Celebrating National Families Week: Supporting the People Who Make Us

At Mantel, one of our core principles is to ‘Make Things Better’. While that applies to the solutions we build for our clients, it often starts at home. We believe that career and family shouldn’t just co-exist; they should truly thrive together.

For Nina Zivkovic, and many new parents, the transition to motherhood was a period of significant joy and significant change. At Mantel, our goal was to ensure that as her life evolved, her professional support system moved along with her.

Nina stayed active and focused throughout her pregnancy, using her Mantel My Deal to keep doing what she loves. By choosing the Wellbeing category, she was able to fund specialised physiotherapy that helped keep her running right up until she was 37 weeks pregnant. She also used the financial support to hire a doula, ensuring she had a consistent, familiar face by her side to help navigate her care and feel truly supported during her pregnancy.

When it came time to plan her leave, we left the decision completely in Nina’s hands. We were happy to be flexible with any finish date she chose, and she ultimately decided to see a specific project through to completion. Nina worked until she was 39 weeks pregnant, welcoming her baby boy early the very next day, having finished her work exactly on her own terms.

While the arrival of her son brought so much joy, the months that followed were also incredibly tough. Nina dealt with the raw reality of new parenthood – intense sleep deprivation and postpartum anxiety that made every little thing feel overwhelming.

Recognising she needed extra support, Nina’s maternal health nurse referred her to Wren (Women’s Recovery Network), a public health-funded facility supporting women’s mental health. She spent two weeks with a dedicated mental health support team and midwife who helped her prioritise sleep, gain confidence in her ability in caring for a baby, and focused on her recovery. During those hard weeks, we wanted Nina to focus entirely on herself and her baby. It was important to us that Nina was making sure she knew her job wasn’t going anywhere and that we were here to support her in any way we could.

During parental leave, Nina utilised her keeping in touch days when she wanted to stay up to date on what was happening at Mantel and attend social events so she could maintain connectivity to us. When Nina felt ready to begin her transition back to work after eight months, we worked together to make sure the pace felt right. She started back at two days a week, giving her the space to adjust to a changing office environment and get up to speed with our new AI tools without feeling submerged.

As her partner’s own parental leave concludes, Nina is planning to gradually increase her hours to a four-day work week. To make this sustainable, she’s utilising her long service leave to take one day off a week. This allows her to maintain that vital balance as her family enters a new stage.

Nina recognised that having a Mantel People Guide who is also a parent would provide significant support with her transition back to work. She proactively requested to change her People Guide which we were happy to make happen. 

Feeling supported herself, Nina bravely shared her personal story to our #sig-working-parents Slack channel. By being so open about her mental health and the help she received, she turned a very personal challenge into a moment of connection for the whole team. Her honesty didn’t just share her journey, it gave others at Mantel the safety to talk about their own struggles and know it’s okay to ask for help when they need it.