Marketers Unleashed

Motherhood & Marketing: Navigating Parental Leave with Katie Hayes

• Kathryn • Season 1 • Episode 21

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Episode Summary:

What really happens when a high-powered marketer steps away for maternity leave—and then comes back?

In this heartfelt and insightful episode of Marketers Unleashed, host Kathryn Strachan is joined by Katie Hayes, Head of Marketing at Ozone API, to talk about the often-unspoken realities of maternity leave, returning to work, and finding balance in the chaos of parenting and leadership.

Katie opens up about her journey raising twin boys while steering a demanding career, and shares practical strategies for managing the transition into and out of leave—whether you're the one taking it or leading a team that is. This episode is packed with actionable tips, real talk, and a fresh perspective on ambition, motherhood, and support systems in the modern workplace.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How to plan for maternity leave without losing momentum in your career
  • Tips for transitioning back to work—emotionally, mentally, and logistically
  • The surprising challenges of breastfeeding and being “on” at work
  • How to set boundaries without sacrificing ambition
  • Why community and employer support matter more than ever
  • What leaders should know to better support returning parents

Who It’s For:
Working parents, team leaders, and employers who want to support parental leave with empathy, flexibility, and strategy—without compromising on career growth.

Resources & Mentions:

Guest: Katie Hayes


 Host: Kathryn Strachan







Tags:
#ParentalLeave #WorkingMoms #ReturnToWork #MarketingLeadership #WorkLifeBalance #MaternityLeave #CareerGrowth #WomenInMarketing #MotherhoodAndWork #KatieHayes #MarketersUnleashed

