're a manager to know all the right things you know to to know what's expected of you to to be to feel equipped to have all the conversations that you need to have as part of your role um so that was why we have signed up to your maternity pledge um because I love this just show it to the camera this is the actual this is the pad The Notebook that you get and what's really helpful what what I found really useful with this and with the conversations that I've personally had with two colleagues of ours who have gone off on maternity is just that it does give a structure to it makes me REM remember the right questions to ask um and it prompts me in things I would have completely forgotten and it and it gives ideas that I would never even have thought about so I think that's really interesting um and I suppose that I mean I know that yesterday you were at an event yesterday um and I mean were there any sort of insights that you had from that which would be worth I sh what what came up yet as in as women work yesterday which was um fascinating and we had lots of amazing speakers and one of the speakers um did did say what I found from my own research of speaking to women that it was down to the particular manager they had as to how good their mtiv was wow so it's like a postcode lottery in some ways like if you have a great manager who's really empathetic probably been through it themselves or had a partner being through it or you know whatever the situation is and you could end up with a really Lov the mat to leave if you pal that sits you know two seats over has a different manager yeah who perhaps isn't as supportive or not even that just isn't as aware of you know of what to say or the right thing to say or what to do um they might have a worse to leave and return to work and not feel supported and they're sitting in the same office two seats away it's about giving some level of consistency yeah as well and just a prompt like you say a prompt for people doesn't have to be you know in the HR could be a line manager just a prom for them to know and to understand of what stage they at just making sure it's productive for everybody like a keeping in touch day what's the point doing keeping in touch day unless it's going to be useful for everyone you probably got a really good brain coming back into the office so why not use it rather than just having them sitting at a computer that's not really set up and people are going about their their normal day nothing's really been planned because then that person comes in and feels like it's a bit of a waste of their time and already oh I'm not really valued here I'm not really looking forward to coming back because no one really they've not sorted anything out for me so it's all those things and they they go through your head so yeah I mean consistency consistency is really important with all of this and that definitely helps with that helps um managers and that helps then us as a business be confident that actually all the employees you know the bigger we get the less the less likely it is that it will be me having the conversation so I've had them because both people have been reporting to me but that in future that's not going to be the case are happening for both us and for the employees and absolutely and also just from like a real kind of protection point of view what you were talking about with tri funerals it does give you a level of protection because it's if you are following this it would be very hard for someone I say this with zero legal it feels allegedly feels very hard for someone to bring a case against you if you can say oh we're part of the Pledge and we've followed this template and we've given them this and you know what more could we have have done so it it feels like a bit of safety net for you as well business well it's a perfect Saveway so talk to us please about the legal side of things like what do I as an employer what do I need to do what do I need to know what does the employee need to do yeah um and so they need to notify uh their employer um and then at that point the employee needs to do a risk assessment to make sure that the working environment is still safe for them to work so for example if you have someone who's doing heavy lifting for example you might have a reasonable adjustment now in place so that they don't need to do that anymore or if they travel in and they walk far from the stage into to work you might want it so that they can work from home a little bit more or maybe that they commute in times where it's not Peak so maybe you let them leave a little bit earlier and come into to work a little bit later to avoid the hustle and bustle for example if you're working in a city and there's also miserable people who even though you have a bag don't do their seat exactly look up from your phone people oh goodness that happens um and then um I think employes now start thinking about what's going to happen when it comes to maternity leave yeah um during the time that someone's on maternity leave so statutary maternity leave is uh 52 weeks and it's split into two so you've got your ordinary um maternity leave which is 26 weeks and the additional which is another 26 weeks which together with the 52 weeks yes um and you don't necessarily get paid for all of it if an employer is only giving you statutory maternity pay MH so statute pay is for 39 weeks I think um and for the first six weeks you get 90% of your wage Y and then after that it's uh what the government sets it at which is something like £172 approximately yeah or 90% whichever is lower okay um and so what you do tend to find is that a lot of businesses may offer additional maternity pay because is as you can imagine if you're only going to get paid for 39 weeks and it's not full wage sometimes it just need a bit of top up and so when you look at um when you look at other employers um and kind of best practice across the across various Industries