Rest Practices & Employee Leave Policies
The Moment in Time
One of the beliefs that shaped Code2040 was that people don't stop being humans when they come to work. They experience illness, grief, burnout, family emergencies, and moments where life is just hard.
Traditional workplaces try to address employee burnout and emergencies with options like using PTO or sick time, taking medical leave, or continuing to work despite needing. As general policies, these are critical, but often these approaches are reactive to employees who are already struggling and costly to employees.
We asked ourselves :
How do we create a culture where sustainability is incentivized, and rest is built into business operations?
How do we balance flexibility, accountability, and organizational sustainability?
What We Were Solving For
Our goal was to build an organization that responds when people's capacity changes while staying accountable to our team members and our organizational goals. We needed policies that looked further than improving PTO, for example:
Recognized that capacity fluctuates throughout a person's life and career;
Created options between a normal workload and taking leave;
Normalized proactive rest instead of waiting until burnout;
Gave managers and employees a shared process for negotiating changing capacity;
Balanced individual well-being with the realities of organizational capacity and commitments to impact.
What We Built
Rather than relying on one policy, we built a collection of practices that supported employees across a range of capacities.
Rest & Sustainability Practices
We intentionally designed organizational norms and practices that encouraged people to rest and pace their work before they reached burnout.
This included:
Flexible work schedules;
Unlimited vacation;
Organization-wide summer and winter breaks;
Supportive leave policies;
Regular conversations about workload and sustainability - both in the manager-employee relationship and organizationally.
We recognized rest & sustainability as not just when you step away from work - but also when you take time to restore physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Shared Capacity Planning
Building capacity is a team effort. So is access to rest.
Employees, managers, and impacted teammates worked together to negotiate workload, priorities, timelines, and support. Rather than pretending one person could make decisions in isolation, we acknowledged that work happens in relationship with other people. True flexibility requires solid communication, negotiation, and shared accountability.
Reduced Capacity Policies
We discovered during Covid that short term disability support was inaccessible and woefully inadequate. So we designed a policy for temporarily adjusting responsibilities, hours, and expectations while employees navigated health challenges or significant life events. We wanted working at reduced capacity to be like a legitimate option for people. We made it a collaborative effort between the staff member, their manager and their colleagues - so that labor wasn’t disproportionately displaced onto other staffers.
We addressed significant life events with the same consistent philosophy, including medical leave, bereavement, and extended sick time.
Putting It Into Practice
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Build practices and policies to support sustainability and prevent burnout;
Policies to support staff who need to take leave, as well as the staff who take over their work.
We believed that supporting our employees’ capacity wasn’t just about supporting them once they were already down, but that all of the checkpoints before that could help prevent them from getting there in the first place.
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we regularly discussed workload, upcoming life events & time off, energy levels, and team and organizational goals. We integrated rest planning into our annual planning processes to try to integrate time off as a part of the way we planned. These conversations often included:
Continuous evaluation individual work priorities to ensure they were well aligned with the organization’s;
Regular discussion of each team member’s work pace and workload;
Tracking ebbs and flows in work intensity over time to strategically use slower periods for rest.
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Identification of work that could be paused or deprioritized;
Temporary redistribution of responsibilities;
Communication and strategy with impacted teammates;
Determination of what support or accommodations would be helpful and possible;
Setting specific timeline milestones - so we could revisit plans on a set schedule to reevaluate capacity as it changed.
We tried to shift this from being an individual responsibility to one that grounded more into how we worked together to make this possible for everyone on staff.
What Time Taught Us
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Unlimited PTO doesn't create a culture of rest on its own. It’s a policy, not a practice.
Organizations have to intentionally create the conditions that make rest possible: realistic workloads, thoughtful planning, manager support, and shared team norms. Policies helped, but they weren't what made this work.
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One person's flexibility often affects someone else's work.
The more flexibility we created, the more important communication, shared planning, and clear expectations became. We learned that flexibility is a collective practice. When dealt with individually it created competition and resentment rather than collaboration and a desire to support one another.
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Supporting people means leaning into difficult conversations about priorities, timelines, and team impact. In order to extend true support to both our struggling team members and those who would be stepping into support, we needed to be willing to say - “Hey! This isn’t working!” Have them early and often!
What We’d Tell You
Don’t only design for full capacity. People's ability to work changes. It is not an absolute or consistent truth. Maintaining workloads at full capacity makes crises hard to absorb and can be detrimental to your goals and your team members.
Don't rely on policies to create culture. Policies are important, but they won't create a culture of sustainability on their own. Engaged management, planning practices, team norms, and clear organizational priorities matter just as much.
Plan for rest the same way you plan for work. If rest only happens when there's time left over, it usually won't happen. Build it into your annual planning, team rhythms, and workload conversations from the beginning.
Treat flexibility as a shared responsibility. Build flexibility alongside clear expectations. The more autonomy people have, the more important communication and shared agreements become. The best flexibility comes from ongoing communication and negotiation. Help managers and teams develop the skills to plan together when capacity changes.
Support people before they burn out. Reduced capacity policies are important, but they're only one piece of a healthy system. Invest just as much energy in the everyday practices that help people sustain their work over time.
Get comfortable with telling someone it’s not working. You can’t engage in good problem-solving without real, honest feedback about what the problem actually is. If a plan isn’t working, team members and managers need to lean into escalating their pain points. All plans are adjustable!