Dating app Bumble gives staff weeklong break to recover from COVID burnout

Bumble, the dating and relationship app where women have to make the first move, has given its 700-plus employees a “much needed” weeklong break to recover from COVID burnout, according to a Bloomberg report.

The paid holiday for Bumble staff – and employees at its Latin American unit Badoo – comes as companies take different approaches to retain staff and boost productivity following a difficult year that has seen work habits change around the world.

Bumble’s head of editorial content, Clare O’Connor, praised the move on Twitter on Monday. In a now-deleted tweet, O’Connor said that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had taken the action “having correctly intuited our collective burnout”.

The past year has been a busy one for Bumble. The app made its stock market debut in February this year.  The 31-year-old founder of the “feminist” dating app became a billionaire after the company raised $2.2 billion in an initial public offering, which valued its worth at over $7 billion.

The pandemic-induced lockdown only contributed to its popularity as millions of people, quarantined at home, logged in to beat the blues. According to the BBC, the number of paid users across Bumble and Badoo increased by 30 per cent in the three months to 31 March, compared with the same period last year.

Wolfe Herd launched the app in 2014, which encourages women to be the first one to make the move in dating, instead for waiting for someone to ask them out. The app has women employees who guide its users in the dating process.

The company was recently in news after it banned body shaming as part of its updated terms and conditions. The app defines body shaming as “unsolicited and derogatory comments about someone’s appearance, body shape, size or health” and is characterised by language which is “fat-phobic, racist, colourist, homophobic or transphobic”.