Why time away may be the future of work

Speaker A: Everybody has a hot take on the economy. And whether you're curious about inflation, trade wars, or the markets, what you need is reporting you can trust. Hi, I'm Kai Rysdal, the host of Marketplace. Our award winning reporters talk to everybody from CEOs to farmers, to help you understand how the economy takes shape in the real world. You'll be smarter every time you listen, and these days that's priceless. Listen to Marketplace on your favorite podcast app.

Speaker B: I think you have to be prepared. You have to build that muscle of transferring responsibilities to other people in the organization, um, that builds a resilient organization. Um, but the thing I would say is, you know, the folks that, that stay come back with more creativity, more energy, more commitment, like the company has acknowledged them as human beings outside of just their job. That tends to make people more loyal, um, and, you know, fresh ideas, that kind of thing.

Speaker A: It may seem counterintuitive to focus on career breaks at a moment when AI and automation are raising fears about job displacement and economic disruption. But careers today are longer than less predictable and often more demanding. Workers are expected to keep learning and adapting. Yet many people rarely get the chance to step back and rethink where their work and their lives are headed. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I'm your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is DJ Dodona, senior lecturer and MBA alum of Harvard Business School. As an entrepreneur, DJ co founded the credit scoring firm EFL Global. He is also the founder of the Sabbatical Project and the author of Big Time the Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and how to Take One. We'll talk about why DJ believes sabbaticals are an important missing piece of modern work. We'll discuss how time away from routine jobs can help people recover, rethink their careers, and build new skills. We'll also explore the business case for sabbaticals, why some companies embrace them, but others resist, and whether these opportunities can extend beyond elite professional workers. Dj, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Great to be here. How are you doing? Well.

Speaker A: Dj, let's start a little bit with your background, your bio, and what drew you to this particular topic of sabbatic.

Speaker B: So if you don't take a sabbatical, oftentimes a sabbatical will take you. Um, two thirds of them are catalyzed by negative events. So health crisis, relationship crisis, job crisis. So I'd been running a company for eight years, traveling across emerging markets. Uh, it was my dream job. We were doing good in the world, had A great company culture. It was exciting learning, uh, and growing. But at some point I stopped being as fulfilled by it. And the burnout and kind of like the always on entrepreneurial lifestyle caught up to me. Um, that's part of the story. And the other half of the story is being drawn towards something which was there's things that you want to do that you feel like are important in life, not just urgent that you realize after you work for a decade or so, no one's going to give you a break and so you have to do it yourself. And there's stuff that just doesn't fit neatly into the confines of a normal US size vacation.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean coming from the entrepreneurship world and you had a really intense job. Like I wrote a case study about DJs company and he was, he was really all over the place for a number of years. Um, it seems like there itself in kind of this natural sort of cycle of somebody exits a company like you did, and there's a time for them to reflect and also think about what's next. Is this a common trend in among founders to take sabbaticals? Is that part of the inspiration for your learning about this?

Speaker B: I think more and more in these creative industries like entrepreneurship, the arts, um, people need to step back to get new, uh, inspiration to recover, to heal. Especially if you have some financial flexibility or um, some cover. So Entrepreneurs in Residence I think is one of the most socially acceptable sabbaticals, where between founding, selling, leaving a company and starting the next one, a venture capital firm or a place like HBS would give you a title, a desk, and some kind of creative license to try to come up with the next thing. Um, so I do think there's an ecosystem within entrepreneurship that supports these breaks between from one job to another. Um, and I think it's spreading across other industries as well.

Speaker A: So dj, can you tell us a bit about the research that went behind the book?

Speaker B: So we conducted research, uh, on non academics that took sabbaticals. Our definition was, you know, extended leave, more than two months away from routine, um, with intention. And uh, so we studied individuals across, uh, 15 different countries, across all educational, socioeconomic levels, and tried to figure out what was their life like before, what was their life like after, and what changes occurred over the course of their sabbatical. Um, this was in 2018. And so we've been able to follow people through for almost a decade to kind of see what the ultimate impacts of their sabbaticals have been and roughly

Speaker A: what share of the workforce has taken a sabbatical or is likely to.