I I know suzan I know you've got you're working with people in all sorts of different sectors and and same here you know some of our clients are Tech some of them are retail there's a whole you know right way wide range of of people that collectively we're talking to what are the best um policies the best kind of employee benefits that you've seen in this in this space I mean well interestingly vone has got one of the best okay yeah allow to name yeah vone has gotten the best um because it's very um inclusive for fathers as well okay so I think that is although this is called the maternity pledge and I do often speak about this about how it benefits father as well um because it's important that you know that they read these PS they fill out the postnatal forms with the partner they understand what's going on um I'm not in a position to change policy yeah so obviously right now the policy is two weeks um Li came out literally you know the other the other day I saying that if they were voted in they would make potentially six weeks okay um vone I think they have a 26 week I hope that's right I hope it's 26 weeks um patente and it's which is amazing I me let and they don't have to take it all at once they can take like a chunk of it and then spit it up and then take another chunk of it afterwards because I think certainly what is happening is fathers want to spend time with their children there's research to say that if you if you connect with your child um sort of early on you will have better relationship with them it takes the pressure of the mother you know it must be incredibly hard to leave somebody after two weeks leave your partner after two weeks might be struggling and you're off into the office or even if you're hybrid working like off working the attic at home or something and you know they're finding it hard there's probably a lot of guilt involved with that there um it's probably difficult to kind of deal with the financial side that traditionally I mean talking generally I'm talking heteronormal relationships I know it different for different people but you know you're now the other bread winner and you're facing your own kind of change of identity called petence uh which is also quite transformative but not recognized enough and if you can if you can work um somewhere that that kind of recognizes that as well and we kind of move into a more sort of gender equality across the board then that's going to help mothers and fathers and it's going to again so feel like the the the load I don't want to say burden of child care because that just sounds awful but you know there Child Care is hard and it is skewed towards the mother and therefore also affects their career affects their life whereas fathers benefit from becoming fathers and are held up as kind of a bit of an ideal and they earn more when they're father women earn less when they're mother and it's frustrating yes um but yeah there are some companies that are doing doing amazing things and and look if people can offer inance pay that's fantastic but I would actually argue that the The Human Side of things goes um a further goes a long way yeah I think I mean c one of the looking at the benefits that we have is something that's really important to me and it's something we do a review every six months of all of the um the benefits that we offer to all of our employees to make sure that they're useful um and to listen to people and ask what other things that they would like and to see what's viable what's not um and I think from so from a maternity and paternity um perspective um we do offer enhanced enhanced um which which we're really proud of actually because we are still pretty small um and we do think that that the extra amount that people employees will get as a result will really help um when the statutory is pretty low um so DD from your point of view so there there's obviously the statutory paternity statutary maternity yeah then there's Shar parental leave which is a whole different kettlefish yeah and there's also um parental leave now this is the that the parental leave so I'll ask you to just give a quick summary of the first two in a second the parental leave is an interesting one because that's something which I think I'm going to start using I didn't actually know about until recently it's that every until your child is 18 every year you're you can have one week it is unpaid so it's no it's not really that I mean it's no difference to just having unpaid but there is there is an ability for every parent to have one week off um until the age of until the child is 18 which is helpful because obviously school holidays are ludicrously out of whack with the number of holidays that you get when you work and so can you just quickly summ so you've talked about this you've talked about the maternity yeah um is that the same with p with statutary paternity no so statutary paternity leave is only two weeks if I remember correctly and that's what they are pushing for which we've touched on before to have for longer and that's only for um well tends to be for for dads basically yeah um so um and then shared parental leave is the option for both parents or both caregivers primary and secondary to actually share maternity leave because as you know a woman tends to get more and so it has the option of a father a child for example being able to share that maternity leave so it's it's quite good yeah I mean we're we're kind of getting we're definitely behind some other countries but we're also ahead ahead of others I guess um yeah okay so we're just waiting see how this all evolves obviously as much as we would like to be in charge in writing the policies unfortunately not quite able to do that no we'll see what the next government gives us yes probably changing government gives us let watch watch this space um so D from a legal point of view what else like what have we not covered um I think some thing that