Dadding, s2e5: Returning to work

Posted on 18 July 2020

I’m coming to the end of my first period of Shared Parental Leave and I’m slowly returning to work. I thought I’d write about what I’ve been doing and how it’s been.

The nurseries reopened

First, the nurseries reopened. I don’t think I would have returned to work if they hadn’t. In principle I could book the whole year off via Shared Parental Leave, at a financial cost to myself, but looking after two young children is a full time job and I didn’t see any way of making it work. Now that our 3-year-old is back at nursery for 3 days a week (soon to be 4), it felt viable to try to return to work.

Easing back in

I’ve been using Shared Parental Leave in Touch (SPLIT) days to slowly return to work. You get 20 of these, and I have been using them to gradually return to work more and more. I started by working just 2 days a week, so that we still had one day of respite where Luke was at nursery and both parents were around to look after baby Robin. This was also a way we could see what it was like working with our newly-expanded family, before fully committing to return to work – I wouldn’t formally return to work until I’d filled in a SPL variation form.

Currently I’m up to 3 days a week and I will probably settle at a 4 day week. Luke only has 4 days childcare for the foreseeable future and I don’t think I’ll be ready to go back to full time for some time.

Structuring the day

Of course, one big change since I went on leave is that everyone is home working now. This has been a big benefit that allows me to more easily balance returning to work and being there for my family.

My wife Sonia and I have had a lot of conversations about having some structure in the day to be able to manage expectations about the division of labour in the household. As an example, one early sticking point was that normally when I work, I take my lunch break at a convenient time when I’ve finished a piece of work, any time between 12 and 1. This did not suit Sonia at all: as a breastfeeding mother, she was usually ravenous by 12 and could not wait until 1 for lunch; furthermore, it made it difficult to plan who would prepare lunch and often it would fall to her by default. As a result I now down tools at 12 every day like clockwork, and we have lunch together. Sometimes I prepare lunch, and sometimes she does.

I take a morning and afternoon break of around 15 minutes to spend time with the baby. Sometimes I put him in the sling and walk him around the local park. This is excellent time because it gives Sonia a break and it gives me all-important bonding time with my baby boy.

As always, the important factor has been that Sonia and I regularly discuss what is working and what isn’t, and work towards finding a solution. At work, my line manager and my team have also been very flexible and accommodating, which has made returning to work much easier and more productive.

Structuring my work

Before I went on Shared Parental Leave, I was tech lead of a team. Obviously, the team needed a replacement tech lead when I went away. I am returning to work in the same team, but now as an individual contributor. I have been a tech lead for most of the last 5 years so it’s a refreshing change to be a regular engineer again, writing code and solving problems. Of course, I still apply my so-called “soft skills” that were so key to technical leadership, and I can still lead people as an IC in localised contexts, but I have much fewer meetings and the focus of my role is different. I have more time to catch up on the depths of the technology that has changed in the last 5 years.

Working only 2 days made it hard to have much continuity in my work: I’d pick up a piece of work, someone else would finish it while I was away, and I’d have to get context on a new thing when I returned to work. I resolved some of this by being quite self-directed in what I worked on, rather than waiting for someone to be available to explain a task to me. This was good in that I could be productive, although it meant I didn’t necessarily feel too aligned to the team’s priorities as I was kind of ignoring the prioritised backlog for a while.

Some of the work I did was definitely valuable: for example, identifying quick cost savings in our infrastructure. Some was perhaps less so: I upgraded a bunch of systems from Ubuntu Bionic to Focal, which is (probably) a thing that needs doing at some point, but certainly isn’t urgent.

Now that I’m up to 3 days, this has been less of a problem: 3 days is enough time to finish most tasks; and the two days away is less time to lose context on things.

Footnote: on home working

I have always thought that I would hate full-time home working. I really enjoy the face-to-face social contact of an office, and the serendipitous unintentional interactions with people. Spontaneously grabbing lunch or coffee with someone you don’t normally work with, for example. I also find it easier to have difficult conversations face-to-face. Finally, I enjoy having a commute (by bike) to bookend the day, to mark the transition from “work mode” to “home mode”, and to build exercise into my daily routine.

However, I have really enjoyed this recent period of home working. I get to be close to my family – and spend my breaks with them. My work has been effective. Naturally, it is easier to work from home when everyone is working from home, rather than when only some people are.

I know that this isn’t the same as joining a remote-first or remote-only organisation from the ground up. The people on my work slack are people I have spent months or years building up face-to-face social interactions with, which makes it easier to assume good faith in text-based interactions and to avoid misunderstandings. I haven’t had to do an annual review remotely (either my own, or for someone else).