Hey everyone, Just wanted a 2nd opinion on the below -

If an employee has resigned while being on Maternity leave and timed it so that the leaves and notice ends together, can we ask them to come back and serve their notice period after their leaves for valid reasons?

As far as I understand any kind of leave (paid or unpaid) cannot be considered as notice period. It's on the discretion of the employer to consider it or not. Kindly correct me if I am wrong.

Depends on the company policy as well but yes most companies restrict paid leaves (Casual) during the notice period for a simple reason that notice period is a dedicated time for employees to do handover and knowledge transfer. However if it's an unavoidable situation and employees have been in good terms as well companies can grant paid leaves with a condition that notice period will extend with every leave taken. At Springworks we allow personal time off even in notice period however expect fair usage of the same. Haven't faced a situation where anyone resigned while on maternity - question is if it's an ongoing leave do you need the employee to come back and complete her notice? Ideally you find an internal resource and train them before your employee goes on maternity.

Yeah, we did that but the employee is a team lead and so we were expecting them to join back and for the time being their manager was taking care of the responsibilities. We also allow the personal time off during notice but in this particular case we'd like them join back to serve notice and train their replacement. Hence just wanted to understand the possibility ot the same being done during maternity leave.

You can ask them to come back and serve the notice