Paid time off (PTO) and working hours

Paid time off (for rest)

Our company-wide policy is unlimited paid time off in exchange for achieving work outcomes that impact our success, but we encourage our teammates to take a minimum of 30 days total paid time off for rest in a calendar year. Your total paid time off refers to vacation days, bank/public holidays, and religious days, and you can mix these days up as they best suit you, but remember that the intention is for you to disconnect and get rest.

• Local guidance on bank/public holidays and religious days: you’re entitled to all the holidays celebrated in your country of residence and/or by your religious denomination, and it is assumed you will be taking paid time off on these days. If you choose to work one of these public holidays, you may exchange them for another day, just update your availability status accordingly.
• Local guidance on vacation days: please ensure you comply with your resident country’s legislated minimum vacation days.

Paid time off (for other reasons, including being ill)

• Wellbeing leave: we trust you to practice agency over your wellbeing, and provide wellbeing leave to take if you are ill (sick) or need time away from work to regulate your mental or physical wellbeing. Additional wellbeing leave is also warranted if you’ve been stretched in supporting your team through growth, so that you can recalibrate. (If you’re unsure whether it’s appropriate to put in time off because you’re sick but it’s easy to work from your bed, we encourage you to apply this thinking, which was offered by one of our teammates: if you’d avoid going into the office because of how you were feeling, take paid time off and rest at home.)
• Life leave: we understand that sometimes “life happens” and you’ll need time off to do things that are not necessarily restful. This could include caring for a family member, immigration or legal appointments, taking a pet to the vet, or moving homes.

Important: please record all of your PTO (including public holidays) in Roots as far in advance as possible to notify your manager. If you have any questions about recording PTO in Roots, please contact people-ops@sourcegraph.com or drop your question in #people-ops on Slack.

If you need extended time that will impact your ability to deliver your work or may affect your teammates, seek guidance from your manager so we can understand how to support you.

Working hours

• At Sourcegraph, results matter more than the hours that you put in. We expect our teammates to apply personal agency over how many hours they can stay focused or are needed to achieve the results they want to achieve, and regulate their rest as they see fit.
• We trust that when teammates exercise high agency they will also exercise high empathy and be considerate of their fellow teammates when establishing work schedules and when preparing to take time off. Communication and coordination are key, especially for larger projects and customer facing roles– our Support team has documented how they put this into practice here.
• It’s up to you to identify the right hours to work, considering your type of work and the teammates you work with across other timezones. Consult your manager if you need guidance, and set your availability in your calendar accordingly. If you are invited to meetings outside of your working hours it’s okay to ask to reschedule, or to decline and catch up afterwards by watching the recording and reading the agenda.
• If you’ve worked excessively for a short period and with valid reason, think about how you can restore balance and get guidance from your manager if necessary. This may look like shortening your hours in the next few days, or taking some extra paid time off. If you’re working excessively over long periods of time, something is wrong and it’s up to you to raise this with your manager. We don’t celebrate or reward long hours - we celebrate great work produced sustainably, by teammates who take care of themselves.
• Some teammates prefer to work in a really flexible way, which can sometimes mean that they’re online in unusual hours or days. Others prefer a set schedule. Both are valid options. Moreover, due to our global team one person’s weekend can be someone else’s weekday. There is no expectation that teammates will be responsive over their weekend, in the evenings or while on vacation, unless it’s been agreed with the appropriate notice, e.g., on-call duty.
• Tip: Configure GitHub notifications to send Sourcegraph related ones to your work email. After that it is just a matter of not checking your work email (or Slack) at times that you don’t want to do work. Slack has settings to pause notifications, and you can remove work email from your phone if that would help you not check it during non-work times.

When you’ve decided how to take your paid time off, capture the paid time off in Roots and select the appropriate category. This will update your availability in Slack and Google Calendar. Please update your availability across all other channels including Google Mail and let any relevant stakeholders know you won’t be available. We want to capture your time off in Roots so we can stay compliant with countries where we’re required to track paid time off, but more importantly, so we can measure if our paid time off offering is effective at the company level and across all teams and departments.

Questions and/or unusual situations can be directed to the People Ops team, either via email (people-ops@sourcegraph.com) or Slack (#people-ops), who are happy to provide guidance!