How to get your company to offer a sabbatical
The Overlap #57
Welcome to The Overlap, a newsletter somewhere between product and org design. We’re back in action. Today’s a free post! Next week will be subscriber-only. Then back to free, then back to paid.
I just came back from a six-week paid sabbatical. It was dope. I’m lucky my employer offers this.
The more I talk to others about having a six week paid sabbatical, the more I hear “Damn! I wish my company offered a sabbatical.” So I want to help people who want sabbaticals at their companies figure out how they can actually make it a policy.
This post won’t be about why sabbaticals are important. I don’t think you need to hear the reasons you should take a sabbatical — I’d bet that if you read this, you intuit the benefits of time off and want time off from your work. I want to focus this post on how you can help your company make this a policy.
The more I talk to others about taking a paid sabbatical, the more I hear “Damn! I wish my company offered a sabbatical.”
I want to help you figure out how to get your company to formalize a policy where every employee (including you!) is offered a sabbatical after X amount of years.
This post won’t be about why sabbaticals are important. I believe I don’t need to convince you why you should take a sabbatical — I’d bet that you intuitively believe in the benefits of time off and want time off from your work. I want to focus this post on how people can help their companies can offer this.
How to help your company offer a sabbatical
Find out who owns this decision. Ask them to collaborate with you.
Find out how this decision gets made.
Begin to draft a proposal.
Collaborate on the rest of the draft with the decision-maker.
Get that decision made!
This advice assumes…
…that your company doesn’t have a recurring governance meeting, where anyone can propose changes to policy, and the group has a chance to consent to it. If your company does have a governance meeting, simply draft a proposal and propose it in your meeting.
…that your company doesn’t use integrative decision-making. If your company does use IDM, simply propose a sabbatical policy using IDM!
This advice is for people who work at companies where it isn’t clear how policy decisions get enacted. Or if those decisions are made top-down. Which is most companies.
1. Find out who owns this decision
If you are the founder or CEO, then you own the decision! You can skip to step 2.
But if you work at a small startup, is it the founder? Ask them!
If you work at a 100-person company, or a large TechCo, ask the Head of Human Resources.
Big plus if that person has worked there for 2-4 years. Anyone who’s worked at a company for 2-4 years and is a manager would want the option to take a sabbatical.
Ask that person if they’d be open to exploring a sabbatical policy:
Hey!
I’m [name] from [this team].
I’d love to understand if our company offers a sabbatical to its employees. I’ve seen other organizations do this and say they’ve seen positive returns from it!
Is this something our company offers?
If it isn’t something we offer, have there been conversations in the past that have considered our company offering a sabbatical? Is this something we’d be open to exploring?
People want sabbaticals. Especially after we’ve worked through a global pandemic. And especially if you’ve worked at a company for a while! Your leaders want a sabbatical! So chances are, your founder or Head of HR is super open to it.
They just need to think through how to make it policy. This is how you can help.
If they express openness, ask if they’d be willing to collaborate on creating a sabbatical policy, and offer to share a draft that you both would collaborate on together.
If you hear “no we don’t offer sabbaticals”, ask if this is something they’re open to working on with you. And if they aren’t open to working with you, find someone else who is close to that decision who would be more open to creating a sabbatical policy. There is someone else in your org who also wants a sabbatical policy. It’s just a matter of finding them and working with them.
2. Find out how this decision would get made
Ask your collaborator how decisions like these typically get made. Is this made at a founder level? Can the HR team make this decision autonomously, without approval? Does the CEO need to approve it?
This will save you time in the long run.
3. Begin to draft a proposal
👉🏽 Use this template (from the garden3D Notion!) to draft a proposal.
Don’t draft it entirely on your own. Draft some of it with your best judgment! But leave some questions unanswered for your collaborator (either the head of HR or founder) to work with you on. Your vibe here is to open up a container for your collaborator to contribute, not to ask for sign-off on your perfectly crafted doc.
4. Collaborate on the rest of the draft together
Reach out to your collaborator, share your WIP doc, and ask them if they’re down to work through it together over a call.
Don’t try to “convince” them that your thinking is right. Instead, collaborate. “I started a proposal here and would love for us to finish it together.”
People champion proposals that they helped make vs signed off on (the IKEA effect). Your collaborator has thought of things you haven’t. They want their thoughts to be integrated into the policy. You want them to champion your proposal — their support is crucial in getting this passed.
5. Share the draft with the right decision-maker!
If your collaborator is the decision-maker, great! You can skip this step. That’s why it’s best to work with the decision-maker from the get-go.
If your collaborator isn’t the decision-maker, present this with your collaborator to that decision-maker (or team/forum). Again, people champion proposals they helped make, so you’ll want to be open to integrating other folks’ ideas into your proposal. It’ll make the proposal better and people will naturally become champions of it.
💆🏽♂️🧘🏻🧖🏾♀️
The five steps above are overly simplified for brevity’s sake. There is obviously more nuance to make this happen. Every company is different!
But hopefully, these steps help you feel like you can get started.
Have you gotten your company to create a sabbatical policy? If you have, how did you approach it?
Followup Post
What else I’m writing
At the end of my sabbatical, I wrote a lengthy year in review. It’s more on life than strictly work, but maybe you’ll find it interesting.
If you’re a paid subscriber, see you next week! And for regular readers, see you in two weeks.
–tim
When I quit my job in 2017 the CEO of the company offered me not a sabbatical but an unpaid leave: he understood that I was under a lot of stress personally but there was no room for a paid sabbatical (and...I really didn't want to work for that guy anymore anyway, I was under a lot of stress also because of that job).
Then I did a few months of "high-risk" sabbatical on my own terms (I burned half of my personal savings between the lack of income and the ramping up of the new consulting gig).
I'm not sure how a request for a sabbatical might be perceived by a company and the managers: in my experience there's a high risk of compromising yourself, the request being seen just as a paid vacation before checking out mentally or quitting right after the sabbatical.
You focused a lot on the nuts and bolts of building a proposal — which is great and helpful — but I'm curious about how you navigated the touchy-feely side of it, and how others might prepare themselves better for the inevitable clash of different expectations and suspicions that might arise from a request for a sabbatical.