What if everyone took a sabbatical?
We’d all be better off.
The mythology of the startup world is full of epic stories. Stories of struggle, serendipity, failure, perseverance, and the journeys through the dire straits to wealth and glory. Everyone’s favorite is of course the Gates-Zuckerberg fable. You start by getting into a prestigious program just so you could drop out, launch a startup from a dorm room, and then… the tech giants of the century are born.
A less well-known story is that of Marc Benioff, who showed exceptional abilities from a young age — joining Oracle at 23 as a “Rookie of the Year” and landing a VP role just 3 years later. But then, following a spectacularly successful tenure of another decade at the database giant, he decided to take a sabbatical.
Today, Benioff is worth over $4.4B. But he didn’t earn it at Oracle. Returning from a break, he founded a cloud computing company — Salesforce — appeared on the cover of Forbes, and is presently considered one of the Silicon Valley’s top visionaries. So it is safe to say that his decision to take time and reflect on what he really wanted to do with his life proved momentous.
While both Gates and Zuckerberg caution young people agains dropping out of school; Benioff’s example has wide-reaching policy implication and deserves the attention of the legislators, employees, and employers alike.
A sabbatical, you say?
When a university professor takes a break to write a book, or opts out for a part-time visiting-fellow-gig somewhere, or just disappears for a year to travel the world, it hardly raises eyebrows among her colleagues. In the world of academia, this practice is perfectly normalized.
Now imagine if you and I, and everyone else, could go on sabbatical without a fear of reprisal or a worry about the future career prospects. Take as much time as one needs and can afford, knowing that there is a guarantee of employment upon return. This can be a gamechanger.
Such a scheme would benefit employees in need of a break, but, with thoughtful design, could be a huge boon to participating companies and new graduates struggling to launch their careers.
Hitting the wall
Let’s consider a hypothetical [read: a situation most of us will or already have encountered] where your scope of responsibilities or intellectual stimulation in a given job no longer matches your level of ambition or competence. There are several paths out of the predicament:
- you can quit
- try to take on a new project
- find another opportunity within your organization
- continue to show up at the office leaving your energy and passion at home, performing well below you potential and likely demoralizing colleagues around you
Staying ahead of the curve
Meanwhile, almost every CEO is clamoring for more innovation, higher employee creativity and better adaptability in rapidly-changing competitive environment. Focus groups are created to better understand the millennial demographic or consultants brought in to help cultivate an entrepreneurial culture. Firms are increasingly aware how difficult it is to motivate one’s employees, defeat resistance to change among company veterans, and maintain the edge in the global competition for talent.
Talented, enthusiastic and jobless
The final piece of the sabbatical puzzle can be illustrated by Alba Méndez, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in sociology, who can bring creativity and energy to a new role, is able to relate to millennials much better than most silver-haired executives, and is ready to drive change or at the very least not stand its way. Despite all that, Ms. Mendez is struggling to kick off her professional career and is seeking a job at a supermarket to make ends meet. Given the restrictive and complex nature of labour laws, HR departments are not very keen on candidates without a proven record of success.
Swapping places
We can begin to untie this Gordian Knot, by matching these three groups together, swapping a seasoned professional in need of a rejuvenating break for an unemployed high-potential — the first takes a yearlong sabbatical, the second becomes a “sabbatical cover”. Companies retain yet refresh their talent pools, allow the best-performers to recover from burnout or acquire new credentials while simultaneously attracting new blood who will drive innovation.
Policy dilemmas
This approach would help address both public and private interests. Millions of young people are unemployed in Europe. Intensifying global competition and technological disruptions are putting evermore pressures on blue-chips and other corporate incumbents alike. And lastly, the top talent is growing increasingly restive with employers — no longer satisfied with just a job and a paycheck.
Why then are companies apprehensive about sabbaticals and what is the role of government?
Guided by outdated paradigms, HR directors and executive boards might not see the upside, but clearly recognize the risks of letting people take prolonged leaves-of-absence knowing that they may or may not come back, and worse yet having to budget for the return.
We can get to a million jobs figure if just 1% of educated professionals in the EU decide to take a sabbatical this year.
Shifting opinion
Making a commitment to reintegrate an employee after a year or two away, seems like a step too far if such decisions are framed around employee’s interest.
But once it becomes a matter of the company’s own enlightened self-interest, the paradigm might shift. Governments, in parallel, can design policies incentivizing businesses to try this out. And better yet, create special schemes rewarding companies for bringing in new graduates as “sabbatical covers” and thus addressing the youth unemployment issue.
This can be a triple-win. And we aren’t even talking about sabbatical-support industry spurring up with more executive education programs offered by the universities, boost to the travel industry, and proliferation of new services that would cater to professional on a career-break. Let’s also not underestimate the potential secondary effects on families where both parents could take a year off to spend it with their kids.
The road ahead
The jobs debate today is dominated by tradeoffs at best and doomsday scenarios at worst. The headlines warn us that the outsourcing is killing jobs. The politicians, in a populist fervor, promise to shield voters from the illegal immigrants who will surely come and take the jobs away. And the futurists predict that half of the jobs will be lost to algorithms much sooner than we think.
Anxiety, fueled by such rhetoric, creates an appearance of a zero-sum game and keeps us blindsided to fresh ideas. But the nature of work is changing, as are the needs of businesses and the way societies are organized. The recent buzz about Sweden switching to a 6-hour workday had resonated strongly. The job creation of tomorrow isn’t about the reallocation of a finite amount of factory jobs between China and Germany.
If just around 1% of educated professionals in 28 EU member states decided to take a sabbatical this year, it will open up 1,000,000+ opportunities for the young graduates. We will not be simply addressing a thorny issue of unemployment, we’ll be qualitatively advancing our thinking about personal and professional fulfillment, and we’ll be better off for it.
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If you liked this, you might also enjoy: 5 Ways to Cope With The Workless Future, We’re moving fast. But nobody knows where we’re going, and Global Cooperation in the XXI Century: Is It Time for a System Upgrade?
A shorter version of this article was originally published at www.weforum.org.
