What you need to know if a female employee is breastfeeding and wants to use a breast pump

1. Breast pumping and breastfeeding
   A brand new mother can take up to one quarter of her working hours to breast feed or breast pump until her baby is nine months old. How often this happens is not always easy to predict, it depends on the mother and baby's routine. Your employee is paid normally for the time she spends pumping breast milk or breastfeeding. The time spent pumping cannot be deducted from her normal breaks.
   
   2. Breast feeding room
   Your employee is entitled to a suitable room to pump breast milk or breastfeed. If you cannot provide a suitable room, then your employee can organise a space for herself, or can leave work and go to her child in order to breastfeed.
   
   
   3. Information
   As manager, you must inform your employee about her rights to pump breast milk or breastfeed during working hours. This is necessary so that she can make a good choice without pressure or stress. You can of course reach an agreement about this, and you can, if necessary, adjust her working hours or let her work from home more often. If your employee knows before she goes on maternity leave that she wants to breastfeed, then she will probably ask about the options then.

Working mothers therefore have every right to breastfeed their child or pump breast milk during working hours. There are still a large number of women who stop breastfeeding when they go back to work following their maternity leave. This is not always due to problems with breastfeeding or pumping milk as such, but from lack of time and the reactions of colleagues. This last is often due to ignorance; colleagues often are unaware of the rights of working mothers. As manager, you can do something about this by informing your employees about this. That way you create traction among colleagues.

You can also, of course, make sure that people are given the time to pump breast milk or breastfeed not just in theory, but also in practice. So relieve the employee of a few tasks, if necessary, so that she does not increase her stress because really she does not have time to pump breast milk or breastfeed her child.

Remember that breastfeeding is a natural process and cannot always be shoehorned into a schedule. The process can be disrupted by stress. One night of sleeping badly – not unusual for parents of a baby – or an argument with their partner can be enough to affect milk production and lactation. So pumping breast milk can be really easy one day, and take a lot of effort the next, meaning that the employee probably needs to pump it more often. As manager, show you that you understand this and give her space.

If you need to pump breast milk at work and there is no suitable room available and your colleagues don't understand why you keep breaking off from your work, then you have all the ingredients you need to create stress. If you as manager have a positive attitude, this ensures not only that you have a relaxed and satisfied employee, but also:

• more motivation from the employee to restart work;
• less risk of absence due to stress or problems with breastfeeding;
• higher commitment and productivity;
• lower turnover among employees with babies;
• better health for both mother and child.

Working mothers pump breast milk in the strangest places; from literally the broom cupboard to the post room and the bathroom. This is not how it should be done, and indeed, the Health & Safety Decree states that the employer must provide a suitable room for breast milk pumping. The following requirements must be met:

• the room must be lockable from the inside;
• the room must be hygienic;
• the employee must have complete privacy in the room;
• the room must be quiet and secluded;
• there must be a bed, a couch or a comfortable chair in the room;
• the room must have ventilation;
• there may not be any dangerous substances or dirt in the room.

It is sensible (but not required) if there is also running water and a fridge. Then your employee can rinse the breast pump equipment and chill the milk straight away. If there is no fridge in the breast pumping room, then she must be able to use a fridge somewhere else.