Speaker B: That's a good question. Um, the Society for Human Resource Management estimates that about 6% of individuals have taken it. It's tough to track down because I think there's sabbatical policies at companies which are easier to measure. There's these breaks in between work and in between jobs which are hard to capture. And there's also these informal sabbaticals, um, that, that people, I think, are just now feeling comfortable talking about. So in 2022, LinkedIn launched this career break feature where it allowed you to put a career break as an item on your online resume. And millions of people have taken advantage of that. And so it's quite interesting to see that thing, um, be a bit of a badge, um, of honor, a badge of courage, to say, here's a time where I was actually focusing on something outside of work and people displaying it prominently.

Speaker A: You always label sebaclus as a missing institution in modern work. What about the labor market? Is making these types of moments more necessary?

Speaker B: Any sort of semblance that we thought where in generations past you work and your company takes care of you, does training, saves up for your retirement, is obviously gone. Um, but more and more, you have many, many jobs over the course of your life, um, upwards of a dozen jobs. And so you're required and you're responsible for, um, upskilling yourself, for making sure you get rest and then healing. So I think more and more, not only are the younger generations wanting more breaks for meaning and more flexibility between work and life, but our careers are on our own shoulders. Um, and so in order to do that, when you're working hard, you don't really have time to upskill for the next job. You don't have the perspective to see where things are going and how to get there. And most importantly, um, you can forget to take the things that are most important into account. Time with family, with loved ones, um, living a more authentic life.

Speaker A: So, dj, what you just described as a work culture that, at least in the United States, has people, you know, kind of sometimes getting burned out, getting to the end, they need to recharge versus other use cases where it's about a reskilling function. This lifelong hobby that I want to just take to the next level. Does it matter much in your research how the sabbatical comes?

Speaker B: What we did find from the research is that people tend to fall into three archetypes. One is the achiever archetype, which is if you put down some sort of work, you Want to pick up something else. Right. So you see this with folks that want to become fluent in a foreign language or, uh, want to write a book is a common one. Right. Um, the other one is the explorer archetype. So this part of ourselves that just wants to see what's out there in the world, see what it would be like to live in a foreign country, um, see what it'd be like to live in a different way. You know, doing art, um, things like that. And then the third is the seeker archetype. So that's a person that is also exploring, but more inwards. And the most important thing, as far as having a transformational experience is that you. You heal first. Right. And then you explore and experiment. So is writing a book, you know, as much fun or as fulfilling as you thought it would be? Um, if it's not, that's actually helpful. Right. I talk to my students all the time around. Learning what you don't want to do is helpful to avoid regret in the future. Um, and then having enough time so you can explore, you can experiment, you can set those things down and go off on multiple, like, many internships, so that by the time you reach the end of the sabbatical, you have some data on who you are and which part of life and which aspects of life you want to return to and maybe invest more in. For some people that's quitting their job and finding something else, for a lot of people, it's just coming back with a different perspective about what's important, um, which parts of their life they want to make more space for in time, or just saying to a company, I appreciate you giving me the time to invest in myself, um, and I'm looking forward to the next one. You have a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel.

Speaker A: Yeah. You've also talked in your book about this being a place where you can reshape who you are to yourself. Like this identity formation. There's almost this liminal space where you're able to reimagine yourself. Describe that for us a little bit.

