After every 4 years of working at Tidepool, full-time employees and contractors are encouraged to take 4 weeks of paid sabbatical.
During this sabbatical, you should work on passion projects -something outside the scope of your normal work that is interesting and exciting to you. This could be researching a topic of interest, volunteering for another nonprofit, or something else altogether.
The sabbatical should be a time of self-improvement and exploration with a central activity or theme. At the end of the sabbatical, you should put together a presentation about your sabbatical and present it to the team.
The sabbatical is meant to help further our core value of improvement by letting the employees explore and learn about another area of interest. It may also help some employees avoid burnout from working on one thing for too long.
To make sure that sabbatical is not overly disruptive to the team, you should plan the time for your sabbatical at minimum, 6 months in advance.
The expectation is that after a sabbatical the employee returns to work. A sabbatical is not to be used as a soft exit from the company.
Paid time off of any kind, including sabbatical, does not accrue.