Bumble give staff the week off to combat ‘burnout’

Bumble, the dating app where women are in charge of making the first move, has temporarily closed all of its offices this week to combat workplace stress.

The global team of 700 staff have been told to ‘switch off’ and focus on their own wellbeing.

According to the BBC, one senior executive revealed on Twitter that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had made the move “having correctly intuited our collective burnout“.

Bumble’s success over the past year has been significant, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in people using the app.

A spokeswoman for Bumble told the BBC that a few customer support staff will be working in case any of the app’s users experience issues. These employees will then be given time off to make sure they take a whole week of leave.

The spokeswoman confirmed that the majority of Bumble’s staff are taking the week off.

Bumble has grown in popularity during lockdown as boredom set in and swiping to find a match picked up.

The number of paid users across Bumble and Badoo, which Bumble also owns, spiked by 30% in the three months to 31 March, compared with the same period last year, according to its most recent set of results.

Ms Wolfe Herd also became the youngest woman, at 31, to take a company public in the US when she oversaw Bumble’s stock market debut in February.

She rang the Nasdaq bell with her 18-month-old baby son on her hip and in her speech she said she wanted to make the internet “a kinder, more accountable place”.