Welcome to Marketers Unleashed, the podcast where marketers break free from the noise and dive deep into the raw truths of the marketing world. We're here to go beyond best practices and uncover the bold ideas, untold stories, and hard lessons that shape real marketing success. From dissecting daring campaigns to confronting the challenges keeping us awake at night, we're unleashing honest, unfiltered conversations to inspire, educate, and challenge you to think differently. Get ready to conquer the untamed side of marketing. I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, and this is Marketers Unleashed. Where we're not just talking marketing, we're redefining it. For anyone who doesn't know me yet. I'm Kathryn Strachan, author of Scaling Success: Building Brands that Break Barriers, international Keynote speaker and fractional CMO for cutting edge brands. I have spent years navigating the ever-changing world of marketing and have seen it all. As your podcast host, I bring my expertise and curiosity to the table. Diving deep into honest conversations with industry leaders to uncover the insights, challenges, and bold ideas shaping our industry. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to Marketers Unleashed. Today I'm here with my friend Katie Hayes, and we're gonna be talking about something that is really important and something that really should be talked about more, and that is taking maternity leave and then coming back into the workplace as a mom. It's something that I've gone through personally. It's something that Katie has very recent experience of, so I'm super excited to have her here today to share her insights and her journey with us. So thank you Katie for being here today. Do you wanna tell the audience a little bit about yourself and kind of your background? Hi Kathryn. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Casey Hayes. I head up marketing at Ozone API, a FinTech. We operate in the open banking, open finance space. And as Kathryn mentioned, I have recently been on maternity leave after having twin boys. So I think my experiences is even more unique in that regard, and it's definitely been a journey of navigating it while being on maternity leave and then returning and getting back into the swing of things. Yeah, I think it's always really a big journey. Can you kind of set the scene for us and tell us a little bit about what it was like at work leading up to going on maternity leave? Sure. So I hired a cover, so that was maybe the big stress leading up to my maternity leave. Finding the right fit I think especially in today's market, a lot of senior marketing leaders are looking for full-time roles. So I had to strike that balance between finding someone who was gonna be a consultant and not really looking for a full-time role and finding the right fit for that. So I think that was the big stress. But I was also heavily pregnant. I got up to 36 weeks with twins and was very uncomfortable. They were both breached. They were both headbutting my ribs. So it was a struggle to even sit at my desk towards the end. So I think it was navigating, do we have all the baby stuff? Do we even know things are gonna roll out in terms of your birth plan and all of that. I knew I was gonna be having a C-section 'cause they were both breached. So it was just mainly prepping for that while also trying to let go of work and having a very good handover list and setting up my cover for success but also trying to unwind slowly and changing that mental shift into you're going on maternity leave soon. How did you go about finding the right person? So interviewed a couple of people, and I think in that process, that's where I discovered, okay, these people are looking for a full-time role. And naturally, If you're doing a maternity cover, you may hope that it may turn into a full-time role. I also went into maternity leave saying only gonna be taking six months. Which is also quite unusual in the UK where people do take up to a year. But I had that plan. I'm like, I'm going into this. I'll be doing six months and then I'll be coming back. So I wanted to make sure that I had the right fit for that. And then landed up actually, working with Trisha who had worked with us previously. So she was familiar with the brand and she has been a consultant for over 12 years, so she just felt like a right fit. She knew the business, she knew the team. She is a mom herself, so she knows what it's all about. And I think it worked really well. We had a good touch point of when I wanted to find out information, I could reach out to her and, find out when things like budget conversations were coming up. I'm like, Ooh, this is important 'cause this is gonna impact me when I return. Versus actually just letting things go and being like, I've given you a very thorough strategy, action plan, you're more than capable of running things. So yeah, go ahead. If I remember correctly, you also had people on your team who were going off of maternity around the same time. So how did you find it different as like a leader, being involved in that recruitment process versus being involved in your own maternity cover recruitment process? Yes, you're right. Our marketing manager went on maternity leave about a month before me. And what we did is we hired a more junior content marketing executive to cover her maternity leave, but then also with the plan that she would stay on full-time. So she was brought on as a full-time employee. But she really has to hit the ground running because she obviously lost marketing manager and head of marketing even though there was a substitute. So I think that was a bit of a, a challenge, but she's thrived and I think that's been a great opportunity for her career. Also our company has been growing drastically. So I'd actually hired two people before going on maternity leave. Had to set up their onboarding because they were joining while I was off. So it was navigating that as well. And I think that's part of when I was returning from maternity leave, I also wanted to make sure in my kick days, keep in touch days that I was spending time with these new recruits. To get to know