White said: "Having finally acknowledged the value of motherhood and the importance of new working mums having sufficient time at home with their new babies we then create counter intuitive processes that result in one of our greatest assets feeling unwanted or disloyal to their employer.
"We present them with mountain ranges to climb including financial pressures, lack of communication, job insecurity and split loyalties whilst conveniently ignoring the enormous lifestyle adjustments they are having to cope with at home.
"There is no other protected characteristic within a workforce that would be allowed to be treated in this way.
"HR departments bend over backwards to ensure there is neither direct or indirect hindrances or hurdles in the way of all other staff are treated yet somehow we are able to departmentalise maternity and separate the reality that each one of us was once a child and many of us have gone on to be parents ourselves. This failure to appreciate the situation presents a large part of our workforce with impossible choices.
"Government is playing their part with a new tax-free childcare scheme so it is now time employers stepped up and embraced this natural stage in many workers life cycle.
"We now live in a global day where we shop, bank, communicate, relax and engage 24 hours a day. While we sleep others are busily writing emails to us and while they are sleeping, we are returning them.
"Real time commercial connections now mean someone is expecting an instantaneous response yet we still try to squeeze our workforce into an outdated 9 to 5 work based model where even Yahoo's CEO wants to declare the end of flexible working and embroils their HR department in an attempt to claim "speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home."
"Recent YouGov research has confirmed UK businesses could save £34 billion by adopting more flexible working policies that would immediately enhance the opportunities of staff with child caring responsibilities to develop a blended approach to work location whilst returning to full income.
"The future for our working mums is not work/life balance it is work/life blending. Having worked in organisations as varied as retail, banking, manufacturing and the public sector I have always seen the value of supporting excellent workers who at each stage of their life require us to evaluate how best to maintain the employment relationship.
"At our finger tips are a section of our workforce desperate to blend their whole life activity into our new "always connected" businesses yet we limit their opportunity by creating man-made constraints that have no credible origin.
"Working in the NHS I am the first to accept that there are some jobs that will never fit neatly into "flexible"" working models but we fail to take advantage of a modern workforce that would readily be flexible throughout each stage of their career in what how and when they can work. This is not rocket science it just requires us to model the business needs and the needs of staff on an individual basis. If we can accept the fact that our world is now always connected, we can make use of this knowledge to maintain working relationships with our staff that brings them both work satisfaction and life satisfaction.
"My challenge to UK employers is that it is time to give up the old idea of work/life balance and go for work/life blend. This will ensure greater job satisfaction, greater productive contribution and a happier and more satisfied workforce and all it requires is for employers to make the effort to change."
