If you want more women in leadership, you have to make it genuinely possible for women to see a future at your organisation after they become parents.
That may sound obvious, but I think it is one of the points organisations too often skip past. It is easy to say that diversity in leadership matters. It is much harder to build the conditions that make that ambition real in day-to-day working life.
At Clarasys, we want to do the latter. That is why our Returning Mothers OKR - an internal programme focused on improving the experience of becoming and being a parent at Clarasys - matters so much to us.
At its heart, the work has been about a very practical question: how do we make Clarasys a place where women can continue to grow their consulting careers, progress into leadership and feel confident about their future here, including when they have children?
Why this matters
Our vision has been clear. We want Clarasys to empower women to excel in their consulting careers while embracing family life. We want their voice and personal experience to enrich our solutions, foster growth and drive our purpose. And we want people to feel they can have influence, progression and balance, rather than being forced to trade one against the other.
That matters not just from an inclusion perspective, but from a business one too. Losing women at the point they become mothers means losing capability, leadership potential, perspective and continuity. In a consulting business, that matters hugely. Diverse teams help us better understand our clients and their customers, and retaining experienced women strengthens both our culture and our long-term performance.
We also know the broader context is real. Parenthood changes energy, focus and capacity, especially in the early years. Without the right support, balancing work and family becomes harder, and women are disproportionately affected by the well-documented motherhood penalty. If organisations are serious about gender equality, they have to be serious about this transition too.
What support looks like in practice
That is why our Returning Mothers OKR has not just been about one intervention. It has focused on the wider system around becoming and being a parent at Clarasys.
Over the past year, that has meant working on clearer return-to-work pathways. We now offer better support before, during and after leave and more structured thinking about how people re-enter client work, receive coaching support and People team support. We have focused on having more open conversations about the practical realities of parenting and career progression.
One example is the work we have done on return to client work. We know from experience that returning mothers need clarity on expectations, a chance to rebuild confidence if needed, and a return shape that reflects both the individual and the role. That is why the thinking has included options such as a mini induction, defined internal project work where that is the better first step, regular check-ins, optional buddy mentoring, and a clearer ‘menu card’ of return options so that people are not left trying to work it all out alone.
We have also introduced and strengthened support that sits around parental leave more broadly. In the UK, our parental leave handbook is designed as a one-stop shop for leave rights, procedures and the additional enhancements Clarasys offers. It covers maternity, shared parental leave, adoption, surrogacy and neonatal care, alongside support such as Keep In Touch (KIT) days, a parental leave buddy scheme, coaching support, People Partner support, and healthcare resources.
We have also built more practical support into the journey itself. Our parental leave checklist prompts conversations with Coaches and People Partners before leave, offers the parental leave buddy scheme, encourages a performance snapshot before leave, helps people think about contact preferences and KIT days, and supports structured return planning before people come back.
Creating more open conversations
What I am particularly proud of, though, is that we have not approached this work only through policy. We have also tried to create more honest conversations.
That is what sat behind the recent Parents @ Clarasys Transparent Conversations roundtable series. It was designed to create honest, practical discussions about balancing a career and a family at Clarasys, not just for current parents but also for colleagues considering a future family and looking for reassurance, role models and insight.
The first roundtable focused on the financial reality of parenting: maternity pay, childcare and planning. What came through most strongly was that there is no one right way. Different families make different choices. But the discussion surfaced practical themes around planning early, making use of support such as childcare schemes and salary sacrifice benefits like YellowNest, navigating childcare choices, balancing work and family trade-offs, and recognising that parenthood keeps evolving.
That kind of conversation matters. It helps demystify the reality of becoming a working parent. It helps people learn from each other. And it signals that we are willing to talk openly about issues that are often left unspoken in professional environments.
Listening across the UK and US
We have been intentional about listening to our US colleagues too, because being progressive means recognising that support needs to make sense locally as well as globally.
From the outset, we regionalised the roundtable approach so that discussions could be culturally relevant and tailored to local nuance. The feedback from the US has been especially important. The US team raised challenges across benefits, support, flexibility and return-to-work, and the signal was strong: for some, parenthood had become a real retention risk.
Feedback highlighted concerns around insurance coverage for dependents and fertility treatment, parental leave length, return-to-work support, phased return, pay and bonus structure, childcare costs, and flexibility without being seen as less committed. The message was clear that action and ownership were needed, not at some distant point, but now.
That feedback is shaping what comes next. The US team has been validating themes, prioritising topics and feeding those insights into broader benefits discussions so that future changes reflect what working parents in the US are actually asking for.
What this adds up to
So what does all of this add up to?
For me, it shows that Clarasys is trying to do this work in the right spirit. We are not simply saying we want more diversity in leadership. We are trying to change the conditions that often sit underneath whether women stay, grow and lead.
That means offering meaningful policies and support in the UK and US. It means improving the return-to-work experience. It means coaching managers and coaches better. It means creating more open and psychologically safe conversations. It means listening when people tell us what is still hard.
We are not claiming to have solved everything. But I am proud that we are taking action in a way that is practical, progressive and grounded in real feedback. I am proud that we are building support not only for returning mothers, but for parents and future parents more broadly. And I am proud that we are treating this as a leadership issue, a retention issue and an inclusion issue all at once. Because if women cannot see how family life and career progression can coexist here, then our leadership ambitions will always fall short.
If you want women in leadership, you have to create a workplace where women with children can see that future clearly. At Clarasys, that is exactly what we are trying to build.
