This tech company let its HR manager take 3 months’ paid leave to

Millions of Americans are quitting their jobs and rethinking what they want when it comes to work and work-life balance. Companies are responding, meeting their employees’ needs in areas like remote work, flexible hours, four-day workweeks, compensation and more. This story is part of a series looking at the “Great Reshuffle” and the shift in workplace culture that is taking place right now.

Imagine collecting your full paycheck while taking three months off from work to do whatever you please.

That may be an unattainable dream for most, but for employees at tech company Automattic, it’s a reality. For every five years worked, employees get a paid three-month sabbatical.

For Lori McLeese, it was the perfect cure for her burnout back in 2016.

“We were stretched super-thin,” said McLeese, global head of human resources at Automattic, the online publishing and commerce company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and others.

“I was starting to wonder if I still enjoyed doing this type of work.”

She loves the outdoors, so she decided to hike the Camino de Santiago, a network of pilgrim routes across Europe. She walked over 600 miles in three months. In addition to tackling the Camino de Santiago, she visited towns in France and walked through the tulips in the Netherlands.

“It was the best thing I could have ever done,” recalled McLeese, who lived in San Francisco at the time.

For one, she realized she wasn’t a city girl and decided to relocate to Asheville, North Carolina. She also found a renewed sense of purpose at work.

“It helped reset my brain,” McLeese said. “I stepped away completely disconnected, came back, was rejuvenated, was excited about my work again.”

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That is one of the goals of Automattic’s policy — to allow workers to recharge. It also gives them time to think about what they want to do.

“It provides a really nice sort of reset point for people to reevaluate their role or their careers or what they want to come back doing,” said Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

It can also benefit those left behind, since people take on new responsibilities to cover for the worker on sabbatical.

“This is an amazing opportunity for others on the team to step up in leadership positions, and to get to work on projects that they’re really excited about,” McLeese said.

Since the program’s inception in 2015, 366 employees have taken 375 sabbaticals (Nine have taken two). In addition, there are 80 sabbaticals planned for 2022 and early 2023.

To be sure, Automattic is an outlier. Prior to the pandemic,…