'Paid vacation': Bumble closes offices for a week to give 'burnt out' employees a break

Dating app Bumble on June 21 shut down its offices for a week to combat workplace stress and to give the worn out and tired employees a break, the head of the company’s editorial content, Clare O’Connor announced on Twitter. The firm that made the stock market debut, rapidly growing during the coronavirus pandemic asked its as many as 700 staff members to wind up and focus on themselves. The move was made by the dating app company’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd who had “ intuited” the collective employee burnout. 

In April, the company had already revealed that it was planning to give all Bumble employees a “paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June.” The entire week of leave implies that the employees will not attend to the work emails and no work-related phone calls. The much-needed break for the employees was announced worldwide across all operational offices of the woman-centric dating app. A spokesperson had said in a statement, “All Bumble employees will have a paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June.” She said that as the rate of vaccination picked up worldwide, and the COVID-19 restriction begun to ease, Bumble wanted to give its employees and the staff members around the world “an opportunity to shut off” for at least a week and abstain from the work stress and pressure. 

The spokesperson said that the decision was well thought of considering the challenging times of the pandemic wherein the workforce needed some time away for mental and physical growth and peace. Only a few customer representatives may be working to attend to the user-related queries for the company.

'Correctly intuited' burnout

Bumble's head of editorial content, Clare O'Connor, appreciated the step taken by the CEO as she wrote in the now-deleted tweet, “Whit Wolfe Herd gave all 700-ish of us a paid week off, having correctly intuited our collective burnout. In the US especially, where vacation days are notoriously scarce, it feels like a big deal.” Bumble’s  31-year-old American entrepreneur capitalized on an underserved market and built a multibillion-dollar company catering to women and is even led by them. The stake of her dating application, where women make the first move, is valued at approximately $1.5 billion.