Speaker B: So it goes by a lot of names. There's liminal space, so this kind of place between where you set off and what you come back to. Um, William Bridges calls it the fertile emptiness. So it's this concept that if you try to move from one thing to another quickly, the next thing's probably gonna look a lot like the thing before. So think about if you leave your job and you get a new job immediately, you're using your old contacts Your resume looks very sufficient for that, you know, similar looking thing. So it really requires us stepping back far enough to let kind of like the creative juices, let our own energy and our own kind of pull on what we want to do, inform what we want to do next. So the sabbatical movement is not at all about eliminating work. It's just about, you know, setting it aside for a little bit. You know, I think about the MBA as an example where you're stepping back from routine work and you're learning and you're also seeing parts of the world meeting people that have different sorts of jobs and responsibilities. That's really opening up the focal point for what's possible in your life. You try some of those things on for size with independent projects, with summer internships, and then you reenter the world. Um, and our society has kind of approved that that is a acceptable way to step off the path.

Speaker A: How long do you need to have? And I'm guessing that you're going to tell me two weeks does not make for a sabbatical, even though I'm sure some bosses out there might suggest what's the appropriate space. Could you do a sabbatical at your workplace? Like, if you're freed from some responsibilities, I can say our renewal leaves. At Harvard Business School, we have some faculty that stay on campus, just don't teach during that period. And so is there a best practice about physical separation from where you normally were?

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, so again, I don't want to discourage any organizations from having extended leave that stretches beyond a vacation. So I will say that from our research folks consistently said that it took six to eight weeks before they really started to feel like themselves again. Our identity around, um, being governed by our calendar and our email inbox and our task list and what our job is or what people expect from us and the roles and responsibilities we have, you can't just switch those off within a few weeks. Um, the other thing, the difference between a sabbatical and a vacation is that if you're gone for two weeks, even if probably if you're gone for a month, your work is still going and piling up behind you. And so you're constantly thinking in the back of your head, I'm going to have to do this, I'm going to have to do that. It doesn't disappear. Whereas things like a sabbatical and parental leave, you're gone for so long that the company has to find a way to get the work done without you, um, which enables you to actually free up Some of your mind and concentration on the task at hand. So I'd say ideally you'd want to have it two months or more. Um, for many reasons. A lot of folks say between four and six is ideal.

Speaker A: But it's interesting that you're not also saying a year plus like that. Six months might be an optimal spot.

Speaker B: I took four. I think you'll talk to folks in the three to six range and it flies by. I mean in a span of a 40 year career, six months is nothing. Right. Um, but looking at a four month or six month break seems like it's tremendous. Right. Um, to your point about geographic separation and work. So we talk about the definition as extended leave from your routine work intentionally. Right. Um, so routine work, what does that mean? If you're doing work that does not resemble your old work, you're kind of using a different intrinsic aspect of accomplishment. So again, writing a book, um, doing yoga, teacher certification. It might feel like work to someone else, but you're deciding to do it and it's not exercising the same muscles as your existing work. Harvard created the first sabbatical policy, and I believe it was 1890. And the purpose was for health, rest, recovery and the pursuit of scholarly activities. Right. And so over time those three have kind of eroded and you've substituted out such that a sabbatical is trading out some of your responsibilities, teaching, departmental responsibilities, but really magnifying research. And so the concern about staying in the same place or continuing your routine job is that you're just maybe turning the volume down and shifting the focus and not actually allowing yourself to retreat back to who am I as a person. Like your professional identity is still kind of in place on the geographic front. Um, being outside of your geographic constraints is preferred. The one other academic study beside ours about sabbaticals was, um, Israeli, uh, university professors. And they found that the folks who went abroad for their sabbatical, um, had m, much better solutogenic, uh, effects. So increased energy, increased personal resources. Um, it does take additional energy to come back and reincorporate yourself into your old community. But, um, I think the exciting thing about that that I've seen is a lot of children of academics will talk about, oh, like my parents, we took sabbaticals when I was a kid. My wife, for example, they went to Australia for a year and France for a year. And those are still, even though their, uh, father was working. Those are memories that they have for the rest of their lives.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then where are employers? Uh, typically on prescribing with the person taking the sabbatical, what they're going to do versus creating the space and then really is up to dj, how he's going to spend the time.

Speaker B: I think that if you want to give your employees the gift of having a transformative experience, you have to let them decide what they want to do. I think there's, there's half measures, which I think again are better than nothing. So for example, Endeavor, um, they allow people to, to go from the kind of headquarters office into the field branch offices, so headquartered in New York. And they'll go to Brazil, go to South Africa.

Speaker A: Yeah, Endeavor being a community of very high growth entrepreneurs and a, uh, support network for them.

Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. And so that's a sabbatical program for them in the sense that they're putting aside their routine jobs and responsibilities. They're going abroad. That's still kind of technically working within the constellation of its portfolio companies. But you're in a different place. I think when you start telling people what they can and can't do, it just becomes a little bit of like a, uh.

Speaker A: The Wired newsroom is known for award winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building challenging and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker B: A work retreat.

Speaker A: I don't know if this is a glass almost full or alarmingly, uh, empty, but 8 in 10 employees, uh, in a formal sabbatical or program, return to their, um, initial employer. Uh, so what should we learn about the two? Uh, and how should companies think about that? Are they people that probably would have left anyway?

Speaker B: I think typically when we talk about turnover from a sabbatical, uh, the assumption is if the person didn't leave, they would stay there working forever. Right. And so that's not happening regardless. I mean, you know, companies in the tech space, average turnover is like, you know, leaving every two and a half years. Right. And so, um, the second assumption is that if they did stay, they'd be working, um, they'd be fully engaged, they'd be at the same level of creative powers as if they stayed. I helped Zappos design a sabbatical policy and I remember the manager who was in charge of designing it Was like if the moment you let someone out of the company and off the leash, they leave. I don't want people that don't want to be here. You know, I mean like hiring, training new people is expensive, it's difficult, it's uncomfortable. But that's the way companies work. And so I think you have to be prepared. You have to build that muscle of transferring responsibilities to other people in the organization, figuring out what someone does, bringing new people on, um, that builds a resilient organization. Um, but the thing I would say is the folks that stay come back with more creativity, more energy, more commitment. Their company has acknowledged them as human beings outside of just their job. And that tends to make people more loyal, um, fresh ideas, that kind of thing.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I want to go over again on what you kind of slipped in there about. It's almost like a key man risk, key woman risk, that you are making the organization more resilient by not letting everything fall on one person over and over again for a decade. But having say a little bit more about that or examples.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's interesting. There's two levels of it. Right. I've talked to a lot of nonprofit leaders who, you know, they're especially susceptible to burnout because it's mission focused work. And they're putting, you know, them, they're putting the mission and the organization in front of themselves. Um, and so those, those leaders don't often step away, especially if you're a founder. Right. And so if something were to happen to you, like the organization falls apart. Right. So there's, there's strengthening the organization, the key person risk, like that. And there's also them being able to step out, shed all of their responsibilities, see what continues to work well in the organization and what completely falls apart so you can come back and not pick up the things that work well without you. You can witness, um, how people stepped up to the plate when you were gone and that can help make hiring and staffing decisions. Um, the second level. So that's the executive level. The second level is more the frontline employees or the junior manager types where uh, it's kind of enabling them to shed some of the responsibilities they maybe have outgrown, but, but retain. Um, and also to offer something that is like an equitable form of time off. So if you're an employee that's not going to take parental leave, you're carrying water for someone while they're gone, they get back, they don't carry water for you. Right. Whereas if there's A sabbatical policy. And it's set by, um, tenure at the company instead of seniority. When you're picking up the extra water for someone else, you come back, they pick it up for you. Everyone gets access to it. So I think it's a more equitable, um, benefit that people can take advantage of.

Speaker A: I'm going to wrap all this up and I want you to imagine you're advising a CEO of a 3, 000 person, $1 billion company, roughly the size of Harvard Business School. And that organization maybe has a generous policy to take Memorial Day off and Thanksgiving, a couple other things, but doesn't have anything else. Like in this space, putting your entrepreneurship hat on minimal viable product. Minimal viable. Like what would you suggest to them as like the step to get started?

Speaker B: I would say first of all, plan something in the future, not now. Right. So say we're going to work towards this. And the second thing, uh, if everyone has access to the program but the senior leaders aren't taking it, the junior folks are less likely to take it. Right. So you have to kind of lead by example to show that this like work devotion norm is such that it enables you to take it. So start it a few years in advance, give it at least three months, um, have people retain, you know, ideally pay partial pay, but most certainly benefits, um, and have senior folks take it

Speaker A: to leave and presumably something where they would return to at least their previous position. Like you don't, you're kind of guaranteeing you're not going to have fallen a couple levels down in the organization.

Speaker B: Yeah, just like parental leave. Right. I think, I think kind of maintaining someone's spot and, and I think what often happens is you come back, the company recognizes the kind of work that you did and oftentimes we'll say the replacement cost to bring someone in at market rate would probably be higher than what they're paying you. And so it gives you an inflection point to say, do we want to re enter this working relationship in the same way or do we want to change it in some way?

Speaker A: Can you give us some of your favorite examples of people, uh, in the book that have taken a sabbatical and mid career and it really sort of took their career up to the next level or helped them find a happier spot to their career, however they wanted to find that success because you did have multiple ways that the success could be realized. But what are some examples of how this played out?

Speaker B: So many examples. Um, one of them, there was a private school principal who left, um, the school at the 10 year anniversary of um, the school. So it was the African Leadership Academy in South Africa and his uh, fiance was going to graduate school in Europe and he went on his own journey learning about things completely unrelated to school. He actually did a tour of some schools, um, in other emerging markets to get some examples. Um, but he came back and he realized that the operations of the school had run better than when he was there. And so he immediately promoted that person to effectively coo. Uh, the fundraising fell completely off a cliff and he was like, okay, like, you know, I am the, the charismatic founder. Like I have to be here for this and that's not sustainable. Um, and so he set the goal, you know, within three years to hire someone to replace him. Kind of on the funding side. I, um, love that story. I think that another great one is there was a, you know, a CTO of a venture backed company here in Boston who, His um, wife was Norwegian and she had taken five years off to uh, kind of raise the kids and she wanted to get back in the workforce. He was a bit burnt out, um, and wanted a change of pace. She heard about this um, island off the course off the coast of Norway that had kind of like a one room schoolhouse type situation. And so she got to go back. Um, they lived on this island that had like, you know, 400 inhabitants. He learned how to fish, how to dry fish, how to smoke fish. Um, he spent a third of his time just on hobbies like music, fishing, a third of his time with his kids, and then a third of his time on his next steps. And he ended up, uh, because he had a technical background. Uh, this was in the age of kind of mobile app development. So he was like, I've been in a leadership position, I don't get to get my hands dirty in the programming technical side. So he was like, I'll just mess around and make a mobile app to help folks, uh, do, uh, text to speech. Um, his father had studied, um, vision impairment. And so he's like, this could be helpful and it'd be an interesting project. And so he put it on the App Store and it started to gain steam. And he faced this dilemma when he came back to the States. Do I go back on this kind of venture backed CTO ride or do I kind of let this thing grow and see what happens? And he chose the latter. And what it enabled him to do is his wife came back and got a job in education. So he designed the company in a way that he could take the summers off for the rest of his kids, um, time in high school. Um, so that kind of thing, I think there's, there's businesses can perform better. I think people can have lives that are more attuned to what's really important to them, um, during those phases. But, um, yeah, so many more. Yeah.

Speaker A: Are there any household names that you point to, like from the business community or beyond that have famously taken a sabbatical?

Speaker B: So, uh, a lot of companies that, that you would know of. I mean, Adobe Automatic, um, Genentech was, uh, an early sabbatical policy. McDonald's started the first sabbatical policy in 1977. The Genentech one is interesting because, um, almost all kind of biotech companies have to have some sort of sabbatical now. Um, and so it kind of falls on the heels of Genentech saying this is something we value and then has this ripple effect. But there's also this notion that in order to be a successful company CEO, you have to run multiple companies and sleep under your desk. Uh, Marc Benioff came up with the idea for Salesforce while he was on sabbatical from Oracle. Um, Dr. Brown, who started Impossible Foods, uh, came up with the idea on sabbatical. So I think there's a lot of kind of sabbaticals hiding in plain sight.

