The case for sabbaticals

Transcription:

Penny Crosman: (00:03)

Welcome to the American Banker podcast, I'm Penny Crosman. It's every hardworking employee's dream: a long sabbatical, time to travel and learn and unplug from the everyday stress of work. But DJ DiDonna, founder of the Sabbatical Project, says offering sabbaticals brings numerous advantages to banks and other companies when it comes to recruiting and retaining high performing employees and avoiding a systemic problem of burnout. DJ, welcome.

DJ DiDonna: (00:30)

Thanks for having me. It's exciting.

Penny Crosman: (00:32)

So how did you get into this? How did you come to realize the value of the sabbatical?

DJ DiDonna: (00:38)

I came into it in a way that I think most people do, which is through a forced sabbatical. So I had started a company actually in this realm, in the fintech realm, we were doing credit scoring in emerging markets. So kind of like a FICO score for places where there's no bureaus. And after about seven years of running it, I kind of looked at my co-founder at one point and, you know, I guess we looked at each other and said, man, we're tired. And I think that you normally hear about burnout around companies and jobs that maybe aren't a great fit for you, but to burn out from your dream job was very unsettling. Even in the past five years, I think our conversation around burnout has changed. And so because we started the company and we cared a lot about company culture, it was a pretty easy fix for us to set up a sabbatical policy.

DJ DiDonna: (01:29)

So took a few months off and that was the first extended break that I'd had since high school, the same kind of American vacation schedule as everyone else is on and return from that just really changed with how I thought about myself and work and time off and what I wanted to do in the future and had such a profound change on my outlook that I looked around and said, where's the information about this? This seems like a pretty tremendous life experience. And there's really not any information other than people's vacation pictures. So set about to changing that.

Penny Crosman: (02:08)

And what did you do on your sabbatical?

DJ DiDonna: (02:12)

On my sabbatical? I want to stress that there is no kind of like one size fits all sabbatical. You know, it depends on your life stage, depends on how much time you have. But what I was yearning to do on my sabbatical was spend more time on things that I thought were important, but maybe not urgent. So I did a pilgrimage. I walked around a Japanese island for six weeks, this Buddhist pilgrimage. That's the marquee event that you'd see up on the, up on the big lights. But I think what actually had the biggest impact on me during that time were things that were just more personal. So spending time with a sick loved one, doing a construction project with my dad, doing a, a train trip across Canada with my mom and her college roommate for 70th birthday, oh, probably should have called that 60th birthday, but a birthday. And, just really those things where I feel like you don't have enough time or flexibility in normal life, um, to spend time with people you care about and things you want to do. And it just, it gave that space and, and freedom to be able to do that.

Penny Crosman: (03:20)

It's so interesting. I feel like a lot of us would love to do that in a way, but don't necessarily feel like we have the financial security or the personal security to like give up working for more than a week or two. Is there sort of a mental hurdle you have to cross to, you know, really jump in and do that?

DJ DiDonna: (03:46)

Absolutely. You know, and I think, listen, there's a few types of privilege involved here. There's the obvious privilege around, you know, myself as like a white male entrepreneur, Ivy league educated who can take time off and, and that's real. And the concerns that folks have about, you know, how folks will perceive them taking time off, um, are obviously central. And, you know, we've seen this with the, the fight for parental leave, right? Um, the normalization of this time off for maternity leave and now parental leave more broadly has been a long, it's been a long battle. And I think we're not totally where we wanna be yet, but we've made a lot of progress. So there's that there's that privilege. And then there's also the secondary kind of psychological privilege because if you talk to someone from Australia or someone from the UK or France or Sweden, the idea or Israel, the idea of taking a few months off to do something important to you is totally normal.

