The benefits of taking a sabbatical
Sabbaticals are emerging as a potential salve for quiet quitters and the great resignation.
There is a scene in the 2010 film Eat Pray Love that feels profoundly ahead of its time. Julia Roberts, who plays the journalist Elizabeth Gilbert, is cursing the feeling of emptiness she can’t seem to shake.
“I used to have this appetite for food, for my life, and it’s just … gone,” she says, announcing her plans to quit her job, throw caution to the wind and travel the world for a year. Eat Pray Love was based on the memoir that transformed the real-life Gilbert into a global publishing phenomenon, selling more than 12 million copies. A decade later, the story is still a reference point for aspiring soul searchers everywhere.
The pandemic’s role in exacerbating this universal malaise has been well-publicised, as have the many movements that are emerging in its wake – from quiet quitting to the great resignation, suddenly, there are an abundance of buzzwords to choose from when describing the act of checking out. And statistics show women are disproportionately affected. According to Deloitte’s 2022 Women @ Work study, which surveyed 5,000 women from 10 countries, 53 per cent of women say their stress levels are higher than they were a year previously.
The report also showed Australian women are more burnt out than our international counterparts, with women aged 18 to 25 being the most at-risk group. But it’s not just a work thing. The amount of invisible labour women do in the household is also taking its toll.
A recent study by the University of New South Wales Business School and careers hub Women’s Agenda found 31 per cent of women are spending more time on domestic duties than they were before the pandemic.
When you consider the fact that many of us haven’t been able to take a long holiday in almost three years, it’s no wonder we’re desperate to rest and reset. But today, quitting and booking a trip or simply sucking it up aren’t our only options. More and more, workers are learning about the advantages of a different kind of leave: a sabbatical.
A sabbatical is an extended period of time spent intentionally away from routine work. Where once, sabbaticals were associated with academics, they’re increasingly being taken by people in many different fields. A sabbatical can stretch from six weeks to a year, but according to research organisation The Sabbatical Project, those who take longer breaks tend to experience the greatest shifts in perspective.
In most cases, sabbaticals are unpaid, though some progressive companies such as Patagonia offer sabbaticals as part of their employee benefits programs.
People take sabbaticals for all kinds of reasons. Burnout isn’t the only conduit. Many people take extended leave to travel before starting a family, or to explore an interest that lies beyond the perimeters of their day-to-day job. Often, a person will choose to take a sabbatical with the intention of returning to their job when it’s over, but you might take a sabbatical because you’ve resigned, and you want a breather before throwing yourself into the next thing.
Essentially, you’re giving yourself time and space to recharge, and figure out what’s important to you. At a time when burnout is being classified as an epidemic of global proportions, sabbaticals are emerging as a potential salve.
“A sabbatical can give you the time and space to really look at things,” says British-Australian author and life coach Kemi Nekvapil. She works with women from a variety of industries, at all different stages of their careers, and says the concept of sabbaticals is coming up in discussions more than ever – two of her clients are currently taking one.
“Ideally, you don’t want to take a sabbatical because you’re already approaching burnout; you want to take a sabbatical so that you don’t get so burned out,” she clarifies. “Taking a sabbatical when you’re feeling well, and you have the energy to invest in things, is very different to, ‘I’m taking time out because my body or my mental health needs me to.’ As women, so many of us think we have to be crawling on the floor before we ask for what it is that we want. And that comes at a cost in the long run.”
Nekvapil is confident that one day soon, sabbaticals will become less of a last-ditch effort to cure work-related burnout and more of a measure to promote overall wellness and lifelong learning. But in most Western countries – Australia included – stigma around stepping away from work still lurks, and we’ve become experts at internalising it.
Research conducted by The Sabbatical Project found that Harvard Business School alumni were seven times more likely to worry about how others would perceive their decision to take time off, as they were to judge their own friends, colleagues or employees for doing the same. Therefore, convincing yourself a sabbatical is necessary is often the biggest barrier.
Many people feel daunted by the expanse of time, and whether taking four, six or 12 months off will jeopardise the momentum of their career. Talking to someone who’s done a similar thing – a sabbatical mentor of sorts – can help normalise the experience, says Nekvapil. For those harbouring more existential anxieties, she shares the following advice: “If a client said to me, ‘I’m concerned I’ll be taking a step backwards,’ I think I’d be asking them, ‘What would be the positives of stepping into yourself?’”
Jade Sarita Arnott made the choice to step into herself in 2012. She had been running her beloved Melbourne-based fashion label Arnsdorf for six years, and the relentless speed of the fashion cycle, coupled with the extent of waste produced by the industry, had her questioning whether fashion was the right fit for her.
“As women, so many of us think we have to be crawling on the floor before we ask for what it is that we want. And that comes at a cost in the long run”
Sarita Arnott was also pregnant with her first child. She had always wanted to be a mother, but as the demands of her business multiplied, the difficulty of juggling both became clear. So she made the difficult call to put Arnsdorf on indefinite hiatus.
“Another person might’ve been able to pivot within their career and transition to that next step,” she recalls. “But for me, I needed to pause to see things more clearly.”