them and to help guide them. Obviously Tricia was doing that job, but they'd gone through the recruitment process with me. And then they joined the company and they're like, oh, my line manager actually isn't even here. So I think that was really important to, to, do. For anybody who's maybe getting ready to go on maternity leave or is supporting somebody else who's gonna be going on maternity leave, like what advice would you give them? I would say plan ahead as much as possible. Have a very thorough onboarding document. Make sure that they have logins for everything because you don't want them to be bugging you when you're on maternity leave, 'cause you're not gonna be looking at your phone in those first few months. You're gonna be in newborn blur slash bliss, hopefully. So making sure that they're set up in that regard. But then also wind down and you need to look after yourself in those late stages of pregnancy. You need to focus on reducing your stress as much as possible and getting your mindset ready for this new adventure that you're about to embark on. Yeah, I think it's impossible to like fully realize how intense having a baby is. Especially at the beginning transition before you do. It sounds like you had a really good plan, but was there anything that like really surprised you about going on maternity leave? I knew I wasn't going to have a normal sort of experience, purely because I was having twins. And also, first pregnancy so I knew it was gonna turn our world upside down. And I think one thing that surprised me is it was really good to have a mental break from career, but at the same time I found it very difficult to switch off. I wanted to stay connected. I was on LinkedIn daily, probably. I'd scheduled content to make sure that my presence was still there initially. So I found that quite difficult, but then also had to focus on myself. I think the first few months of having twins, we were in hospital for about a week and then recovering from a C-section, which is major surgery. And you, you realize when you aren't allowed to walk very far or do any basic exercise for the first twelve weeks or so until you've had that health check. And then something that we also don't always talk about. Everybody's journey is different, but the breastfeeding journey with twins, it was something very different for me. I went into it being like, I'm gonna do six months. The first night in hospital, I was like, I'm gonna try and feed. I can be a super mom and do it all. Error, I was very unwell the first night and the second day after, giving birth. And my journey completely changed. So I think it's also about mainly preparing for different spanners to be thrown into the works. You may find that actually breastfeeding is not for you and go onto formula and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I landed up expressing and, got a, hospital grade pump. And I think that was actually probably one of the toughest things throughout maternity leave, is that you are just constantly bringing that into your daily and night routine and it's a big struggle. And you also don't even realize the hormone aspect of it, of breastfeeding and then weaning yourself off, especially with the supply for twins. I had to give myself about one or two months to, to wean off and I wanted to make sure that I was getting to that point before going back to work. Because on some of my keep in touch days, I was having to schedule, okay, I need to express milk for the boys at that time. And, for women who are going back to work and having to do that in the office, I'm very grateful that, we are a remote first team. And then I'm work from home most days, 'cause it allows for that flexibility. But I think that's something that, isn't, it's almost a bit taboo. It's like women just get on with it. But it can be a big burden. Yeah, massively. I breastfed my daughter, I think for eighteen months, but exclusively for the first six months. And I mean, it's such it takes such a toll on you and you don't think about the impact that, that maybe has on not only your ability to work, but your life. You're basically using your body for six months to keep another human or humans, in your case alive, which is totally intense. And yeah, you go into motherhood as well with like these ideas of what life might be like and then, you know, spanners get thrown in the works and, you know, it doesn't always work out how you think it's going to. And not be too fixated on am I being an ideal parent and doing things to the book because every child is different. Every parent is different. You've gotta find what works for you. Yeah, and you have to give yourself a little bit of a break too. I mean, I, I know I, I had friends during maternity leave who, really thought that they should be breastfeeding, and when they weren't able to, really beat themselves up about that. I have one friend who didn't leave the house for about two months because she felt that she had let herself and her baby down by like using formula. At the end of the day, all that matters is that they're fed and that they're healthy and that they're safe and not, how they actually get their food. So I mean, I think as women we're quite often very hard on ourselves, if we don't live up to those ideals, if we don't meet the expectations and the standards that we've set for ourselves. We need to be a little bit nicer to ourselves. We do, and I think that's where community is so important because a lot of the time you feel you have these thoughts in your mind. And you get in your head and actually sharing experiences with fellow new moms or parents is hugely beneficial. We joined a local twins club, the Wandsworth Twins Club, and I met such a wonderful group of women who actually, surprisingly a lot of them were in marketing. Also quite, ambitious career women who have had twins. And there was a weekly playgroup on a Wednesday and we would go to playgroup with our little ones for like an hour or two. And then while they were still little and not moving around, we would go to a nearby pub and just have coffee. With all our double buggies, we were like quite a brigade arriving. But I think