A week off to de-stress: Should other companies follow Bumble’s example?

Employees at the dating app Bumble have been given a paid week off work to recover from “collective burnout” triggered by the pandemic.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of the dating app, sent a memo to all 700 of Bumble’s employees, telling them to switch off for a full week, for which they will be paid.

In a statement, Bumble said the “global team has had a very challenging time during the pandemic. As vaccination rates have increased and restrictions have begun to ease, we wanted to give our teams around the world an opportunity to shut off and focus on themselves for a week.”

In a tweet, which has now been deleted, Bumble’s head of editorial content Clare O’Connor said Herd had “correctly intuited our collective burnout”. Bumble announced the move back in April when a spokesperson said: “We recently announced that all Bumble employees will have a paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June.”