The designer knew she wanted to use her time away from fashion to explore old hobbies, and try new ones on for size. She enrolled in a photography course and later, a furniture design class.
“Doing those classes was exciting; being around new ideas and helping generate new ways of doing things,” she recalls. “I’d always had these heavy deadlines looming with the brand, it was ‘output, output, output’. But to be in class, learning new things … that really filled me back up.”
In addition to the amount of time taken off, experts say that mastering a new skill – or, at the very least, dabbling in something different – is what sets a sabbatical apart from a regular holiday. Sarita Arnott discovered the benefits of this when, in 2017, she relaunched Arnsdorf with a revamped business model that included her own manufacturing facility.
“There were little things I learned that I was able to weave back into my fashion practice. You’re out there having these seemingly unrelated experiences, but then they come together at the end and create this new thing,” she observes.
Dr Juliet Bourke had a similar experience. In 2018, the highly decorated UNSW Business School professor and former leader of Deloitte Australia’s National Diversity & Inclusion Consulting Practice broke with corporate tradition when she took a six-month sabbatical. She moved to Tuscany with her husband and daughter and diligently went to language school for two months.
When Bourke first floated the idea of taking a sabbatical with her company, she says it “certainly wasn’t a normal thing for people to do”. Nevertheless, her managers at Deloitte, where she was also a partner, were supportive; one even expressed a desire to do something similar. Bourke also intended to return to work.
“There’s a difference between stepping away from your career because you don’t want to do it anymore, and taking a pause,” she explains. “It’s about putting ‘refresh, restore and reframe’ activities into place, so you can enjoy your career in the longer term without hitting rock bottom, and needing to go through a more intense period of recovery.”
But even sabbaticals can present challenges, and for Bourke, returning to work in Sydney following six months of “a life lived in slow motion” was more difficult than she’d anticipated. “I’d had this life of freedom and interest and friendships, so when I got back and my workplace was exactly the same as I’d left it, that was very, very difficult,” she reflects.
If she had her time again, and she was in a position to influence people who are coming back into the workplace post-sabbatical, Bourke says she would recommend giving them something new to do.
“Because they’ve got all these new ideas and relationships and skills. And if you put them back into the box they were originally in, it’s going to feel quite confining.”
Today, the onus to initiate a sabbatical tends to fall on employees, as so few companies around the world offer formal programmes.
Another obvious barrier, therefore, is money. Not a lot of people can afford to go without income for six months, especially not as the cost of living rises. If you’re not on the brink of burnout and taking a sabbatical is something you’re able to work towards, your workplace might be able to assist you with saving part of your salary, perhaps with a 48/52 plan, so you can have money coming in when you do take time off.
If your reasons for taking a sabbatical are more urgent, it’s worth talking to your HR department – there might be paid or partially paid time-off policies your company doesn’t openly advertise that you’re eligible for. But ultimately, sabbaticals won’t become truly affordable until organisations start to recognise them in their leave policies.
One company pioneering this change is luxury ecommerce retailer Farfetch. In 2019, following a successful 12-month trial, the organisation launched its Boomerang program, which gives employees who’ve been with the company for five years or longer the opportunity to take up to eight weeks leave, partially paid.
“I got into such a strange routine during Covid; I was working just to work, rather than working to live. Breaking that routine and the monotony of it has really reminded me just how big and beautiful the world is”
Sian Keane, Farfetch’s head of People, and her colleague Ana Sousa, VP of People Lifecycle, have been instrumental in bringing the program to life. Both have also experienced the benefits of taking a sabbatical firsthand.
In 2019, Sousa travelled around Australia and New Zealand in a motorhome for two months; something she calls “the experience of a lifetime”. Keane, who is originally from Melbourne, toured the West Coast of America with family, before ending with a solo yoga retreat in Wales. Both women say they returned to work with a newfound sense of energy and purpose.
“My thoughts were clear, and I was much more motivated to embrace the challenges and support my team and they noticed that change,” comments Sousa, adding that since her sabbatical, she’s become much better at sensing when she might need time off, and acting on that intuition. Keane points out that the sabbatical program has also benefited Farfetch’s staff retention.
“We’ve actually found that engagement with Farfetch has increased after five years of tenure for people who have taken a sabbatical.”
Meanwhile, by carving out their own breaks, employees are in a unique position to inspire their companies in the process. Recently, Genevieve Nelsson became the first person at Bloomsbury Publishing’s Sydney office to take a sabbatical. She explains it was a difficult decision at first.
“It felt impossible to step away from my life, career, family commitments and my whole routine for such a long time,” reflects the senior marketing manager. But her company was supportive of the idea. Nelsson spent four months travelling Europe, collecting experiences, perspective – and even a marriage proposal from her longtime partner.
“I got into such a strange routine during Covid; I was working just to work, rather than working to live. Breaking that routine and the monotony of it has really reminded me just how big and beautiful the world is,” says Nelsson. “It has given me a reason to reflect on work-life balance, what I really enjoy about my job and what I want from the future.
“I’m starting to see how important it was, after several years of fulltime work, to step away. Having the chance to disconnect and reflect is something that I think only comes with an extended break.”
This article appears in the December issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.