When Employees Take Sabbaticals, Organizations Benefit

For the past seven years, I’ve studied the overwhelmingly positive impact sabbaticals have on people’s mental and physical well-being, creativity, and confidence. Through hundreds of interviews with people who have taken sabbaticals, I’ve learned that the benefits extend to the teams and organizations in which they work. And yet when I talk to organizational leaders about sabbaticals, many express skepticism about whether facilitating them is practical, or even possible: “We’re already at full capacity, so how would we cover the absence?” “How can our team function effectively without a key member?” “My company would go out of business if I allowed everyone to take extended breaks — especially if they’re paid!”

I understand why bosses might be hesitant to support sabbaticals. But I’ve come to believe that the benefits to organizations of offering them far outweigh the risks.

Some leading companies agree. Although corporate sabbatical policies in the United States remain relatively rare — only 5% of nonacademic employers offer them — they are a feature at dozens of successful and innovative organizations, including Adobe, construction software giant Autodesk, Automattic (the company behind web-publishing giant WordPress), Genentech, Deloitte, Bank of America, and a rotating cast of the Big Five tech companies (FAANG), depending on the economic winds. Salesforce, Impossible Foods, and Apple would not exist in their present forms without the sabbaticals — sometimes forced — undertaken by their founders.

The percentage of U.S. employers with formal policies supporting extended leave has doubled from 2019 to today. As these organizations transform what was once an opportunity for the privileged few into an equitable and important part of their cultures, they learn that offering sabbaticals can be a differentiator to attract talent, increase retention, and rejuvenate long-tenured employees.

In this article I’ll describe the benefits to performance, resilience, and innovation realized by companies with extended-leave policies, and I’ll identify the three pillars of a successful sabbatical program. (To share your sabbatical experience and be included in my research, take this survey.)

Improving Organizational Performance

My research highlights two ways that group performance improves when employees are able to take sabbaticals.

Clarifying responsibilities.

In many organizations, it’s not always clear who’s doing what, and when. A job description rarely represents an employee’s full contribution, particularly when they have long tenures and retain duties tied to previous roles. This lack of clarity can lead to inefficiency and redundancy, not to mention frustrated and burned-out workers.

A sabbatical can reveal the full breadth of someone’s role and responsibilities in a way that regular, shorter vacations can’t, because all the duties of the leave-taker must be transferred to other people while they’re gone. The duration of the absence creates a revelation for both the employee and the employer. As they work together to outline, hand off, and adjust work before and after the sabbatical (and as colleagues adjust during the sabbatical), tasks that are unnecessary are often eliminated and tasks that were delegated often stay that way. In this way, work is streamlined and both individual and company performance is enhanced.

Retaining talent.

People almost always return from a sabbatical with more energy and less stress — a clear win for organizations. Many also return with fonder feelings toward the organization that allowed them the break. It’s true that some might have used their time off to reflect on areas of work where they are dissatisfied, which might prompt a conversation about responsibilities and compensation upon their return. But even that can be a good thing for companies and the long-tenured high performers they want to keep, especially those who are underpaid relative to their market value and are thus an unseen flight risk.

Consider Carson’s experience. She had been working at a research center focused on emerging-market poverty, leading partnerships and innovation and seeing the center through a critical period of formalization and growth. After five years in the job, she was feeling undervalued in terms of her level of autonomy and pay. She and her fiancé had been fantasizing about taking a “monster” honeymoon. So, she asked her bosses for five months off. To her surprise, they granted the unpaid leave. She traveled through many of the countries her organization studied during her leave, and it reminded her why she’d gotten into the work in the first place. Her time away not only reaffirmed her belief in the center’s mission but also gave her the confidence to consider taking her skills and experience elsewhere if necessary.

