Bumble shuts offices, gives ‘burnt-out’ staff a week’s paid break

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd made the move "having correctly intuited our collective burnout", said a senior executive praising it as "a much-needed break".

London: Dating app Bumble has on Tuesday given its 700 staff worldwide a week’s paid break to combat workplace stress, the media reported.

The staff have been told to switch off and focus on themselves, BBC reported.

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Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd made the move “having correctly intuited our collective burnout”, said a senior executive praising it as “a much-needed break”.

“Whitney Wolfe Herd gave all 700ish 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,” Clare O’Connor, Head of Editorial Content at Bumble shared in a tweet on Monday.

The pandemic has been extremely busy for the firm as it debuted on the stock market in February, and had rapid growth in user numbers.

According to the latest figures by the company, the number of paid users across Bumble and Badoo, which Bumble also owns, spiked by 30 per cent in the three months to March 31, compared with the same period last year, the report said.

Several other tech companies have also unveiled their plans for remote working as the economy reopens.

Twitter has said that it expects a majority of its staff to spend some time working remotely and some time in the office. CEO Jack Dorsey initially said that employees could work from home “forever”.

Google also rejigged its timetable — as of September 1, employees wishing to work from home for more than 14 days a year can apply, the BBC reported.

Conversely, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said workers should be in the office at least three days a week by September.

Employees have launched a campaign against the move, media reports stated early this month.

Other companies, such as accountancy firm KPMG, have introduced new measures to combat the fatigue some workers might feel after more than a year of working in a less-than-ideal home set-up.

Voice-only meetings, for example, are now required on Fridays to reduce the need for video calls. And it’s discouraging early morning meetings to give staff more time to prepare for their working day, the report said.

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