DJ DiDonna: (04:42)

It's totally culturally acceptable. You don't kind of have to twist yourself and nots to, to get your head around it. And so what we're trying to do with the sabbatical project, which is the home of this research that we're performing about sabbaticals is just tell a lot more of those stories so that it becomes normalized and more common, as opposed to people feel like myself, feeling like you have to get to some like burnout or some emergency situation where you, you physically cannot handle everything before you take time off. Cause that's just not a great place to be in. Um, it's avoidable and, you know, that's, that's the kind of current state of, of the world

Penny Crosman: (05:19)

And your health might be compromised by the time you get there, too, I would imagine.

DJ DiDonna: (05:24)

Absolutely. I mean, no one, you know, no one waits, hopefully no one waits to go to the dentist until they have a problem. Right. You're going on these six month checkups or however often we're supposed to do it. Um, so I think that's not what we're comfortable with in something more extended break, like a sabbatical.

Penny Crosman: (05:41)

Now you mentioned going on pilgrimage and spending time with a loved one who was ill, does the sabbatical have to be, do you have to be doing something noble or could you just be relaxing and goofing off?

DJ DiDonna: (05:55)

No, exactly. And that, um, so it's a, it's a great question and call out because I think starting from square one, the word sabbatical is something that people use to hide behind. I mean, I, I certainly hid behind it, right. Like what sounds better? Uh, that I went on sabbatical, you know, in my early thirties, from, from the company I started or that I was burnt out and depressed and you know, couldn't bring myself to, to actually get out of the company, even though we'd created this policy. So absolutely. I mean, I think there's a lot of recovery that happens there and frankly, there's a lot of difficulty in that time off, no matter what you're doing, because you're basically, you're swapping out your identity that you've kind of been, uh, viewing over time. And, and you're, you're kind of taking that mask off and saying, what am I really like? Uh, what, what have I been like in the past? How far have I strayed from that? And what do I do with myself when I don't have this kind of work identity to, to hide behind?

Penny Crosman: (06:57)

It's so true. I think for so many of us, our, our job is so much of our, of who we are identity and so forth. So when you think about the, the companies that, you know, allow this or encourage it, and the reason I got into this subject was because we've been doing our Best Companies to Work For project where we figure out the fintech companies that have the best employee policies and perks and culture and, and overall are the best places to work in the industry. And I noticed that twice as many companies offered a sabbatical in the past year than the year before, when we did the same surveys and such. And so it seemed to me something's happening here. More companies are recognizing the value of this. What are some of the benefits to companies that you have seen?

DJ DiDonna: (07:58)

From a company standpoint? Listen, I think that the biggest concern that people have, when they have their company hats on, and let's remember that everyone who works at a company is also just a human. But from a company standpoint, the concern is that folks are going to leave. So you give them time off and then someone's going to leave and you will have given them essentially some sort of golden parachute. And, you know, I think what happens is people are comparing apples to oranges, right? It's not that you can either have someone that stays there and is totally content and doing great work or they leave, you know, if you're giving someone time off and the first thing they do, their first order of business is to leave the company. Probably that's not a good sign, right? like either, either their time there was kind of had long passed an end or, you know, something was wrong inside of the company that was making folks not wanna stay there.

DJ DiDonna: (08:52)

So think about it as a way to give both the company and people perspective about whether this is working for them, right. For the company in particular. I think there's a great opportunity to investigate key personnel risk. So, you know, especially at, from a leadership perspective, if your leader is stepping away for a few months, what things go really poorly when they're gone? What things go really well? Um, because at the end of the day, there's no guarantee that anyone at a company from the leader on down will be there from month to month. We have, you know, things come up in our life, we have opportunities. And so it's really a way to build that muscle for something inevitable, which is transition and, um, you know, folks leaving, right. I think from a personal standpoint, people come back, you know, our research and we collaborated with academics from Notre Dame and university of Washington on this is that people come back more creative.

DJ DiDonna: (09:49)

They come back obviously healthier. They come back less risk averse, so willing to take risks, willing to, to be creative and able to be creative, cuz they have more kind of, you know, mental faculties and, and health and things like that. And you know, I think if you're doing it right and you're offering these policies to your employees, you're building up loyalty, right. You're building up loyalty that a company views you as more than just a cog in the machine and that has spill on effects to recruiting and you know, all of that, all that great stuff.

