should I have told my employee I figured out she was pregnant?

A reader writes:

I work for a small organization that prides ourselves on being very good with our benefits, including paid parental leave. We’ve never had a pregnant staffer, so all of our plans are in theory and not yet been tested in real life.

We’ve been having issues lately with staff not adhering to our office hours of 9-5 and coming and going as they see fit, so I had to call a staff meeting last week to address it and let them know that we can no longer be as flexible as we once were because too many people were abusing the system. This has included a lot of “I don’t feel well so I’m going to sleep a bit longer and then work from home today once I feel better” when we do not allow work from home except in rare circumstances. I had to stop all of that and tell everyone we needed them in the office 9-5 every day.

One of my staff has had several medical appointments lately, and eventually I put two and two together and realized she was likely pregnant. She had come to me last week to ask how she should handle her hours for a day where a quick appointment turned into three hours. Today she stopped by my office so I asked her to close the door so we had some privacy, and I said, “You do not have to confirm anything to me, but I want you to know that I think I’ve figured out your medical issue, and if I am correct, I just want you to know that we will be as flexible as needed during this time. Don’t worry about the crackdown on hours and work from home stuff that I told everyone last week. We want to make this as easy on you as possible.”

My friend thinks I should have waited for her to tell me before saying anything, but I felt that it would be less stressful on her to know that I already know, so she didn’t have to spend the next few weeks hiding it and trying to figure out how to balance her work and her medical appointments, especially since she had already come to me with a question on it, though without telling me what the medical issue was. In the end, we’d be accommodating to whatever the medical issue was, but knowing that different issues require different accommodations, and this one especially needed flexibility in the areas we just announced a crackdown on, I thought it was better to get out ahead of it. What is the best way to have handled this?

I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

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