we've not covered is the fact that women actually have the right to take antinal uh well time off for antinal care okay um and that's great obviously because that's something that you you need to prep for having a B for having a baby and I think tiing quite nicely actually actually because you need to PR for the to have this child from you yeah um another thing is if you do have a child um and you're breastfeeding um an employer does actually need to give you reasonable time offs and reasonable facilities as well so you be able to breastfeed or if you're expressing for example yeah um makes sense because obviously the baby needs to be still taken care of if the woman's back at work yeah um so I think those are other two points that we've touched on okay but I think what we've discussed before is obviously we've got stat uh maternity pay um I think really there need to be toed up a lot of the time because it doesn't give people the chance to basically stay as long as they to have the full 52 weeks you tend to see that women are probably going to come back earlier because they can't afford to stay off the whole time yeah because towards the end actually they're not entitled to anything at all yeah that's where it is it's a difficult balance between wanting to encourage wanting to bring your employees um you know wanting to create a a workplace and an opportunity for them after maternity that is you know that builds in their skills and gives them you know the continued opportunity to thrive um and and commercially supporting them as much as you can while they're off but also balancing the fact that for some businesses you to small businesses when you you know the cost can you may want to give everything under the sun but actually that then becomes tricky so it's trying to so I think that's you know the enhanced pay is in is an interesting um option but obviously that in itself there's an enormous range that what enhanced pay can actually can actually mean yeah one of the ideas which and actually we we've looked at this and I which I think is quite interesting is that some is that you in terms of the enhanced pay you can just pay their salary for longer so the statut is you know 90% for 6 weeks so you can do 90% for longer yeah but you can also you as well as that then you can also after that part of the enhanced pay is finished um an idea that I've seen some companies do is just top up the statutory pay um from X to y yeah which actually from an employer Point employees point of view is nice because it's additional but actually from a cost point of view it's also commercial because it doesn't it's not doesn't cost quite as much as 90% of the um so there are interesting and clever things that people that you can do which balance the commercial side with with you know making sure that you're treating employees as well as you as well as possible and I think you raised a good point because you don't want as a business to overpromise only to find out that actually you can't actually deliver what you said you wanted to obviously a business needs to run and so it is about like you said having that balance it's it's really important yeah and I think I mean you know one of the conversations that we were ddu and I were having yesterday was all about planning and planning in a different sense but planning Recruitment and looking forward and you know as departments and businesses grow what are the different milestones and what therefore are the different recruitment needs that we'll need a different points it's actually the same sort of planning um is is also kind of relevant across the piece really because you know the more that from a retention point of view the the the sooner with employees telling people telling us as soon as possible um when they're pregnant it's really helpful because then it enables you to properly succession plan and it enables them to enables you to then get the their cover in place in plenty time to make sure that the Handover is um really as stressfree as possible um because you can never tell quite when little B wants to make an appearance into the world so the more kind planning I think I think the better and just to make that end bit um go as well as possible for the employee and and for the business as well um so um any final thoughts any final thoughts any final thought final thoughts I think it's just I mean part of what I what I do as well is the kind of campaigning for Mr tressence it is telling people about it and educating people about it because I think it is a bit of a piece of the perinatal mental health puzzle that is missing I mean i' never heard of per Nal that is a term like Perry menopause is a new term peral NE what like what does B basically kind of covers um pregnancy and sort of postnatal so you can still say postnatal and stuff but it kind of covers the idea that people you know there how their mental health is during pregnancy as well sometimes that's an indicator of how their mental health might be afterwards okay not always because Health's a funny old thing but sometimes it can be so the term perinatal seems to kind of cover both and that's and I do say perinatal because the packs these packs get given out when they're pregnant the idea is that you kind of read the packs when you're about six months pring when it starts to feel a bit more real before that it's a bit surreal fair enough you still dealing with it so you kind of read the packs then and it can kind of help you get your head round pregnancy and then sort of what happens afterwards but then you still got it to almost refer back to when you're in it yeah so it kind it kind of helps you um but I think like I just think that mesin is really important to stress I think a postnatal PL is really important to stress so in the UK we don't do postn plants we just don't they do it a little bit in the US obviously their health system is something else um but we don't do it and there is