Bumble's Week Off

The main story

Dating app Bumble tackled collective employee burnout this month by shutting down its offices for a week.

Bumble employees returned to work on June 28th after a paid week-long vacation.

Spearheaded by CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, the initiative was a stance to combat a “collective burnout” felt by her staff.

Close to 700 employees were able to take part in the initiative, while several customer support staff were online in case of any user experience issues.

The announcement was released to staff earlier in April in response to a December 2020 survey citing high levels of employee stress.

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Teachable Moment

While a free week of vacation sounds great on the surface level, it hardly is an original idea (companies like LinkedIn have already done this) and misses on addressing the root of existing problems.

Organizations and working professionals will never clear the hurdle that is burnout until critical issues in the workplace are discussed and tackled:

• Time management
• Stress management
• Work/life boundaries
• Employee advocacy

These are just several elements that can contribute to an employee’s wellbeing and have a larger impact during their tenure than a week off.

Ask yourself: what are you as a manager (or employee) doing to address these issues at large?

A week off sounds nice until you go back to work and realize the problems that stressed you out in the first place never went away.