having that community and having a WhatsApp group has been so beneficial because you can share these experiences and obviously also moms who've been at different stages. I remember reaching out to a twin mom who was on a similar breastfeeding journey with me, and I was like, how do you even go about weaning down from like twin supply? And recently we've had the WhatsApp chat at the moment is about our one year vaccines. Like how's it gone? How bad have the kids been? Oh, chicken pox, oh, apparently you have to pay for that on the NHS, which isn't great for, twin months, but all these different things is it's great to hear. My boys have recently started nursery five days a week. They are absolutely loving life, but we've already had two incident reports. Which is, in the UK, if you are not aware of it, it's, if, something happens. So, Luke my one son was trying to stand up and knocked something over onto his brother's head. So Kai had a bruise on his head and we had an incident report. And then the second one was at nursery, Luke was standing up and fell backwards and hit his head. So we were talking in the WhatsApp group about our twins tackling each other. There've been lots of scratches and they're just at the stage aproaching when just, yeah, getting quite rowdy with each other, it's really comforting just hearing that everyone's going through the same thing. And I think that's really important. It can be really learning maternity leave. So you need to tap into that and force yourself. Because in the early days your big one thing in the day is maybe if you get outside for a walk and, I don't know, pop up to Sainsbury's to get some groceries, that's like an achievement. To get dressed, get everything ready. I think especially as a twin parent, because it's not like you can just strap on one baby and head off into London or into town. I did feel quite limited by that. Very much hung out in Balham where we lived at that time. And did my usual park walks. Got very friendly with the takeaway coffee guys um, yeah. Yeah, I think community is so important in like keeping you sane. I mean, all of your old friends are busy with their work, they're working nine to five. So most of your friends from your old life, you can't go see. So having mom friends in the neighborhood who you can go for coffee with or even just chat on WhatsApp makes a really big difference to keeping you sane. I massively struggled with maternity leave Like, I love my daughter to bits, but I didn't find it intellectually challenging. I'm very ambitious. I like to constantly be doing things. Like my mental health struggles if I don't leave the house like every other day. So trying to like, take care of your own needs, learn how to take care of a mini human who cannot tell you anything about what they need and, try to keep your brain intact is a massive challenge. So, I mean, I, I went back probably about nine months into it. Being a mom a lot more now that I can like, have conversations and like engage with my daughter. But I definitely struggled during maternity leave and it definitely wasn't like the rosy picture that you quite often see portrayed in the media. Yeah, for sure. I found exactly the same. I think kept Slack on my phone for quite a while and I was taken in on what was happening with the team. A couple of months in, I went and took our boys to meet the team in Victoria and it was a team building summer event. And I think when I left that event, I had an aha moment where I was like, you have limited time Katie. You have three more months of maternity leave. You need to make the most of it, you have some keep in touch days scheduled and that's how I treated easing back into work. I think I used the 10 kid days over two months. So by the time I went back to work, it wasn't cold turkey. I knew what was going on and it wasn't a massive adjustment. And I also had quite a bit of leave, so I went back and did four day weeks for a while. So I kind of went about it by easing back into things. But that ambition doesn't go away and I think that there's definitely room to have your same levels or even higher levels of ambition and a family life. It's about how you make it work for you. I know there's this idea you can't have it all and you definitely can't have it all, we are not superhuman. But there is a balance that you can find in your every day and that's something that I already struggled with. I think, while I was doing those Kid days, I actually decided to do a mini MBA in marketing a month or two before I went back to work. I think purely because of that, I was missing that mental stimulation. And it just happened that we also moved from London to Surrey, like literally two days before I went back to work, and that was maybe taking all a bit too much on board. But I think I don't regret it at all because it helped me clarify my thoughts. I felt like I was coming back as a stronger marketing leader. I had more perspective and really high career ambitions. So I came back, hit the ground running and I was like, I wanna achieve this, and this. And I'm still on that track. Six months in I'm like, this is what I want, this is what I wanna do. And that's just my experience. And I think it's very important to realize it's different for everyone. My ambitions may be I want to skyrocket my career in the next six months to twelve months. But some people are not like that. Maybe they are at a different stage where they want to actually say, well, I wanna navigate finding this balance of working full-time and then navigating part-time work. How do I jam pack my work into three days and feel like I'm not dropping the ball, but also giving enough attention to my child? And that takes some time, and the only way to do it is to go through it and to figure out what, works for you. And that's where I think flexibility and flexible working is essential. Yeah, and I mean it changes and ebbs and flows as well. My daughter's almost eight and during that time there's been periods where I've prioritized my career and my husband has taken on more of the lead care role. There was a two year period where I lived in London and they lived in Scotland