With 30-day mandatory, paid vacations, a Utah company is helping bring an unusual corporate perk to the startup world

BI

Courtesy of Wallaroo

Early this year, Wallaroo founders Brandon Doyle and Kade Hendershot were talking employee benefits.

"Even through we're growing and the company is great, we don't have money to just shower on perks," CEO Doyle told Business Insider of the 30-person Utah media startup.

"Pretty much everyone in the world loves travel, and we have a handful of clients in the industry and know the space. We started thinking and talking: Some startups do paid vacations, so why not make it official?"

The solution the business partners landed on was a 30-day paid sabbatical, offered to employees after four years of employment, then every three years after that. Wallaroo, which has professional connections and properties in the travel space, would encourage employees to spend at least half of that time traveling out of state, or even out of country, and would pay for that trip. Since it's a new program, the company hasn't yet established a price cap, but will encourage employees to take advantage of travel services that have a relationship with Wallaroo and might be willing to subsidize the trip in exchange for company services.

Sabbaticals, or extended vacations, are a fixture for academics who use that time to do research, but in recent years they've become more common within other industries. In 2015, Fortune gathered a list of some of the biggest names offering paid sabbaticals, including Adobe, General Mills, Boston Consulting Group, and Deloitte. The prerequisites to qualify for a sabbatical range among the companies, from five years of employment to five years working at the partner level.

It's not just corporate giants getting on board. New York City startup BirchBox offers employees a three-week "tri-batical" to celebrate three years with the company. Colorado's New Belgium Brewing Co. (No. 13 on the BI 100: The Creators) offers four-week sabbaticals for every ten years of employment, and Clif Bar offers six to eight weeks after seven years with the company. 

Wallaroo is no stranger to flexible work arrangements: Last year, it transitioned to four-day work weeks, where each employee works four nine-hour days, then four flexible hours on their own, for a total of 40 hours of work punctuated by three-day weekends.

Courtesy of Wallaroo

Because of the company's connections in the travel industry, its chief concern about mandatory sabbaticals wasn't the cost. Rather, Doyle said, it was how it would impact the team at large when someone left for 30 days.

"Money-wise, it's still a sacrifice for us, but it's more like a whole company culture thing," he explained. "We all have to pitch in when someone leaves for 30 days. We had the idea and then presented it to the team to make sure everyone would be willing pitch in. Everyone was on board, so we decided to do it."

Doyle is hoping that the sabbaticals have just as much positive impact for the employees who remain at the office as for their colleagues who take some time off. "We think a 30-day sabbatical is not only an opportunity to fully recharge, but also a once-in-a-lifetime — or hopefully, in our case, ten-times-in-a-lifetime — scenario. We're hoping to see benefits not only with employee retention and happiness, but also an increase in productivity once you get back and with teamwork in general."

Wallaroo was founded in 2012, so the first employee will take their sabbatical before the end of this year. Currently, they're planning on a week-long Caribbean cruise, another week on a yet-undecided island, then two weeks to decompress at home.