One of your employees is going on maternity leave, and the practical question hits before the emotional one settles: who is going to do her work for the next few months? It is a fair thing to worry about. A key person stepping away for twelve, twenty, or twenty-six weeks is a real operational gap, especially in a small company where everyone already wears several hats.
The good news is that covering the work is a solvable logistics problem. The trap is solving it in a way that quietly damages her right to come back. This guide walks you through how to keep the work moving without jeopardizing her job protection, so you handle the coverage well and the reinstatement cleanly.
Short answer: You can hire temporary coverage during maternity leave, but because the leave is job-protected you cannot permanently replace the employee. Compare your coverage options, put the temporary nature of any hire in writing, and plan the handoff so she steps back into her role cleanly when she returns.
The one rule that shapes every coverage decision
Before you compare options, internalize this, because it governs all of them: leave taken under Massachusetts Paid Family and Medical Leave is job-protected. When your employee returns, you must restore her to the same position, or an equivalent one with the same pay, benefits, seniority, and status she had when leave began.
That means you can absolutely bring in coverage. What you cannot do is permanently fill her seat and then tell her there is no longer a place for her. A temporary replacement does not change her reinstatement rights, no matter how well that person performs. The federal FMLA rules say the same thing: employees are restored to the same or a virtually identical position regardless of whether you hired someone to cover.
So the framing for everything below is simple. You are arranging temporary coverage for a job that still belongs to someone else. Keep that phrase in mind and most of the hard calls answer themselves.
Any negative change to her job during her leave or in the six months after is presumed to be unlawful retaliation in Massachusetts. "We reorganized and her role went away" is exactly the kind of story that presumption is designed to catch.
Your coverage options, compared
There is no single right answer here. The best choice depends on how long she will be out, how specialized her work is, and what your budget looks like. Here is how the realistic options stack up.
| Option | Best when | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Temp staffing agency | You need someone fast and the role is fairly standard | Higher hourly cost; ramp-up time for anything specialized |
| Fixed-term contractor | The work is project-based or specialized | Get the temporary term in writing; classify correctly as contractor vs. employee |
| Internal cross-training / redistribution | The leave is shorter and the team has some slack | Don't overload one person; don't permanently reassign her core duties |
| Temporary promotion / "acting" role | You have a capable internal person ready to stretch | Be explicit it's temporary and acting; agree on what happens when she returns |
| Delay non-urgent work | Some of her output can simply wait a few months | Be honest about what truly can wait versus what only feels deferrable |
Most small employers end up combining two or three of these: redistribute the routine work, delay what can wait, and bring in a contractor or temp for the specialized piece that no one else can cover. You do not have to replace one person with one person.
A quick real-world example
Say Priya runs the books and manages payroll for a 22-person company, and she is taking 20 weeks of leave. Her employer maps her job into three buckets. The weekly payroll run, which is time-sensitive and specialized, goes to a bookkeeping firm on a fixed-term contract for the leave period. The routine invoicing gets redistributed to an office manager who cross-trains with Priya for two weeks before she leaves. And a systems cleanup project Priya was leading simply waits until she is back.
No single "replacement" was hired. The job stayed intact, everyone knew the arrangement was temporary, and when Priya returned her role was exactly where she left it. That is the pattern to aim for.
Your coverage planning checklist
Work through this in the weeks before leave starts, not the week of.
- Break her role into tasks and sort them: time-sensitive, routine, and deferrable.
- Decide which buckets you'll cover with a hire, redistribute, or delay.
- If hiring, put the temporary nature of the role in writing to the new person.
- Schedule cross-training or a handoff document while she's still in the office.
- Keep her core responsibilities identifiable so the role is clearly hers to return to.
- Set a check-in point partway through leave to adjust coverage if dates shift.
- Confirm the plan won't quietly change her job, pay, or title on return.
- Line up the return so the temporary arrangement winds down cleanly.
If you are doing all of this without an HR team behind you, you are not alone; most companies your size handle it the same way. Our guide to leave administration for companies without HR covers how to keep the paperwork and logistics manageable when it is just you.
Common mistakes that put reinstatement at risk
Coverage rarely goes wrong on the staffing side. It goes wrong in a handful of predictable ways that turn a smart plan into a legal problem.
The first is telling the temporary hire, or letting them assume, that the job could become permanent. Even a casual "let's see how it goes, this could stick" creates an expectation you cannot honor and a paper trail you do not want. Say plainly, in writing, that the role is temporary and tied to a colleague's leave.
The second is permanently reassigning her core duties. It feels efficient to just move her biggest responsibility to someone who is staying. But if her job looks materially different when she returns, that can be read as failing to reinstate her, even if her title and pay are unchanged.
The third is "improving" the role while she is out and handing that improved version to the coverage person. Restructuring her job during leave, then reinstating her to something lesser, is precisely what the six-month retaliation presumption is built to catch.
The fourth is overloading a single teammate as free coverage and calling it cross-training. That is how you turn one person's leave into a second person's burnout, and sometimes a second departure.
What good coverage looks like on the way back
The cleanest coverage plans are the ones that are easy to unwind. When the temporary arrangement is clearly labeled from the start, winding it down is straightforward: the contract ends, the acting role reverts, the deferred project restarts, and she steps back into her own job.
That last part deserves its own attention, because a smooth return is where all this planning pays off. For the specifics of re-entry, from confirming dates to easing her back in, see preparing for an employee's return from leave. And if this is genuinely your first time managing any of it, your first employee taking leave walks through the whole arc from a standing start.
What to hold onto
Covering the work while someone is on maternity leave is a planning exercise, not a crisis. Break the job into pieces, cover each piece in the way that fits your team and budget, be honest with everyone that the arrangement is temporary, and keep her role intact so she can walk back into it. Do that, and you protect both your operations and her job at the same time, which is exactly the balance a good employer is trying to strike.
This guide explains the practical steps, not legal advice for your specific situation, so when a coverage decision starts to look like it might affect someone's reinstatement, check it with an employment attorney before you act.