Penny Crosman: (10:22)

Yeah. That makes sense. And, and I did speak to some of the fintech companies on our list about this. And they did mention that if you add up all the costs of trying to recruit a new person and train that person and the transition costs, it's more than what you're paying to enable somebody to take a sabbatical. They also mentioned that when they're hiring people, a very generous sabbatical package is quite appealing because it's still relatively rare. I mean, it's not that nobody does it, but it's not super common yet. Right. So how, what can companies do so that when somebody does go for say three week, three month sabbatical, it's not overwhelming for the people who are left behind?

DJ DiDonna: (11:12)

It's a good question. I think the first thing they can do is offer it to everybody at the company. If you're a law firm and only the partners can take a sabbatical and it just, you know, lump a bunch of work on all the support staff, then that's gonna build resentment, which is pretty toxic. Right. And so from my perspective, and I I've seen this at dozens of different companies, when everyone can take a sabbatical and it's part of just working at the company, then you get to celebrate it, right. Like, oh, you know, Penny's going on sabbatical, you know, that's awesome. I wonder what she's gonna do. Oh man. I'm so excited for my sabbatical in three years. Right. So you're kind of like, you're all carrying a heavy load and you're giving it to folks while you're, and then you, like, you get to offset your load and take off your load when you're on sabbatical. So right. It's, it's kind of like a community. Good. The other thing I think is that, you know, if you offer compensation and the very least I think is just benefits, right? So that people don't have to think about their, their health insurance, you offer compensation that allows people to not have to worry about taking time off, um, financially. And so, you know, I think that those are some basic things that, that you can think about in order to, to make that accessible for folks.

Penny Crosman: (12:27)

And one risk to this that I know of from, from speaking to some of these fintechs, is that there is a chance that somebody might not come back. Like at one company, they said a handful of people took sabbatical and never came back. However, they also felt that the goodwill that they generated, what would move forward, you know? So even though that person left, they have a great relationship with that person in their new company. So there's still a benefit and chances are that person would've left eventually. Anyway, you know, it's not the sabbatical necessarily that make somebody leave. Do you have any thoughts on that?

DJ DiDonna: (13:09)

I think that when a company first launches a policy like that, um, think about it. Like if you were a company and it, and it was your policy that every four years you gave someone three months off. If the company's been around for 10 years and you have all these folks that have been there for longer than four years, you're gonna have this backlog of kind of burnout. And so I think in the first wave of introducing a policy like that, you're always gonna have an over overrepresentation of levers. Um, and then when it becomes just a more common occurrence, then not only we prevent people from getting to the place where they're burnt out and wanted to go anyway, um, you're also gonna have this light at the end of the tunnel effect so that folks can say, oh man, I'm working really hard through this product launch cycle, but I can see that, you know, this summer I have a sabbatical, right. So it gives them a little bit less of the feeling of being on a treadmill and more like, okay, we're, we're hiking up this mountain and then we get to rest before we hike up the next one.

Penny Crosman: (14:09)

That makes sense. All right. And at the sabbatical project, is there some way people might work with you or access your research? Is there some site they should go to?

DJ DiDonna: (14:19)

Absolutely. Yeah. Visit the sabbatical project.org. We have our academic research. There's also, we kind of collect a platform of coaches that, that specialize in folks on sabbatical. So people can get some help there if they want and and a bunch of free resources as well. Our research, all that.

Penny Crosman: (14:38)

Okay. Great. Well, DJ DiDonna, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you all for listening to the American Banker podcast. I produced this episode with audio production by Kellie Malone. Special thanks this week to DJ DiDonna at the Sabbatical Project. Rate us, review us and subscribe to our content www.americanbanker.com/subscribe. From American Banker, I'm Penny Crosman. And thanks for listening.