and he did Monday through Fridays, and I'd be there at the weekends. And now, you know, now that I'm taking a little bit of a professional break. I'm doing a lot more of the childcare and like doing more of the main parenting and he's working the longer hours. So it's been of like an ebb and a flow and you know, just because one thing's working right now doesn't mean that, it always has to be that way. Or, if you find that you're not so happy with the way that things are, you can still change it. I think motherhood and, balancing a career, there's not just like one answer that's gonna work forever. You can change it, you can mix it up. We've used nursery and then child minder and now she's at school and I do all the pickup and drop off. There's lots of support, but you do need that support around you. And I think without a supportive partner as well, it would be much harder. I couldn't agree more. I think having a partner that you juggle and navigate this journey with is so important. I was quite lucky my husband was on gardening leave for the first two months of maternity leave so, he was around. My mom also came over from South Africa for first three months, which was hugely valuable, just keeping the household going. And it's just really special having your mom there to help you 'cause you're also recovering. But yeah, having that partnership where you get into a streamlined routine. We do that. My partner does the early morning feed. He gets the boys ready for nursery, takes them. We fetch them together when we are both working from home. We do our evening routine. I do the late feed and that's how we navigate it. But I think especially in, in London and the uk. Where your family's on the other side of the world, it's difficult if you don't have a village. We have Gareth's sisters nearby. She also has twins who are now about 11. So it's great to have family sort of nearby, but it's not like what it may have been back in the day where you have your community or family around you. You can just drop your kids off at your mom And, I don't know, have a bit of a break. I think I actually, it's hard to think about when last we went out for dinner. So we've gotta make the most of having, his mom visiting at the moment so we can sneak off and share a meal together without the kids. And not, forget about your relationship.'Cause I think that quite often gets forgotten about. We went through a period where we forgot about our relationship for a bit and it took some work and, we did a year and a half of marriage therapy as well, which helped bring it back together and now in a really good spot. But it's easy to lose sight of that. How did you find the transition back to work? I mentioned during keep in touch days, treating that as sort of my onboarding, getting back into the swing of things. The boys were at home for the first couple of months. So I found, you're juggling constantly because you can hear them, you are on work calls. And then at the same time you're trying to do laundry. You're trying to make sure that their bottles are there. Also, it's a new nanny. They don't know the routine. They don't know the boys that well. So that I think took a bit of strain. I think having them at nursery now full time it definitely allows for that more quiet space. But in terms of the work itself, for me it was more about redefining myself as, a career woman and as a mom. I think I had kids quite later on in life in my late thirties And so I think at the stage of where my career is at, I didn't really want to press pause on my career. So I think it's that struggle, and I think maybe as you say, you've recently taken some time to travel with your daughter and each stage is different. And with these ebbs and flows, I look forward to a time where careers turned down and mom is dialed all the way up and spending more time with them. But I think for now, I'm, conscious, I want to make sure that my career is on the trajectory I want it to go. I'm also conscious of this like mom tax. Whatever that looks like in terms of pension gap, gender pay gap, are you being overlooked for promotions, are employers and teams saying like ease into it when actually you want to dial things up and move more quickly. Navigating that is also quite a sensitive element to consider. Yeah, it's not easy to balance what people maybe expect of you in the workplace with what you want, and being held back from that. How do you navigate the internal politics at a company, you know, with stakeholders whose expectations may not align with what you want? Setting healthy boundaries are important. I think especially in marketing, where you may have been at every event, you may have been networking a lot. You have to dial that back and say, okay, what is gonna be the most impactful? What is my best use of time? Definitely something I've heard being said before I went on maternity leave and it's about prioritizing, but I think that coming back prioritization is just sharpened naturally. I will have a Monday morning, give me a cup of coffee. By midday I would've done like three days worth of admin, boom, boom, boom, 'cause you just have to prioritize. And I think in those early days when the boys were still here, soon as they went down to sleep, I'd be back at my computer catching up for an hour or two. And that's the beauty of flexible working. I was very strict, I'm not gonna work on weekends. Weekends are purely family time. If I need to get a head start on a Sunday evening once they're down, I can do that but having those healthy boundaries are important. And then I'm just very lucky with the flexible working and the company culture at Ozone API it really does enable you to do that. So it hasn't been too much of a challenge where the expectations have been, you need to deliver on this or more. I think that it's the environment that we operate in caters for that. Yeah, I think flexible working is really key for being able to create opportunities for everybody. But even now with my daughter, being in school, you know, it'd be really difficult if you had to be in an office nine to five, five days a week. You know, school drop off time is 8:15, you gotta

