Bumble Gives All Employees Paid Week Off Amid Reports Of Pandemic-Induced Burnout

After a year of working through a once-in-a-lifetime worldwide epidemic, Bumble is giving its whole team a “Paid Week Off, totally offline” vacation this week to help alleviate fatigue.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, the CEO of the woman-led dating app, made news earlier this year when it became a publicly traded business on the Nasdaq. When Wolfe Herd, 31, held her newborn baby on her hip on the Nasdaq floor as she took the business she started public in February, she became a millionaire — but she also became a symbol for working parents worldwide.

The businesswoman is now being praised for taking the week off for all of her employees. Bumble’s more than 750 worldwide workers will take a paid week off this week, according to a spokeswoman who confirmed this to ABC News via email on Tuesday.

Bumble revealed it was urging all employees to disconnect for the “completely offline” bonus week off in a tweet in late April.

According to SEC filings, the majority of Bumble’s management team (54 percent) and board of directors (73 percent) are all women, making it one of just a few big U.S. firms with a female CEO. As the epidemic shut down daycare facilities, sickened millions, and prompted schools throughout the country to switch to online classes, several reports have suggested that women bore the majority of caregiving tasks at home.

According to Pew Research Center statistics, the caring issue is connected to 2.4 million women exiting the work field altogether between February 2020 and February 2021 while the epidemic raged.

Furthermore, research issued late last year by consulting firm McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org warned that COVID-19 may undermine years of hard-won advances for women’s representation in corporate America, with one in four women considering downshifting or quitting the job. According to the research, nearly three-quarters of senior-level women who indicated they were considering leaving the workforce or working in a reduced capacity mentioned “burnout” as the primary reason.

While the epidemic brought to light the inequalities many women today face in balancing a job and home life, they are far from alone in experiencing pandemic-related exhaustion. Because the move to remote work blurred the line between on-the-clock and off-the-clock employment, some evidence suggests that job productivity actually increased during the health crisis.

One in five global survey respondents said their company doesn’t care about their work-life balance, according to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, which was released earlier this year. Furthermore, 54 percent said they are “overworked,” while 39 percent said they are “exhausted.” Business executives are “out of touch with employees and need a wake-up call,” according to Microsoft research.

According to figures provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month, the percentage of workers who resigned their employment in April was 2.7 percent, the highest “quits rate” since the agency began collecting records.

While many companies are facing criticism for their seeming disregard for their burned-out employees, Bumble isn’t alone in promising post-pandemic flexibility as the country recovers from the pandemic’s toll of more than 600,000 deaths.

LinkedIn granted all of its workers a week off in April as part of a “RestUp!” campaign aimed at improving employee mental health. Teuila Hanson, LinkedIn’s chief people officer, said immediately after the paid time off that it was “very amazing to watch how our colleagues returned to work revitalized and recharged” on the social media site.

“It reminds me how important corporate culture, as well as staff wellbeing and mental health, are to any firm,” Hanson wrote.

Hootsuite, a social media management business, said in a blog post late last month that it will give all of its employees a week off because the “pandemic reminded us how vital mental health is.”