research to say it lessens the incidence of maternal distress and postanal disorders yeah but we don't do them because so who would do who would do them if we did them here I would like what I've done there like what I've done there not even planned not even planned blah blah blah blah um no I mean I think the difficulty with a postn plant is how you I guess ideally it will come through the NHS you know as part of that kind of dis kind of thing but the problem with the poal plan is you don't know what you don't know so you don't really know what to put into it so you need a template to follow and it's really overwhelming to think of all these things I'm meant to think about what level of support I might need to you know breastfeeding for example you touched upon it in terms of going back to work and obviously um the UK has one of the lowest rates of of breastfeeding it really does um that is not our fault um as as mothers it is there a lot of different fact of societies F all kinds of things but we are not properly supported within that and therefore by the time a lot of people come back to work they are no longer breastfeeding um because they've either stopped much earlier on or they've kind of done the year and then it's like right I'm done now you don't often see people breastfeeding longer than that although they can if they want to um and it's kind of about educating people that it's like these things are harder than you think they're not as natural as you think and you might need a certain level of support to put in place but trying to find that support when you are really tired when your hormones are all over the place when you feel like a failure because you can't feed your child which is a common thing that comes up again and again and again you don't know where to go for it but if you've done post plan and you've already identified where that support is you've already thought at what point might I need a bit of support because I've looked into the pros and cons of you know different elements of feeding and you maybe even not drawn A Line in the Sand of when you're going to say this isn't serving me anymore and I'm not going to feel ashamed for that and but if you don't do that beforehand it's very hard to do when you're in it yeah because you just can't think rationally and you you will will put the blame on yourself I I don't know there is nobody that I've spoken to that hasn't which is really sad itself it is an emotional emotional it is it is and it's probably part of a a larger um systemic life of being of a woman and a mother in modern days but that's why I think things like this are really useful because they just prompt you they give you something you know the structure to use um and they can prompt to use it some people will find parts of it useful and more useful than others but that's the same with with everything with everything but I think just having something there um will you know can only help yeah um DD any final thoughts from you um I think something that we've probably not touched on is that the legislation does I know we've had some statistics that aren't so positive but I think you can see the legislation has tried to help in the sense of if you take maternity leave well normal maternity leave you are enti to come back to your same job and if you take additional maternity leave though you might not be able to come back to the very same job you can come back to a similar one you've got the right to that and so women do have that sort of protection uh but whether they you know for the reasons that we've discussed with mat dresss whether they actually want to come back after you know the brain Chang and they got all these different priorities I think that's a different sort of question but that is something to to bear in mind and people uh have the right to make a flexible working request so if after they've come back to working with him actually this working pattern doesn't quite Wa work for me um they could be eligible to make a flexible working request to their employer and just say actually can I either work different hours work a different routine or work from home for example in a different location so that's something to to bear in mind um that women still have those rights well and what so in that last instance so last last question um in that last instance what are the obligations on the employer so for somebody who does come back and they do make a flexible working what are the what are the legal requirements um for the employer's perspective so an employer they have to consider it yeah uh they can't to say no no no they actually have to look at their business see what the request is and see can we reasonably accommodate this balancing it against our business requirements um and if not they need to be able to provide some of the prescribed reasons why they can't um basically adere to that request so if for example they couldn't change the working hours well can you prove why why is that is that because we can't meet business needs is it because we can't afford to do that um so that's something that women can fall back on if they feel that they need to change the way that work in order to basically accommodate this new laugh that we've got being mother okay well thank you very much both um there Lots is something which we could probably sit and talk about for day um but that been really useful really good to know both some of the you know legal um you know specifics that we should all be aware of and when we're have both our teams and for the businesses that we should bear in mind when we have employees who are pregnant whether it's mother or the father um also um Susan are really useful to see yours and postnatal plan and the sort of template so that can that can help spr the right conversation and so thank you very much both um and I'm sure that um we will all be available always to answer any further questions on any of this thank you