Bumble shuts offices to avoid burnout amongst employees

The company behind the popular dating app told workers to take a paid week of leave to 'shut off and focus on themselves'

'We wanted to give our teams around the world an opportunity to shut off and focus on themselves for a week,' Bumble said in a statement.

In an effort to combat the possibility of staff burnout, Bumble has temporarily closed all of its offices around the world in order to give workers a seven-day break.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, CEO of the dating app company, made the decision to give the company's 700 employees an entire week of paid holidays after "having correctly intuited our collective burnout,” according to a tweet from the company’s head of editorial content.

In response to an article by The New York Times about the case for a national paid week of holidays in April, the company tweeted: "We recently announced that all Bumble employees will have a paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June, so you could say we feel this."

The week off has been given in addition to staff members' usual annual leave allowance, which is significantly shorter in the US than it is in Ireland. On the far side of the pond, Americans are allowed to take an average of 10 paid vacation days off per year. In Ireland, the average is four working weeks.

In a statement, Bumble said: “Our 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.” 

The swiping app, where women make the first move, has grown in bounds over the past year. Bumble Inc. brought in over $171m in revenue and increased its number of paying users by 30% to 2.8 million in this year's first quarter alone.

The company also went public on the New York Stock Exchange last February, making Herd (31) the youngest female CEO to ever take a company public on the stock market. In April, Bumble Inc. was named in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential companies.

This is what leadership looks like. #BumbleIPO

@WhitWolfeHerd 💛 pic.twitter.com/v8csvdCAiE

— Bumble (@bumble) February 11, 2021

Experts feel that employee burnout isn’t too far off the horizon here in Ireland, with a study by the University of Limerick revealing that six out of ten employees are feeling more stressed since Covid-19 arrived.

In February, the Oireachtas Health Committee also heard that 91% of nurses and midwives described feeling mentally exhausted when off duty since the pandemic commenced.

“The findings are a wake-up call for senior leaders as the stress levels being experienced by employees, particularly female employees - are not sustainable," said Marc Doyle, chief executive of OMT Global. "We are in danger of seeing employee burnout in the very near future.” 

In response, companies here have been making similar moves to Bumble. Unilever Ireland gave employees a day off last October as part of the company’s ‘Global Day of Thanks’. Similarly, Google - whose EU headquarters is situated in Dublin - gave employees a day off in September. Here at the Irish Examiner, staff were given an extra paid day off last April.

"It is clear now that employees are able to work well from home and see a blended way of working as the desired future state," said Dr Sarah Kieran, a researcher, and lecturer at the Kemmy Business School. "This however requires new ways of leading, new management approaches, and employee supports.”