She came back reinvigorated, and she was pleased to learn that her absence had caused the team to recognize the magnitude of her contributions. Her bosses asked what they could do to keep her, and she went from “feeling like a cog in a wheel,” in her words, to “feeling like a grown-up with power.” She was promoted and, two years later, became the executive director. The organization has thrived since her return, doubling its budget and scope and quadrupling its number of staff members and research affiliates.

Building Organizational Resilience

Many company leaders I talk to fear that if they offer a sabbatical, they’ll essentially give a “golden parachute” to an employee who intends to leave. Here’s some good news: According to my research, 80% of extended-break-takers return to their companies. Of course, that means that 20% do not. While this number is far preferable to the 0% of employees who return when they are forced to quit to get an extended leave, it does suggest that turnover is a legitimate worry. Recruiting and training a new hire takes time, and the process is disruptive, creating extra work for those who remain.

But when a sabbatical reveals that your employee wants to move on from their role or your company, there are silver linings. First, you’ve parted ways with someone who wasn’t committed to your organization anyway. As one Zappos director explains, “If upon the first sight of daylight they sprint for the exits, at that point I wouldn’t want them on our team anymore. We have no shortage of folks who actually want to be here.” And second, new employees bring with them high motivation, new ideas, fresh energy, and insights from their previous employment, whether at competitors or in other industries, that can lead to more creative solutions.

When an organization offers extended breaks as a routine part of its culture, it builds the capacity to handle turnover. It’s a form of resilience training, as the company is forced to fill the gaps the absent person leaves behind — even if it’s just for a little while — and the colleagues who fill them get stretch experiences and opportunities to prove themselves. Ironically, enacting a sabbatical policy can help a company both prevent and prepare for the departure of key people.

The African Leadership Academy (ALA), a pioneering boarding school in Johannesburg, experienced this firsthand. Ten years after ALA opened, its cofounder, Chris Bradford, decided to step back for an entire academic year to accompany his fiancée to Europe while she completed her master’s degree. When he returned, Chris discovered that the school’s operations had flourished in his absence, but its fundraising efforts had fallen off a cliff. In response, he promoted the person who’d been handling operations to be ALA’s permanent COO. Then he turned his attention to soliciting donations for the school’s upcoming gala and training others to better fill this role. He set a personal goal to transfer the role to a colleague within three years so that he could move to the United States, where his fiancée would soon start an academic job. Chris’s sabbatical marked the beginning of the end of his time at ALA. But from an organizational perspective, it also led to the identification of talented potential successors.

Fostering Innovation

Creativity is an essential workplace skill — it’s a crucial component of innovation and boosts both productivity and adaptability. Unfortunately, the workdays of many people, governed as they are by task lists and deadlines, aren’t conducive to creative thinking. What’s needed is exploration and play, which requires unstructured time — exactly what employees get when they take sabbaticals.

That was certainly the case for Cheryl P. Johnson, CEO of COTS (Coalition on Temporary Shelter). After running the Detroit-based organization for 17 years, she took a paid sabbatical that was funded by an area donor. She started her extended leave with a monthlong meditation retreat in upstate New York and followed that by taking a yearlong coaching certification program on the West Coast. She returned to work brimming with ideas about how to tackle the root cause of homelessness — multigenerational poverty — rather than simply providing temporary housing. Armed with a new outlook and coaching skills, she redesigned COTS’s approach to family support, case management, individual mentoring, and self-sufficiency training. The new program design has since been adopted by dozens of nonprofits across the country.

Making Sabbaticals Equitable and Successful

Is your organization ready to start reaping the benefits of employee sabbaticals? Although there is no single playbook for designing a program, my research has found that all successful and equitable sabbatical programs rest on three pillars: eligibility, support, and disconnection.

Eligibility.

Many employers make the mistake of offering sabbaticals only to people at certain levels — usually management. Adopting a managers-only approach exacerbates organizational hierarchy, provokes resentment, and limits benefits such as increased innovation and reduced burnout to a select few. Don’t fall into that trap — make your program more widely accessible. Some companies, such as Adobe and Autodesk, allow employees to bypass their managers — requesting permission for a sabbatical is as simple as checking a box in an HR tool. Practices like these send the message that everyone who has devoted significant time to the company, not just the executive class, deserves time to recover and explore interests outside of work — and that they don’t have to jump through hoops to do so.

