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Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. Whether we acknowledge it or not, breaks in a career are pretty normal. They might come because of a health issue, or resetting to figure out what path you really want your career to take, or

work quite commonly because of childcare or elder care needs. We know that over 2 million women in the US alone left their jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, largely because of the need to take care of children, what systems like schools and daycares were disrupted. A huge number of men also left the workforce. Now some of these people are preparing to come back to work. As part of our occasional series, back to work better, we wanted to think about the ways that companies

can better help these workers readjust. And it turns out the idea of a so-called Return to Work program has actually been around for 20 years. Joining us to talk about that is Carol Fishman Cohen. She is CEO and co-founder of I relaunch, and author of the HBR article, Return to Work Programs Come of Age. Carol, thanks for being here.

Hi, Kurt. Thank you for having me.

Why is now a big moment for returnships and other return to work programs?

Return to work programs were already starting to proliferate in greater numbers at the end of 2019, and then, of course, COVID hit. And when we're talking about 2 million women leaving the workforce during COVID, we're talking about them actually withdrawing from the workforce. They're not counted in unemployment numbers. It's a different number than the number of jobs lost.

And the important thing is that they left the workforce for reasons that have nothing to do with their work performance. It's because of an external factor. And you could say that about the relaunchers who left before COVID, that they're usually leaving for some purpose that has nothing to do with their work performance.

And that's one of the things to keep in mind if an employer is thinking about starting one of these programs is this is a high caliber pool, and this is a relatively untapped pool.

And that's why companies who have these return to work programs in place are well positioned to reengage with this high caliber population when they're ready to return.

So those who took the career break before COVID, and then the big group who took the career break during COVID.

And it sounds like this may continue because your article sites research showing that that a lot of millennials plan to take career breaks in the future, you know, more so than than previous generations.

That's right. Career breaks are not going away. In fact, we think there are going to be more career breaks taken in the future. And that's one of the reasons that companies who have these programs in place are going to be signaling to their current employees, their employees have already been on career breaks of their own high performing alumni.

And employees who are earlier in their careers who might be anticipating a future career break, they're signaling that they really understand that people go through life stages and they might take career breaks and they have a formal pathway back for those who make that decision.

So what exactly is a return to work program?

So return to work programs are programs for people who have decided to take a career break and an extended leave as distinct from a shorter term maternity leave and then are interested in returning to work.

Typically today we see them as returnships which are internship based return to work programs, but there are also return to work programs that don't include internships that are what we call direct higher programs and those are programs where people are hired as an employee on day one.

These programs usually involve some sort of transitional programming that's specialized for the person who's returning after a multi year career break and there's often mentorship and events and other specialized programming that's involved in return to work programs.

That term return ship you said is based on an internship which to a lot of people does not sound like returning to employment, what's the nature of a of a return ship exactly.

So returnships have really evolved. The very first one was created in 2008 by Goldman Sachs and we've seen in the proliferation of return to work programs, especially over the last five years, most of them involve this idea of a return ship.

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