Policies alone can’t protect employees—they need empathy, flexibility, and trauma-aware leadership. In this interview, Renée Robson, trauma-informed yoga facilitator and founder of Trauma Informed Leadership, shares practical strategies for creating workplaces that truly support parents, including those navigating perinatal mental health challenges or neurodivergent experiences.
Her message is clear: trauma-aware practices aren’t just a “nice to have”—they’re essential for building inclusive, high-performing workplaces.
Whether you’re an HR professional, a manager, or a colleague, small shifts in how we listen, lead, and design systems can make a profound difference.
Question: Can you tell us a bit about your background in HR and what drew you to trauma-aware practices in the workplace?
I ended up working in the leadership space and organisational design in large non-profits. Because of supportive, awesome managers and leaders who I worked for, I ended up doing my Masters in Management. In my career and studies, I focused on what great leadership and organisational mission drift looks like in non-profit organisations and how a lot of conventional wisdom around management and organisational design doesn’t directly translate into those types of environments for success over time.
At the same time, I was dealing with becoming a parent and, not long after, having my wonderful Step Dad become sick and later pass away from brain cancer in New Zealand, all while the C-word was happening. During this time, I ended up taking steps to better address my mental health and CPTSD, which resulted in my yoga practice becoming yoga study. I then qualified as a trauma-informed yoga facilitator.
There was a lot of crossover with the Boston TCTSY model that I learned. It aligns with what are arguably the best and most effective trauma-healing and integration therapies, and I consider it one of the most genuinely 'trauma-informed' approaches to 'trauma-informed practice' available.
While I loved working in large organisations and the impact we were able to have, I realised I could have much more impact on the people who need good professional development in trauma-informed thinking and leadership/systems design in a different role. When I was made redundant, I founded Trauma Informed Leadership, a social enterprise (certified with Social Traders). I designed my business model so I can provide pro-bono support to small non-profits on an application basis.
I combine this with working with organisations and leaders who want to go a step beyond conventional authentic leadership or trauma-informed practice, using a systems and leadership design reframe of what trauma-informed leadership looks like for them. I also spend time providing 1:1 trauma-informed yoga classes virtually and teaching trauma-informed yoga at two teacher training schools in Victoria.
Renée Robson
In your experience, what are some of the key challenges parents face when returning to work after experiencing perinatal mental health issues or trauma?
I think the key challenge is facing well-intended but ultimately unsupportive policies and procedural commitments.
Many of these systems are set up without a holistic understanding of what actually drives people to do a good job. There is too much defaulting to nitpicking the detail and too little focus on evidence-informed, human-centred solutions.
This flawed design has a specific, damaging consequence: it strips the direct line manager of genuine authority. They aren't given the coaching support to navigate these sensitive issues, nor do they have the power to collaboratively decide what's best for the employee.
This is the core of the challenge. The parent is caught between a manager who almost always wants to do the right thing, and a rigid, unhelpful system that prevents them from doing so.
How can HR professionals and managers better support employees who have experienced antenatal depression, anxiety, or loss during parental leave?
Ultimately, managers need to be okay with how people want to grieve and supportive of how they want to handle their transition back to work.
When I was in my 20s and experienced a pregnancy loss (a pregnancy we really tried for), I tried to return to my job. Even though my boss gave me more time than was legally required, it was nowhere near enough time to grieve.
I now work with women through trauma-informed yoga during this exact period, and it's a common time for old, dormant experiences to be activated.
It is a deeply common experience, and it's staggering how often the sheer complexity and grief of these life events are reduced to a couple of days off and maybe a meeting with your manager.
Goodness, you might even get three EAP sessions and an e-learning module about it.
This is the core of the challenge. The parent is caught between a manager who almost always wants to do the right thing, and a rigid, unhelpful system that prevents them from doing so.
What are some practical steps organisations can take to create psychologically safe environments for returning parents?
The first step is committing to organisational trauma-aware practices. This requires prioritising psychological safety and understanding its interdependencies with intersectionality, including neurodiversity, disability, and LGBTQIA+ status.
Most approaches to psychosocial safety are rooted in compliance tick-and-flick methods, which negate the real benefits. Leaders/organisations that focus on genuine psychosocial safety as a way to build inclusion and accentuate creativity and collaboration and performance find far more success and see significant shifts in behaviour.
I appreciate leaders are under immense stress. However, difficult times are when your practice is tested. Employees and stakeholders evaluate this performance, and that evaluation is what supports or destroys the psychosocial safety and culture you have taken so long to build.
How can trauma-informed approaches be embedded into HR policies and practices, especially in relation to parental leave and return-to-work planning?
Investing in professional development and ongoing coaching/mentoring of staff on their subject matter expertise and their role as a leader. The age of e-learning has been wonderful for accessibility, reporting, and cost. But most learning happens relationally at work, and genuine time spent developing these skills is required.
