Sabbatical policy

Context

RadHR recognises that no matter how committed any of us are to our work, we all have lives beyond it. What is important to each of us will vary, but what we can offer one another is time to pursue things that are important to us, beyond work. We feel that this will help keep the team invested in the work we do together, in a longer-term way.

Purpose

Qualifying RadHR workers can use approved sabbatical leave for whatever they want. There is no expectation that it will be of direct benefit to the organisation, beyond helping make sure that we all feel supported.

Length and pay

Sabbaticals can last for up to three months at full pay, or up to six months at half-pay (or three months at full pay and three months unpaid).

Requests should be made to the rest of the Core Team at least 6 months before a proposed sabbatical, to allow for adequate planning (whether that means adjusting organisational workloads or securing temporary work cover).

While we wouldn’t want to dictate how this policy interacts with the RadHR Unlimited Paid Holiday policy, we would ask each other to think about organisational impacts if we are considering taking a sabbatical closely before or after a significant period of annual leave.

Eligibility

Sabbatical requests can be made by any RadHR Core Team members who have been working as part of the organisation for at least two years.

Workers will be expected to continue to work with RadHR after their sabbatical ends, for a period equal to how long they have been off for (e.g. three month sabbatical = three months working after sabbatical).

Approval process

If a RadHR worker makes a sabbatical request of the rest of the Core Team, the Core Team will aim to make a decision about it within one month. This may be challenging, depending on the level of work re-planning or work cover that would be involved, but the Core Team will work together to try and make a decision as soon as is viable, out of recognition that extended periods of time away from work often require significant personal planning, beyond the organisational impacts.

As with all of our work, we will aim to approve any sabbatical requests on a consensus basis, including with the person who has made the request.

Planning for sabbatical

When a request is approved, the Core Team will bring it to the next Team Day to discuss in the context of existing workplans. The first approach will be to see if the workload of the worker requesting the sabbatical can be reduced or postponed for the length of the sabbatical. If this is not fully possible, the Core Team will work out if there are others in the RadHR networks (likely the Facilitators’ Pool, due to their existing knowledge of the organisation) who might be able to take on specific tasks, over specific dates, during the sabbatical period.

We should ensure there is appropriate amounts of unallocated budget if we know a sabbatical is coming, to help cover aspects of the work that cannot be postponed.

If more than one sabbatical request is raised in a similar timeframe, we will first see if there is any flexibility in shifting the dates of the requests to minimise organisational impact. If this is not possible for the workers involved, we may need to look at wider postponement of organisational work, due to the size of the team. This may require approaching funders to make the case for the pause of some activities.