Speaker A: It seems like in the local high schools around where I live, a significant more than 10% of the kids that are coming out of high school will have some form of a gap year before they start college or start the work program that they're going to do. Uh, and likewise, towards the end of schooling, these are becoming more common. Does that fit into this gap? Uh, the sabbatical framework as well?

Speaker B: So, yes, in my book, I kind of talk about instances for a sabbatical from gap year to twilight career. So what are the inflection points across your life where it's worth kind of stepping back and taking stock? When I was initially doing the research, I was mid-30s, so I was looking and assuming that people who were taking a sabbatical and burning out were my age or older. I kept hearing younger and younger folks say, like, you know, I'm burning out, or I want a break earlier. And, um, you know what? I guess what I didn't realize is just the degree to which the conveyor belt starts early on in a kid's education. Right. So by the time you get to college, you've already been working essentially for eight years to get into college. And then you go to college and then you graduate and then you start work. Right. And so I think the gap year phenomenon which started in the UK has made its way to the States, is, um, growing in popularity. You know, Harvard has a gap year society. Um, you know, it's, I think 10, uh, percent of people will take a gap year or a leave of absence over the course of their four years. But every time is bad timing to take time off. Right. It's not the story that we tell about our life and our career. The, um, story we tell is you graduate from whatever level of school you attain and you work until you retire.

Speaker A: Yeah, let me press on that just a little because I do hear some of, for example, our current students, whether it is about taking some time to be a form of sabbatical or joining a startup company for a while, but if they were looking over, for example, at private equity, they might say, this is like the one moment where I'm able to get on a career ladder. At private equity. They recruit certain types of people certain times and this is the time where I can get on that conveyor belt. Do you find any merit in those kinds of ideas or is it really more of. We always say that, but in the reality, when you keep spanning back out and looking, um, a bit more broadly, no, you can make these times.

Speaker B: So Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medical School, almost half of the people that go to medical school there take a year off to do research, to attend, uh, do clinical work, that sort of thing. Um, law schools, many, many law firms have mandatory sabbatical policies because they know that the attorneys are burning themselves out. Um, consulting firms like basically invented sabbaticals. They have these externships, um, they have take time where you can work 20% less. Um, tech companies have been implementing them with this kind of product development cycle. And so I think that, I think the world is moving towards this, this kind of cyclical aspect where you get, there are inflection points that take time off. Um, you know, private equity, for example, like, um, the MBA is not a requirement to be in any job. It's certainly not a requirement to be at the top echelons of private equity. But a lot of the people in private equity, some of them take two years to be in an mba and some of them don't. You kind of end up in about the same place. But you know, some people got two years to explore, to experiment, to open up the possibilities, and others don't. So I think you can find it anywhere. And I think if you're confident enough to do something that matters to you, I think the right employers will say, I respect this person, they're courageous.

Speaker A: A striking thing on the list you gave is that they're almost all very high paid jobs, knowledge, work and so forth. And I know you grapple some with the question of how does this extend to the broader workforce and to people that are in very stressful but lower wage opportunities. Tell us a little bit about how you are approaching that.

Speaker B: I think that um, if something's important to us as a society, we work to make it the norm and possible for everybody. Um, parental leave is not available to everyone in the U.S. i think we're the only high income country where it's not, you know, mandatory paid parental leave. Um, but states, companies, um, are filling in the gaps. And so, um, we're on that journey right now. I think that um, you know, at the top of organizations you need leaders to take it and create enabling policies so that's equitable across the organization. So that means that um, you retain your insurance, you retain some sort of pay. Um, if you do that then it starts to filter down through organizations. But we're at the bleeding edge of this revolution where time off is seen as a privilege instead of a human right.

