Why Companies Need Returnship Programs (Back to Work, Better)

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

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 quite commonly, because of childcare needs. We know that over two million women in the U.S. alone left their jobs in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, largely because of the need to take care of children when 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 better to help these workers readjust. And it turns out, the idea of so-called “return-to-work programs” has actually been around for about 20 years.

Joining us to talk about this is Carol Fishman Cohen. She’s CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch and author of the HBR article “Return-to-Work Programs Come of Age.” Carol, thanks for being here.

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Hi, Curt. Thank you for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: Why is now a big moment for returnships and other return-to-work programs?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Return-to-work programs were already starting to proliferate in greater numbers at the end of 2019. Then, of course, Covid hit and when we’re talking about two million women leaving the workforce during Covid, we’re 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.

You could say that about the re-launchers who left before Covid, that they’re usually leaving for some purpose that has nothing to do with their work performance. 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 re-engage 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.

CURT NICKISCH: And it sounds like this may continue because your article cites research showing that a lot of millennials plan to take career breaks in the future more so than previous generations.

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: 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. 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, so 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.

CURT NICKISCH: So what exactly is a return-to-work program?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: 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-hire programs.” 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.

CURT NICKISCH: That term returnship 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 returnship, exactly?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Returnships have really evolved. The very first one was created in 2008 by Goldman Sachs. 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 returnship, so it’s based on an internship-like experience, but it’s tweaked for the mid-career professional. We’ve seen the returnship as a concept evolve, too.

Originally, they were more project-based, similar to what might be experienced by a college intern who’s dropped into a team for a few weeks working on a project, and then that experience ends and maybe they get hired and maybe they don’t, but now we’ve seen them evolve to the point where they’re called “intent-to-hire programs.” So yes, someone is in a returnship for a designated period of time, but the company looks at the hire as someone they intend to have stay on longer-term as an employee once the returnship ends. If you think about it, that can really impact the way a manager and a team integrate that person during the returnship period.

CURT NICKISCH: When people come back after a break, and it might be a longer break and shorter for others, where do they pick up? Are they starting at where they left off or in another place entirely or a mixture of both?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: So this is a great question. This is the topic of a lot of discussion inside return-to-work programs because we find a couple of things: Everyone’s risk-averse. The relauncher themselves is thinking, “Well, maybe I should come in at a more junior level because I’ve been out for a long time and I need to get my bearings again,” and the employer’s thinking, “Well, we don’t want the person to fail. We want them to have a success early on, so do we err on the side of a more junior role, then have them move up later?”

And so sometimes the person comes in a little junior to what they had left. Some of that is also dependent on how long their career break was. And then they ramp up and they ramp up quicker than they themselves or their employer anticipated. Then the question becomes, do they need some kind of a level adjustment?

And it’s interesting to think about these kinds of programs, not only as modeled after university internship programs, but also leadership development programs, because leadership development programs have special features, and so maybe if it works in your organization, you build in a few months out after the person is hired a level adjustment or something that might start that conversation.

Other companies will say, “Nope, we can’t do that. We can’t do anything off-cycle.” But that is a conversation that companies who run return-to-work programs are talking about a lot right now. The other thing I would add there is that for managers who are managing a relauncher in a return-to-work program, that in itself can be a leadership-developing experience on the manager side.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, I think it’s an important thing to realize, right, that that gap on the resume doesn’t mean the same person is now returning at the end, that a lot has happened in that time.

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: There are a lot of elements of this discussion. Some relaunchers will say, “I actually got more confident going through my returnship program and felt better in my conversations when I was negotiating what I was going to convert to because I proved to myself that I could do it. I wasn’t really sure at the beginning, but I was sure at the end.” We’ve had the relaunchers themselves report that.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What have you seen work with these programs? What makes a returnship successful?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Number one, you have to have buy-in at a senior level, so it is extremely critical for there to be a senior-level champion of the concept. Sometimes that senior-level champion pilots the program in their particular line of business as an example for everyone else. Sometimes they’re also running interference to help clear the way for a brand new onboarding program to be introduced inside the company.

If you think about this, it’s not often that you get the chance to create a brand new program from scratch. And a manager that suggests the concept and is the force behind making a program like this happen is in a very high-visibility role, so I think even from a leadership development perspective of the person or people creating the program, it’s a great place to be. That brings me to another critical point and that is that someone really needs to own the program. A person has to have ownership of the program. We have seen sometimes when programs get off to a great start and then the person who is the program manager, who’s the real driver behind it, leaves the company or moves to another position within the company, and then the program can languish or sometimes go away and has to be revived again, so that ownership piece is really important.

CURT NICKISCH: As far as the structure of these goes, it was striking to me just how many weeks they last and when they’re scheduled. It almost seems like paid training, right, for employees?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Absolutely. That’s one of the great gifts of the return-to-work program: These are all paid programs and you have the opportunity to get this transitional programming and support in your first few, 12, 16, 24 weeks of employment, even if it’s a returnship and you don’t know a hundred percent if you’re continuing or not, we know from the data we’ve seen on these programs, and we have more and more of it as there are more programs and the programs last longer, that over 80% of the people who participate in these returnship programs get hired when the program completes, so we know it’s a successful model to engage with the returning professional population.

