Return to Work – Reinvented!

In 2019, our endeavour at Kohler India was to introduce and inculcate a culture of Inclusion and hire diverse people. We were just beginning the DE&I journey, and so we started with focus group discussions. During one such discussion in our Gurugram office, one of the female associates said ‘I wonder if I’ll get a decent role when I come back from maternity leave’. That comment echoed in our* minds, and we went back to our dashboard to see how many women quit the company post maternity leave. What we realised is that we didn’t have enough women employees to even measure this! Also women who left us quoted ‘personal reasons’, so there weren’t enough data points.

Back then, women attached a stigma to joining a company that manufactured toilet and bath products.  We knew that unless we created an employee-friendly workplace and were known as such in the market, talent attraction would be a huge challenge. We knew we had a long journey ahead of us to change this narrative, and it started by establishing a mid-to-long-term plan to resolve the many uncomfortable questions we had conceived earlier during FGDs, one of them being – How do we redesign work so women don’t just return but sustain careers after maternity leave? That shift changed everything we did in the next 3 - 5 years.

Moving from Policy to Lifecycle Design

Our first intervention was structural. We mapped the maternal employee lifecycle end-to-end and addressed each of the phases below with interventions: 

1. Pre-leave anxiety phase 
2. Transition to leave
3. Identity shift during caregiving
4. Return shock
5. Career re-anchoring

We tied up with a parenting partner who supported through parenting counselling, gift voucher, parenting newsletters, blog articles, parenting community network and a maternity handbook covering topics for expecting and new parents, child care, brain development of babies, nutrition, breast feeding etc.. A community of young and older parents was made available for them to join and discuss with other working parents on issues of common interest.

What we found from industry data was revealing : In India, the return to work and continuation post maternity stands at ~27% while in the US, UK and Nordic countries it is ~70%+ and this is despite India having the longest paid maternity leaves globally. The retention and sustenance of returning women is the lowest in the manufacturing industry at 

*Our refers to the India CHRO and the DE&I Project team

~30%-50% while in IT is ~60% - 80%**. The highest emotional and professional risk sat in the first 120 days post return, not during leave itself. 

**Data source : NASSCOM diversity reports, Deloitte women returnship studies, Avtar Group gender diversity benchmarking.

So we built a reintegration architecture that included – 

1. Manager readiness coaching
2. Reintegration coaching for the associate

The CFO of Kohler India who happened to be a female leader was the head of DE&I Council. She scheduled separate meetings with the returning associate before her return to understand her needs & aspirations and another meeting with the Manager of the returning associate to see if her aspirations are still met. If it’s not met or if the role is still not available, then she discussed alternate options in a way that met the aspirations of the returning associate. Several back and forth discussions along with HR took place while this was finalized. Once the associate completed 3 months post return another call was scheduled with her to understand if she was assimilated well into the role. Return was no longer an event. It was a managed transition.

Flexibility as Infrastructure, not an Exception

Flexibility often lives in policy documents if it’s not consciously operationalised in team cultures. We introduced three structured pathways for mothers with a child less then 6 years of age:

1. Variable Hours (altered start and finish time)
2. Work from home 
3. Sabbatical / maternity leave extension without pay

But the real shift was managerial accountability. We began tracking a scorecard for maternal retention, flex utilisation, and post-return performance normalisation. Flexibility moved from “accommodation” to “operating model”.

Childcare : Solving for ‘Personal reason’ attrition/attraction driver

During exit and entry interviews, most women who exited/rejected the role quoted childcare reasons as ‘personal reasons’. Only during 1-0-1 / focus group discussions was it identified that the real reason was a lack of childcare support. We invested in a 3-tier childcare ecosystem –

1. On-site creches at large campuses such as Manufacturing Plants
2. Partner day care networks across cities
3. Reimbursement option for self-chosen daycare facilities

Over the last 3 years, maternal absenteeism dropped and women's engagement scores rose, in some businesses sharply. Childcare wasn’t a benefit, it was workforce infrastructure

The Manager Multiplier

Oftentimes, maternal retention varies between Managers. It was important to build a Manager integration  program consistently and we covered :

1. Bias check
2. Empathy during maternity hire, drives /rehire/postt return/performance reviews
3. Psychological safety creation

We also created “return conversations” templates so no woman had to negotiate her reintegration from scratch. Once the awareness was created, Managers went over and beyond their routine to identify roles within their or other teams for the returning female associate. Several of them started preparing atleast 2 months before the return and referred to the Flexi policy for options to ease the integration.

Returnships : Rebuilding Broken career bridges

We realized we had another invisible talent pool — women who never returned at all. So we launched a program called ‘Spring – Back to Work’. It was designed to encourage women from across industries returning to their corporate career after a break and tap into the marginalized yet significant talent pool. A good portion of women have been hired YOY since 2023. 

A virtual support group was started for returning mothers. Other platforms were provided in the form of storytelling for continued inspiration, and a sounding board program was kick-started as part of the Women’s Employee Resource Group.

Measuring what truly matters

We began measuring –

1. 90 – day integration success
2. Maternal retention/attrition within 12 months
3. Gender Pay Parity
4. Women's engagement scores overall

Impact – Finding dynamic career paths for high-potential female talent who returned to work coupled with a successful back-to-work integration and pay parity, led to a good improvement in women's engagement scores and sustained retention of the female workforce post return. Our women leadership potential pool increased by almost 10% in 4 years. We have been recognised as one of the Top 25 Best Workplaces in Manufacturing in India by GPTW in 2024 and 2026. We have also been recognised as one of the Top 50 Best Workplaces for Women in India by GPTW in 2023.

But beyond metrics and recognitions, the culture shift was visible. We don’t hear any longer women whispering about career trade-offs after motherhood. 

Reinventing maternity integration taught me one defining leadership lesson: Women don’t leave because they become mothers. They leave if the workplaces fail to evolve when they do. If Organizations truly want gender-balanced leadership pipelines, the work cannot stop at generous leave policies. India offers 26 weeks of 100% employer paid maternity leave in comparison to 0 federal paid (Employer optional) 90 days leave in the US and 39 weeks of ~90% Govt + employer paid leaves in UK and so on. We have a unique opportunity, therefore, in India. It’s imperative that we redesign how work is structured, how performance is measured, how managers lead and how caregiving is supported. When we do that, maternity stops being a career interruption. It becomes another life stage – accommodated, normalised, and sustained within the flow of work. And that is when women don’t just return. They rise.

About the Author:

Bhavna  Hiremath
HR Professional , Kohler Co.

She is a Global HR Leader with extensive experience in shaping people strategies across the technology, engineering, and consumer durable industries, supporƟng workforces ranging from 3,000 to 150,000 employees. Currently part of Kohler’s Technology Strategy and Plaƞ orm Delivery group, she focuses on global HR strategy, organisation design, talent and organisational development, large-scale global change management, and business partnering—enabling leaders to make decisions grounded in strong people practices.

She previously served as the India HR Leader for two of Kohler’s Global Capability Centres in Pune: the India Technical Centre (Engineering and Supply Chain captive) and the Technology Centre, alongside her global responsibiliƟes. During this tenure, she successfully scaled Kohler’s Technology GCC by 120% within a year during the Great ResignaƟon.

Her earlier leadership experience includes managing Compensation & Benefits across India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, as well as HR business partnering for Kohler India’s corporate funcƟons. She also led the creation and execution of Kohler India’s DE&I strategy, embedding inclusion into the business agenda and improving gender diversity from 11% to 30% across Indian businesses.

Before Kohler, she held key roles at Wipro, Infosys, Honeywell, Akamai, and Timken across Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, and Compensation & Benefits. Her experience also includes an internaƟonal assignment in the United States, where she worked on global long-term incentive design, executive compensation benchmarking and design review, and global M&A integration.

She is a graduate of the Wharton Chief Human Resources Officer Program (2022) and a recipient of mulƟple industry awards for Corporate Health & Wellness iniƟaƟves. The Wharton CHRO program strengthened her long-term strategic perspective, enabling her to effectively codify business and people strategies for leaders across Engineering, Supply Chain, and Digital GCCs, while also strengthening succession pipelines and organisation design.