Flexible working and reduced hours: you're not asking to do less work. You're asking to stop doing work that doesn't belong to you anymore.

Returning from maternity leave and thinking about reducing your hours can be a bit nervy.

You know you can't go back to exactly how things were before you left, but you may worry you’ve created a problem before it even started.

Your role hasn't stayed still while you've been away and has been covered in one way or another. Some parts will have been picked up by other people, some things will have been paused, and some things will have quietly stopped altogether because there simply wasn't capacity to keep everything exactly as it was.

You're not necessarily walking back into a fixed role that's waiting for you, but back into something that's already shifted.

This is where a lot of people get stuck. The instinct is to make everything fit into fewer hours. Same workload, same expectations, just compressed into less time. It feels responsible, but it's usually what creates the pushback, because it immediately raises concerns about what will drop, who will pick things up, and whether the quality of work will suffer.

The more effective approach isn't to protect everything. It's to accept that some of what you used to do probably no longer needs to sit with you at all.

Think about how your work was covered while you were away. Not defensively, but practically. Because it often becomes clear that certain tasks have already been absorbed elsewhere or quietly deprioritised, without the business collapsing as a result. That tells you something important about what's genuinely core to your role and what's simply accumulated over time. It may be that even before you went on maternity leave, parts of your role needed delegation, but you never got round to doing this. Returning from maternity leave may be the perfect time to start your role from a fresh.

A lot of employer resistance to reduced hours comes from the assumption that it will require additional resources or a major reorganisation. But in most cases, the reorganisation has already happened informally during your leave and the work is already sitting somewhere different. The question is whether it actually needs to come back to you in the same way, or at all.

That's why a strong request isn't about keeping everything intact, but about being clear on focus. What you're continuing to own, what no longer sits with you, and how the work is realistically structured given the hours you're returning on.

When you approach it that way, the conversation shifts. It stops being about whether the business can accommodate a reduction in hours and becomes about whether the current shape of the role actually makes sense anymore.

If you’re considering submitting a flexible working request, but you’re not sure where to start or how to angle it out, let’s have a chat.