Speaker A: What do you characterize as the difference in the US that makes us? And mainly it goes much farther to, as you've talked about parental leave policies and many other forms of labor market and beyond adjustments. But is this becoming more prevalent in companies in Europe or elsewhere? And then also what has characterized or been most responsible for the US approach?

Speaker B: Here in Sweden, for example, you can get six months off paid by the government to work on a startup idea. In some of these places they have such good vacation policies and cultural norms around respecting time off that like the need from a burnout perspective isn't as much there. Um, so I think the US is doing two things. One, it's this culture of like overwork that's, you know, spawning disengagement and discontentment, which means that you want to have something like this. But also I think the US and the US companies actually are really good at experimenting and exploring. So there's examples around consulting firms. Consulting firms have a lot of really interesting experimental time off and leave policies. Um, and so, you know, at the same time where I think super high income countries are respecting the need, um, for extended leave, you also have places like China which has this, you know, famous996 like working all the time that is now reinfecting the United States. And that's kind of Silicon Valley's like AI culture rallying cry. And so I think there's, I think the best, um, policies and the worst policies have a tendency to be contagious.

Speaker A: Yeah, that 996, if I recall correctly, is 9am to 9pm Six days a week, uh, that you need to do that. And it's also, you hear so much in the news today about this company is saying everybody's got to get back to the office and five days a week in person, et cetera. Um, as you think about being. Because you're very forcefully appealing to companies to think about this, can it be consistent with some of those other things? So would a return to the office mandate be also consistent with having a sabbatical policy? Or is this kind of. The tide's coming in a little bit at the moment, but it might get better later on?

Speaker B: I think, um, the workforce is experimenting in different ways. So I do think that in the boom times, uh, employees had the power to kind of stretch, return to office and flexibility and things like that. Um, there's a lot of uncertainty now, which I think makes it difficult for companies to plan multiple years ahead and, and have those sorts of policies. Um, but I would say my offer is, um, run an experiment. Like, let's run an experiment around how does it impact your retention, how does it impact worker engagement, loyalty, creativity? Um, and then you'll be able to tell. I think the worst that can happen is that some employees leave, uh, others are really happy. Um, but I think it's a really interesting experiment that I challenge companies to run.

Speaker A: I don't think we could have a podcast these days that doesn't use the phrase AI at some point. So I will sneak it in here towards the end. But in a serious context of AI is bringing about so much change. And on one side of the ledger, I could see we constantly speak about continuous learning, reskilling, being able to see things in new and different ways. I could see a sabbatical being completely aligned with that. I could also see someone saying, but, my gosh, if you miss out on this generation of technology, it's going to be so hard to come in at the next generation. How do you think AI is going to ultimately shape in our workplace the need for things like sabbaticals?

Speaker B: It's interesting because I've advised a few people who are. These are chief Product Officer, chief Technology officer of Fortune 50 companies, and they're on sabbatical. And I think they ironically, are having more time and more fun experimenting with AI, upskilling themselves on creative projects. It's allowed them to feel more empowered coming back into their positions, having rolled their sleeves up and experimented themselves, reminds you that there's really interesting, creative ways to adapt this new technology versus just viewing it from understandable uncertainty and fear.

Speaker A: That's great. So what's next on the research agenda?

Speaker B: Oh, man. Well, as you know, I've got a. I've got a book coming out in July, so I'm supporting that. I also have a baby coming up soon and so I think those are on the near term, near term agenda. Um, but yeah, I think. I think the world is changing really quickly and, uh, I'm trying to do this movement justice. It's. It's going to take a while to mature. So, uh, talk to me after my sabbatical, which I have no idea when it is.

Speaker A: That's great. Well, DJ's book is big time. The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and how to Take One. Dj, thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker B: Hey, thanks, Bill.

Speaker A: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven't already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work project at our website, hbs.edu. managing the Future of Work while you're there, sign up for our newsletter.