pick 'em up at 3:

30. So how do you manage, to be in an office nine to five or nine to six, and still be there for school pickup. And you have to physically pick them up from school until they're in P five, which is about 10, 11 years old. So if you work for a company that is like that, you need a lot of external support to be able to do it. Schools aren't set up alongside you know, working parents schedules. The amount of holidays that they have doesn't correspond with the amount of holidays you get with most employers. So it's maybe 15 years of balancing parenthood and work and, you know, workplaces and the way of working is not always aligned with what they need. And that's where I think leadership in companies need to prioritize this. I think from day one at Ozone API, all parents have the understanding or permission or encouragement to block out their calendars for school pickups. And because our team is global, we may have our GM Nihal in Dubai booking out school pickup midday. We know that we just don't book meetings around then, or if it's urgent, she'll be in the car. So working around what we have and with our engineering delivery team where they need to be online all the time. We'll have a Slack channel where someone will be saying, I'm off to do the school run. I'll be back in an hour. And just having that communication and those mini boundaries set in your calendar, enables that. And it's so easy to do and to work around. If you're trusting your, employees and your team to, to do their thing and giving them the flexibility to operate, it's gonna come back tenfold. What about for leaders who are supporting people who are coming back from maternity leave. What advice would you have for leaders who have a team member who's maybe coming back from it? It's very specific to the individual and I think it's important to spend time to understand where that individual is at, and what they need in terms of coming back to work. I think as a standard, people returning from parental leave should have an onboarding or re-onboarding. Because if they'd been out for a few months, a lot may have changed in the business. So having things like business update check-ins. Robin and I went on maternity leave, we came back and there were over 30 new people that we hadn't met, 'cause the team had grown so much. That re-onboarding is really important. And then introducing these elements of flexibility and making sure that you're having that career development discussion. Where are you at? Do you just want to find your feet for the next few months. Do you want to navigate this shift back into work, whether it's part-time, full-time, whatever that looks like. Or are you looking to climb more in your career and what does that look like? So I think it's really important to understand where the individual is at and then support them that way. Yeah, and to not approach it as a one size fits all, but actually make the time to understand what kind of support they're gonna need coming back and, having those conversations. I think sometimes leaders maybe don't feel comfortable having those conversations. Especially if it's maybe a male leader and a female who's coming back from parental leave. If you're maybe hesitant or unsure how to even ask somebody what kind of support that they need, how would you go about opening that conversation without inadvertently offending or upsetting somebody? I think an in-person touch is always nice. I know our co-founder and CEO took us off for lunch on one of our kid days and it was nice to just touch base and I think we were just talking babies. He's a father himself. His two sons are grown up now. But having that face to face and that more human element will hopefully help have a more comfortable conversation. But if your relationship with your line manager and vice versa isn't there, and it's maybe a bit more formal. Perhaps you can lean on your people team in HR and bring someone else into the conversation to get a sense of where they're at. And hopefully it will help to break down some barriers and make it a bit more human. Everybody should bring their authentic self to work. There's strength and power and vulnerabilities and being like, I'm juggling this, I'm struggling with this. I'm not dropping the ball on, on my job and my work, it's still very important to me, but I may need a bit of flexibility for what I'm going through at the moment. And that applies to all life stages, not just returning for maternity leave. It may be caring for an elderly parent. It could be so many different things, and I think at the end of the day, we're all people and we need to be more human. If you're in a very corporate environment, make sure that you are bringing that into the mix. Yeah, and leaders have a responsibility to, to give that to their people, to understand the life stages that they're at and you know what they might need, and to maybe have some of those difficult or maybe a little awkward at first conversations. And you know, open the can of worms, really explore, what it is that they need in a workplace for that time in their lives. And, you know, that's gonna change as life changes. Exactly, and the word empathy comes to mind. Be empathetic and navigate it with that in mind. Yeah. Is there any final advice you'd like to give our audience before we wrap up today? If you are about to go on maternity leave, as we've discussed, I think try limit your expectations of how things are gonna roll out. Enjoy the journey. Your career and ambition can definitely coexist with family life and tap into community. That is gonna be your, your superpower and your biggest support along the way. I think that's some really great final advice. Well, thank you everybody for listening in today. It's been really great to have you, Katie. It's been great to talk about this. I think we need more female voices in the workplace, talking about some of the challenges we're facing and, life things that we are experiencing should be something that's actively talked about and not, hidden in the corner. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation today. Yeah, it's been great to have you. That's a wrap for this episode of Marketers Unleashed. Thank you for tuning in and diving deep with us into the unleashed world of marketing. We hope you're leaving with fresh insights, new ideas, and maybe even a few aha moments to fuel your next big move. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new episode. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a review or connect with us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts, and join in the conversation. Until next time, keep thinking bold, challenging the norms, and unleashing your inner marketer. After all, what's the worst that'll happen? I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, over n' out.