Another way to expand eligibility is by offering new hires a chunk of paid time off before starting: a “pre-battical.” Typically, only the wealthiest among us are able to take unpaid leave, and they often do so between jobs. However, tech hospitality company SevenRooms began offering two weeks off with pay to new hires after it noticed higher rates of burnout among job switchers during the Great Resignation of 2021. The idea is to ensure that people leave behind old stress and exhaustion and enter their new role with excitement and sustainable energy, not just the short-term adrenaline boost that comes from starting any new job.

Support.

An organization offering sabbaticals should provide support on two fronts: finances and benefits.

The best possible scenario is giving employees full pay and benefits during their time off. That’s what McDonald’s, widely considered to be the first U.S. company to provide a paid sabbatical to its salaried employees, has done since 1977. If that’s not feasible, partial pay — or even a stipend — can give leave-takers enough cushion, especially if they have sufficient time to plan and save. Or companies could offer full pay for a shorter period of time — say three months — and allow employees to use unpaid leave or accrued vacation days for the rest. Obviously, the less financial help you offer, the more likely it is that only privileged employees will be able to take advantage of the policy.

In countries where healthcare is linked to employment, such as the United States, retaining insurance for your employees is also nonnegotiable. Although it’s possible for people to buy supplemental policies for work breaks, having to navigate that system even once can trigger enough stress to reduce the positive benefits of time off.

To differentiate themselves from competitors, companies might also consider offering coaching to sabbatical-takers. A trained, independent third party can help them figure out the details of transferring work responsibilities and putting the learnings from their time off into practice upon return. For example, McKinsey offers coaching to employees during breaks, and HubSpot gives bonuses that employees may spend on any kind of career development.

Next In

The Power of Time Off

The Case for Sabbaticals — and How to Take a Successful One

[

A research-based primer on getting the most out of an extended leave from work.

](/2025/02/the-case-for-sabbaticals-and-how-to-take-a-successful-one)

Disconnection.

The final pillar for a successful sabbatical program is perhaps the most important: ensuring that those who take time off do so for long enough and truly disconnect. You’ll need to establish a minimum time-off policy and actually prevent them from working. This is because habituated patterns can lead to what I call “functional workaholism,” which requires time and space to recover from.

Most of the people I interviewed said it took them six to eight weeks to fully disengage from their professional identities and become open to new experiences and thinking. That’s why three months is the baseline length for a proper sabbatical, and my team’s survey results indicate it also the most common.

Managers should ensure that leave-takers have no access to email or other work communications during their time away. Best practice is to have them set clear out-of-office messages, auto-delete their emails, and designate one colleague they can contact or who can contact them only if absolutely necessary. For example, financial services firm Brighton Jones requires employees who take advantage of its paid sabbatical program to fully transfer responsibilities, uninstall its email program, and provide only an emergency phone number.

Another way to help people disconnect is to give them ample time to prepare for leaving. I suggest 18 months to sort out finances and personal matters, delegate professional responsibilities, and plan the time off. You’ll also need to give them enough runway to readjust to work before they launch back into mission-critical business.

. . .

We’ve all seen companies try to engender loyalty by piling on perks like Ping-Pong tables and free snacks. Offering sabbaticals would be far more meaningful: They generate goodwill, boost employee engagement, and improve team and organizational performance. That’s because the gift of time is a rare and valuable one.

Although extended-leave policies are more of an exception than the norm, organizations would be wise to accelerate their adoption. Doing so would help people fulfill their personal dreams and aspirations, build in recovery time, and live their lives without regret — all while retaining the many psychological, social, and financial benefits that work provides. And that’s a win-win for employees and employers.