Creative sabbaticals are becoming a tool for retaining people, not increasing productivity. But for businesses, they are expensive, difficult — and don’t always work as intended.
Creative sabbaticals are becoming a tool for retaining people, not increasing productivity. But for businesses, they are expensive, difficult — and don’t always work as intended.
Sabbaticals in Ukrainian IT are gradually ceasing to be exotic — but they have never become a mass benefit, writes LIGA.net.
At EPAM, for example, long-term vacations last up to half a year. The main function is to retain a valuable specialist who might otherwise be fired. Not a productivity improvement tool, not a KPI — just a way not to lose a person. The company has dozens of such requests every year.
Intellias has made sabbaticals available to everyone after a probationary period — usually 2–4 months, in some cases up to six months. The leave is unpaid, but the person remains on the staff with health insurance, access to a corporate doctor, psychotherapist, and training platforms. You can even attend town halls and teambuildings.
Fractal has stricter conditions: level not lower than pre-middle, minimum three years in the company, preparatory period for delegation — at least two months. Duration — up to two months for ordinary employees, up to three — for partners and founders. During the entire time, 16 people took advantage of the sabbatical. Some of them were seriously considering quitting before the vacation — and returned with new motivation.
Meanwhile, Ciklum is not yet ready for a sabbatical due to economic uncertainty and a focus on marginality. Instead, they offer Talent Pool: exiting the project while staying in the company, or changing the stack and type of tasks. «For small businesses, such practices are less accessible due to limited financial and human resources,» explains Senior Human Resources Director Maria Shubtsova.
The risks for business are real: overloading teams, loss of revenue for service companies, costs for knowledge transfer and reorganization. There is also the risk that the person simply will not return — EPAM openly admits this. There is also a downside for the specialist himself: you fall out of the professional context, which is especially painful against the background of the pace of AI development.
According to the IT Ukraine Association, 37,5% of the 56 surveyed Ukrainian IT companies already offer vacations of more than 20 working days. Most often, it is product companies and businesses with up to 250 people.
And a separate remark from EPAM, which describes the reality well: «You can take a vacation and worry at home with double the strength, or volunteer with double the strength. The effectiveness of such a pause depends not on the name, but on the purpose with which a person takes it.»
