Formal sabbatical policies are increasingly attractive for employees, but are often misunderstood by companies considering them. Giving employees more than a vacation—months, not days or weeks—provides unexpected benefits to companies: combatting burnout, building culture, encouraging work-life balance, and satisfying younger workers.
Addressing burnout takes longer than a weekend/vacation
First, a sabbatical provides enough time to truly recover and return to who you are outside your job. Participants in a study I conducted said it took much longer than they’d expected, sometimes up to eight weeks, to feel “human again.” Employee disengagement and burnout persists, despite the many tech-forward offerings promising restoration in microchunks of our days. These trends confirm what my research has shown: There’s no quick fix for unwinding work’s negative effects. More drastic measures are needed.
Extended leave also forces employees and their employers to get the work done with remaining resources, rather than have everything pile up in their absence. This frees employees to actually be present during their time off, instead of clearing all the logistical hurdles only to leave one foot in the office anyway.
Employers benefit too. Sabbaticals clarify who’s actually doing what, and prepares organizations for more sudden departures among their staff.
Building culture
Most companies offer extended leave only for one-offs and special circumstances, such as parental leave or disability leave. These departures foist additional work on those left behind, but rarely come with benefits for them, let alone increased pay or lasting promotions. This can build understandable resentment.
During my research, I visited Brighton Jones, a Seattle-based financial advisory firm that gives all employees a three-month paid sabbatical every decade. While at the office, I watched the company gather for a voluntary lunch where an employee who recently returned from sabbatical with their family gave a photo presentation. Near the end, the person thanked several coworkers who had taken care of their clients while away.
The camaraderie was palpable. The returning employee appreciated the extra work that had allowed them to disconnect, and their teammates knew they could cash in on that karma down the line. In an age where so many companies try to buy culture through Ping-Pong tables and free lunch, this felt organic and authentic.
Newfound perspective and boundaries
Another interview led me to Carol, a U.S. government employee who used a leave without pay program to spend several months trekking in Latin America and caring for an ailing family member back home.
Her time backpacking fulfilled a decade-long dream to return to a place she’d loved in her twenties. But it also reminded her what she appreciated about work. Financing international development projects in places like Argentina gave her a sense of mission and accomplishment. She missed her colleagues too; the life of a wandering nomad, no matter how much she liked the outdoors, definitely wasn’t for her.
Carol returned to work healthy, reenergized, and with renewed purpose. She vowed to get outdoors more often and set better boundaries between work and personal life, prioritizing time with family before it was too late. She also recommitted to another contract at work, grateful for both her time away and the light at the end of the tunnel of another sabbatical.
Instead of wholesale life changes, most returning sabbatical takers simply seek to recalibrate their work life balance. Better boundaries save employees from themselves—and keep them happier at work longer.
Attract and retain younger workers
Younger workers increasingly trade compensation for purpose and flexibility, and are more likely than their older counterparts to take sabbaticals. That’s good news for mission-focused organizations and nonprofits, but potentially an impossible task for most companies.
Giving employees time to pursue their passions outside of the office, however, is available to everyone. SAP and Johnson & Johnson offer one- to two-month paid volunteer programs. And Patagonia gives employees two months, with salary and benefits intact, to work for an environmental organization of their choice.
Younger generations aren’t the only ones pushing for flexibility and time off. Research shows that hybrid or work from home policies remain roughly five times their pre-COVID-19 levels. And since California became the first state to mandate paid parental leave in 2002, 14 states have now enacted paid family leave mandates.
Companies can either decide to draw their battlelines at the generational divide, or embrace what my study participants describe as a much more humane way of working: marbled with chunks of time off to recover, explore, and exist outside of a job.
Some of your employees may leave
It’s true: Some employees use their sabbaticals to transition to a new job. But my data shows that the vast majority—around 80%—return to their employers, and are better off with the benefits described above.
For some companies, the prospect of losing people to sabbaticals is enough to turn them off the idea entirely. But put that number into perspective: Quit rates across the largest industries in the U.S. average near 25% per year. Even in the lowest turnover industries like government, employees leave their jobs every decade or so.
As a talent executive at the notoriously forward-thinking online retailer Zappos put it, if some of your employees don’t want to be there, is your best plan to trap them into staying?
Extended leave helps retain, rejuvenate, and inspire your best people. It’s an equitable way to honor the humanity of your employees outside of work while also reaping the benefits once they return. The paradox of sabbaticals is that giving your best people permission to leave for a while may be one of the strongest tactics to get them to stay.