Like many technology leaders, Art Kang is a workaholic who struggles to unplug.
When he does take a vacation, “I’m constantly checking voicemail and email,” said Kang, who is vice president of technology at the student lender Ascent Funding in San Diego. “I get on the computer for a couple hours every day.”
Kang has benefited from a policy at his company that encourages and almost forces employees to take restorative vacations and sabbaticals. Every three years, Ascent Funding employees are eligible for a sabbatical for which they are paid $2,000 and during which IT disables their accounts so they can’t check email and voicemail. They’re paid an additional $1,000 to take an extra day doing something they really want to do, such as visit a spa.
Recently Kang went to Big Bear Lake, a small city in the San Bernardino Mountains, for nine days. “It was fantastic,” he said.
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“The biggest benefit from my perspective is the perception as an employee that I’m not working at a place that just wants to pile as many things on top of me as possible without regard to how I’m doing,” Kang said.
Embracing sabbaticals
At Ascent Funding, vacation and sabbatical policies evolved over time, according to CEO Ken Ruggiero. During the last recession, changes to the federal student loan program forced Ruggiero to fire 300 people.
“We were all burning out,” Ruggiero recalled. “I had an idea: unlimited vacation. So let’s not worry about using it, running out of it or saving it for later.”
Employees still didn’t take vacation and they remained worn out.
“There was always a reason why they couldn’t take a full week off,” Ruggiero said.
Then he made taking a vacation one of every employee’s personal goals. People were told their bonuses would be threatened if they didn’t. This still didn’t work. Then Ruggiero had the idea of paying people to take a week off. He also decided to disconnect staff from the company’s network during their sabbaticals so that they couldn’t work.
He was inspired in part by bankers he worked with who took vacations during which they were unreachable. (Regulatory policies require senior bank officers to take off-network vacations for at least two weeks, to prevent fraud. If someone were perpetrating a Ponzi scheme, for instance, it would be discovered in their absence.)
But “when we added money to it, that was the magic,” Ruggiero said.
The company posted a map on a wall of its headquarters, and when employees came back from their paid one-week sabbatical, they put pins in the map showing where they went. Recently a digital version of the map was created, as most people are working remotely.
Employees have added photos from their trips to Big Bear, Iceland, Costa Rica, Barcelona and other places.
“It gives a sense of community and you can see this is what this person did on their sabbatical,” Ruggiero said.
And employees re-energize and recharge. Wise, the cross-border payment technology company formerly known as TransferWise, began in 2018 offering sabbaticals to every employee who has worked full time at the company for four years. Before that, this perk was allowed on a case-by-case basis. The company has 3,000 employees globally.
The Wise sabbatical is a fully paid six-week leave, and the employee gets the equivalent of a thousand pounds to spend during that time.
“We encourage our Wisers” — the company’s nickname for its employees — “to use it for something memorable or something maybe they normally wouldn’t do,” said Candace Smith, people operations lead for the Americas at Wise. Some travel. “It’s a really nice opportunity to unplug and refresh and come back with a new perspective.”
The policy came about after a review of benefit offerings and listening to employee feedback.
“We’re very well aware that the work we do requires high levels of commitment and it can be taxing for all humans,” Smith said. “So we wanted to be able to provide something that was beneficial on both sides. Our Wisers get a chance to completely rest and relax or do something they normally wouldn’t do. And when they come back, we have found it’s been really beneficial because they have a new perspective, a new energy, or they’ve been able to find intrinsic motivation. And that ultimately helps our customers and then as well as the teammates.”
Digital banking software company Alkami offers unlimited time off, which could be used for a sabbatical. CEO Alex Shootman said the policy is part of providing flexibility.
“The most important attribute for people looking for work is flexibility — 83% of workers say that flexible work is optimal,” Shootman said, citing a Microsoft work trends survey. “Sixty-three percent of high-growth companies have enabled flexibility and 69% of negative or no-growth companies have not. So flexibility is absolutely critical.”
Work from anywhere is another critical element of flexibility for Alkami, which is based in Plano, Texas.
Challenges
One thing that holds employees back from taking sabbaticals and fully unplugged vacations is fear that their work will pile up while they’re gone, or that their job will be taken by a temporary stand-in.
Kang at Ascent Funding said his company provides lots of support. “Everybody kind of knows what this deal is,” he said. “Everybody is prepared to cover for you during your time off. They let you know everything’s going to be fine when you’re gone, so feel free to unplug, and then they actually disable your email account so you cannot access them even if you wanted to.”
Wise asks that employees who are approaching their sabbatical give at least a three-month notice, so the organization can bring someone in from a different team or have someone in a more junior role step up temporarily.
“The team covers them until they come back,” Smith said.
DJ DiDonna founded the Sabbatical Project, which advocates for giving employees sabbaticals to recharge, after suffering burnout himself and recovering through a sabbatical. He recommends that employees give notice of six months to a year before taking a sabbatical.
“It’s like a planned departure, which is much better than waiting until someone burns out and leaves, then everyone else takes on extra load and you have to hire and train someone,” he said.
Some companies fear that if they let employees take long sabbaticals, they’ll never see them again. At Wise, this fear has been realized: A handful of employees never returned from their sabbaticals.
“It’s bittersweet because we do want the Wisers to unplug, refresh and figure out where the next best next steps are in their career,” Smith said. “Sometimes they figure that the next step for them personally is not to stay with Wise, but we understand and wish them well. Sometimes we see them again, we cross paths in a different life. We still have that positive relationship, so ultimately it does work out, just in a different form that we originally didn’t expect.”
In DiDonna’s research, he has found that more than 80% of people who were given a sabbatical from their employer came back.
“I think the fear that people will leave is born out of knowing that they’ve trapped people in the company,” DiDonna said. “You don’t want to keep people in your company because you’ve trapped them. You want to keep them there because they’ve actively chosen to be there.”
A mistake some companies make is having a policy that only allows some people to take sabbaticals.
“If your co-worker goes on sabbatical, your boss goes on sabbatical, but you aren’t allowed to take a sabbatical, then you’re going to be resentful,” DiDonna said. “If your co-worker goes on sabbatical and you qualify for a sabbatical next year, and you’re taking on some of their responsibilities now, and next year you’ll switch, then you celebrate the fact that they’re going.”
Benefits to companies
Smith at Wise said her company’s six-week sabbatical for all employees is a strong recruitment tool, since it’s something few companies offer and helps the organization since time off reduces the risk of burnout.
“Even before the pandemic, we had a disengagement crisis at work,” DiDonna said. “Burnout was declared a global workplace phenomenon. How many workers are looking for other jobs on a daily basis?”
Employees who take a sabbatical and choose to come back have more mental energy and mental resources to do their jobs, DiDonna said. Such breaks pay for themselves in employee retention and not having to recruit and train newbies, he added.
“And I think from a long-term perspective, retaining people who have institutional knowledge is helpful for a company,” DiDonna said. “But if you don’t plan for it and people are dropping out because they’re burnt out, that’s expensive.”
Paying $3,000 every three years to employees who stay saves money compared with the cost of having to recruit and train new people, said Lisa D’Acquisto, vice president of human resources at Ascent Funding.
“We have very happy employees,” Ruggiero said. “The ones that stay, stay a very long time. The ones that go are still friends of ours, because they probably got great opportunities because we help them.”