The complete abdication of many organisations’ professional development and leadership programs to generic e-learning modules that come free in some other subscription is genuinely mind-boggling to me. The acceptance of 'slop' without evidence for adult learning or behaviour change, I think, is irrationally short-sighted by most organisations, but conspicuously most by non-profits and government organisations that have an obligation to communities and taxpayers to actually do a good job.
It's not that e-learning isn’t good, it is awesome, but generic approaches to leadership and management are killing organisations. Don’t AI-slop your people strategy. It's not a cost issue; most of these solutions are peer-led and within the workplace, but you need to mandate time towards it and support it right. Otherwise, garbage in, garbage out.
What unique challenges do neurodivergent parents face in the workplace, particularly during the transition to and from parental leave?
It’s different for everyone, but often people find that parenthood and the big life changes we can go through at this time can sometimes prompt:
Seeing adaptive patterns and symptoms/masking etc. in a new way. This can be due to changing capacity or simply the process of reflecting on our own patterns, how we were parented, and so on.
It can also be a time when we’re more raw. This is similar to the point on masking, but this new-found tender way of looking at the world means we can find navigating the sometimes quite fucked up nature of the workplace inherently more difficult. It is an intensely challenging period for so many: add getting used to daycare, new parenting arrangements, and lack of sleep... and then add navigating an unfriendly environment with a neurodivergent brain. It can be tough.
How can workplaces better support neurodivergent employees navigating parenthood — including those with ADHD, autism, or sensory processing differences?
The approach is the same as most accommodations. First, ensure you have good policies and leader/manager coaching in place to support good practice. Then, support your managers to work out appropriate accommodations for them and their team.
If employees and managers have the right supports in place (such as coaching, professional development, communities of practice, external resources, or appropriate leave), the vast majority can work out the accommodations that are best for their roles, expertise, and teams.
They can do this far better than any HR person who doesn't understand the roles. HR should be there to support, not direct. Setting up the right systems to build trusting relationships has a massive impact on the success of people returning to work, and on the psychological safety of the entire workplace.
How can HR teams build more inclusive policies that recognise the intersection of neurodiversity, mental health, and caregiving?
It's about HR, alongside Safety, and the leadership and Board taking a trauma-informed approach to building psychological safety. This requires:
Building trust
Considering systems and leadership
Priortising lived experience
Actually asking people to help solve solutions rather than designing them behind closed doors. It doesn’t mean you have to agree on everything.
But communicating honestly, in an effort to genuinely build and maintain trust, is what's needed to empower leaders themselves.
What advice would you give to someone navigating a return to work after a difficult perinatal experience?
Ask for help. It's the hardest thing in the world, but ask for help. And if you don’t get the right help, that’s not your fault either; it’s okay to try different things to get the right mix of supports for you.
I was incredibly lucky during my perinatal period with the mental health care from the team at the Royal Women's. Like many women who have had similar experiences with sexual assaults/abuse, I found pregnancy and childbirth to be intensely triggering.Even with all the ‘right’ supports, an incredibly supportive partner, friends, and family, I still struggled with returning to work.
I started a new job and had the most excellent boss in regard to being a new mum. She was the APAC HR Director, and I wish more HR people learned from someone like her. I never felt like I had to fake having had a good night's sleep, which honestly made a huge difference in knowing I didn’t have to put all my energy into masking when I was at capacity as it was.
I think often leaders feel a lot of pressure to say that they do the right thing and they believe in supporting working parents, etc., and then their teams find out that’s all a bunch of BS as soon as there’s any need to make a decision or stand up to a lousy HR policy. So my advice would be less talking about it and posting self-congratulatory messages on LinkedIn, and more practical approaches to solutions led by the employee and their manager, not by a tone-deaf policy drafted in AI by an overworked HR business partner.
Empathy goes a long way, as does not making assumptions about what new parents do and don’t want. Blanket policies aren’t always helpful; genuine flexibility is.
Is there anything you’d like to share with employers or colleagues about how to be more compassionate and supportive during this transition?
I guess you never really know anyone else's story. It might be the most magical, blissful time in their life, or it might be a time that triggers a whole lot of other stress and trauma because of our lives, experiences, brains, and bodies.
Empathy goes a long way, as does not making assumptions about what new parents do and don’t want, and what is and isn’t helpful. Blanket policies around flexibility aren’t always the most helpful; genuine flexibility between supportive managers and the new parents is the ideal, in my opinion.
It's not just about being a nice person, although this type of leadership does make an immeasurable impact for the new parents. It's good business.
Renée and Jimmy the dog
This interview is part of my Yoga in Motion Fundraiser for the Gidget Foundation. I’m completing 100,000 steps of yoga in 10 weeks, marking Perinatal Mental Health Week (23–29 November 2025), and raising funds to support families navigating perinatal mental health challenges.
You can visit my fundraising page to learn more and support the cause here.
Renée’s message is clear: trauma-aware practices aren’t just a “nice to have”—they’re essential for building inclusive, high-performing workplaces. Want to learn more? Visit Trauma Informed Leadership or connect with Renée on LinkedIn or Instagram.