Mentoring New Parents at Work: A Guide for Businesses and Organisations

Investing in your returning talent

Becoming a parent is life-changing. Our experience as employers, practitioners, researchers and working parents tells us this is a critical time for offering support to new parents as they navigate the transition, plan for their return and re-engage with work and career. At an organisational level, there are huge costs associated with losing experienced and talented employees when they start a family and, in the interest of building a more diverse and balanced workforce, organisations need their people to return engaged and motivated to progress their career.

Written in partnership by two established coaching and mentoring professionals, Mentoring New Parents at Work makes the case for dedicated mentoring programmes in the workplace as a sustainable way of supporting new parents and improving talent retention for employers. The authors offer timely, practical guidance for each stage of the mentoring journey, from building the business case through to ideas for mentoring workshops. The book is grounded in theory and practice, and provides tools, techniques and real life case studies from a range of countries and organisations to illustrate good practice.

Mentoring New Parents at Work will be invaluable to all HR practitioners and line managers who want to retain and support new parents, helping to pave the way for gender diversity at all levels of their organisations. Its themes and insights will also be of interest to students and researchers of HRM, diversity management, and coaching and mentoring.

Nicki Seignot is an established coach, mentor and facilitator as well as the creator of ‘MumtoMum’ an innovative maternity mentoring programme introduced to the Asda Wal-Mart Home Offices in 2011. She has recently supported the development of internal career and family coaching at Ernst and Young, is working with the NHS on their pilot parental mentoring programme and leads parental mentoring and supervision with the Royal Society of Chemistry.

David Clutterbuck is co-founder of the European Mentoring & Coaching Council, Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam, York St John and Oxford Brookes Universities in the UK, and practice lead for the global community of Coaching and Mentoring International.