A lot of the programs run around this cohort structure and this is a personal and professional transition. The people who are going through it together form these very powerful bonds because they’re supporting each other with this common experience and they can confide in each other and understand each other in a way that people who haven’t taken a career break can’t.

CURT NICKISCH: Does this only work for companies of a certain size? Some of the companies that you’ve mentioned in this conversation and in your article just strike me as large corporations that seem to do this.

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: So yes, we have seen some of the biggest companies in the world be the leaders in starting these programs. It’s been really interesting to watch how these programs have proliferated over time.

The first wave of programming was really driven by Wall Street and then the next wave we saw was starting at the end of 2015. That was really by companies that were either tech companies or what we’d call “tech-infused companies,” so companies that were in different industry sectors, but had technology at their core.

The third wave we’re seeing right as we speak and that is driven by the public sector, so we’re just starting to see the first public sector programs. The state of Utah is the first state to start a returnship program. It’s really interesting because the lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson of the state of Utah, is a re-launcher herself. She took a 13-year career break. She is the person who’s really driving this effort there on her team, but that is the first returnship program that we’ve seen in the public sector. If you think about it, there’s very low unemployment in Utah, but this population doesn’t get counted in the unemployment numbers, so this is a different pool to tap than a pool that is already pretty tapped out in a state where the unemployment numbers are pretty low.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s still big entities we’re talking about, we’re not seeing a lot of this at the small scale. How expensive are these to do?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Well, it really depends on the company. When companies are thinking about what the costs are of starting a return-to-work program, they have to think about are they going to designate a full-time program manager with the mandate to grow this program as quickly as possible into a global program, or is it going to be a program where they offer it once a year?

Depending on what answer to that is determines whether they’re putting resources toward a full-time program manager or someone who has other responsibilities who’s also handling it.

The other thing is these returnship roles are paid. Of course, if someone starts as an employee from day one, they’re paid, so there are resources there, and there are resources around the programming piece of it.

It’s interesting because the companies that are leading the way, about a third of the Fortune 50 have these programs, but less than 10% of the Fortune 500 have them, so you can see the growth of these programs are really skewed toward the bigger companies. Think about it: Those are companies that have a deep bench in the learning and development area and they have other onboarding programs that they can look at and take modules from. But there’s still going to be an element of programming that is very customized for the relauncher that they might decide they want to outsource instead of develop on their own, so there’s some resources that need to be dedicated there.

So it really depends on what the structure is internally on how these kinds of programs are funded. Does the human resources department fund it? Does the line business where they have participants fund it? We’ve seen, though, that companies have launched these programs and grown them and expanded them globally, and that to us, plus the high conversion rates of the returnship model, indicate that companies believe that this is a good investment and they’re getting a high return on that investment.

CURT NICKISCH: What has to happen among managers and teams to have these programs be well-received there?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Let me make two comments. One is when a company first announces that they are developing a return-to-work program internally, inside the company, two things usually happen. Number one, there are a group of managers who step forward right away and say, “I’m in on this program,” and that’s usually because someone in their personal orbit, friend/relative has either taken a career break or come back from one and they have a personal connection to the concept.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, it’s amazing how that happens, right? It’s just so much comes down to personal experience.

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Exactly. And the other piece is that out of the woodwork come re-launchers who have been inside the company and back a number of years, and everyone forgot that they ever took a career break or never even knew it in the first place, so those are people who stepped forward who are very valuable because they can be mentors for the new program participants, they can have their stories featured internally and externally before there are any alumni of the program, and they can also have some input into what they think might be most impactful in creating the program, so that’s a important result of even just announcing the program.

CURT NICKISCH: What’s a favorite success story?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: There are so many great stories. Some of the ones I love the most are the people who have the longest career breaks. So this is a person who was a social worker who actually kept up her social work license over a 25-year career break, and then successfully returned to a social services agency where she had been a volunteer for a long period of time. We have several engineers who have taken 19, 22, even 31-year career breaks and then have returned to their technical careers. That career break did not stand in their way. They’re both thriving.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s amazing. What have you heard from people about what it means to re-enter the workforce this way and just have this opportunity to go back to work at some of these signature companies?

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: They are so grateful for the opportunity and they’re so excited to be there and they’re eager to contribute and make their mark as soon as they can. I think it’s interesting that now that programs have been running for longer and we have more programs running, we have more re-launchers inside organizations. What does that mean? It means that re-launchers are becoming more senior and they’re moving up into roles where they can hire people to work for them.

If they’re in a critical mass of re-launchers inside a company, they might even form something that’s an equivalent to an employee resource group of re-launchers, so the new ones and the alumni and people who’ve been there for different lengths of time can stay connected with each other and continue to support each other. If you get enough of people who have relaunched their career inside the organization, that could shift the whole profile of how the company looks at the re-launcher population for hiring purposes.

CURT NICKISCH: Well, Carol, this has been great to hear about the opportunity for companies and people returning to work and how that opportunity can grow. Thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about it.

CAROL FISHMAN COHEN: Thanks, Curt. Thanks so much for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Carol Fishman Cohen. She’s CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch and the author of the article “Return-to-Work Programs Come of Age.” You can find it in the September/October 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review and at hbr.org.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch.