Bumble gives all employees a week off
Myles Udland, Brian Sozzi, and Julie Hyman discuss Bumble’s decision to give every employee a week off with pay to help staff recover from COVID burnout and what the benefits could be for the company.
Video transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Well, if you try to email someone who works at the dating app Bumble this week, you will get an out of office message for every single person at the company. They have 700 employees, and they've given everybody the week off, they say to avoid or to recover from COVID-related burnout. Apparently, Hootsuite is another company that recently did this. But not every single person was affected by this.
I mean, sure, this is great, but, you know, I think you guys know my views on this. I think that we need a rethink of vacation culture in general in this country. People are reluctant to take vacation. When they do take vacation, they don't actually take it. Many vacations are working vacations. And I'm of the view that vacations are important. The more of them, the better. They make you a better person. They make you a better employee. And I'm all for it. Brian Sozzi is smirking over there because he's not a vacation guy.
BRIAN SOZZI: I think you and I have opposing views, and that's great. You know, it takes two to make a market. And that is all good, but, you know, just from a Bumble standpoint, I like this initiative by CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd. I mean, she has proven consistently that she wants to do things differently in the dating space. And perhaps this is yet another sign of her trying to do things differently when it comes to employees.
And look, let's look-- keep in mind what Bumble is. It's a growth company. And if you get a sense as a leader that your workforce is burning out as you're trying to cook up new ideas and launch them correctly and now prove to a stock market that is still getting used to you as a public company-- the company just came public a couple of months ago. It's important-- give workers a rest. Let them reset. Let them get back on a growth mindset. And come back hard in a week or two.
MYLES UDLAND: I mean, I get paid to talk about stuff and have an opinion on things, even if I don't have such a strong opinion on things. But I'm surprised by myself at how difficult it is for me to have a strong view on what is happening here at Bumble. I mean, sure, I have no idea what their workforce morale is like, what internal emails have been exchanged, what side Slacks they have going on there that are complaining about this, that, or the other. Certainly, there is some measure of all of those things. Because otherwise, they wouldn't be giving the whole staff a week off.
Julie, I agree that the culture around vacation and around time off in the US certainly could use some reform. At the same time, I felt like we had a little bit of a reaffirmation in terms of work expectations with hybrid and work from home and what the future of work was going to look like. But yet, we've sat here, and I've been told that everyone's going back all the time, and it's fine. And people who are in the office should be rewarded for going there. So I'm having a little trouble, I guess, squaring what exactly needs to change or should change or how we would go about changing anything.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, I don't know. I guess that people can get burned out even if they're working at home, maybe especially if they're working at home. I don't know. Maybe then you'd have no separation between work and home, and you go crazy. Maybe.
MYLES UDLAND: I would say especially for sure. I'm just-- I think, like, as we look at the future of what's going to be sustainable and what's not, like, we're acknowledging burnout is a thing. We're acknowledging that work from home for a lot of people is actually more difficult.
And yet, we're still not really willing to let go of this idea that being button seat in the office is a political advantage, and you could be rewarded for that, which I think is just a bad incentive companies should not be rewarding. Yet we're kind of careening towards that future, which, of course, is just like the past. So I think it kind of comes down to the more things change, right, the more they're staying the same.
BRIAN SOZZI: Have a good show. I'm taking the day off. Bye, guys.
JULIE HYMAN: Wow, unprecedented.
MYLES UDLAND: I'm out Friday. I'm out Friday.
JULIE HYMAN: All right.
MYLES UDLAND: So you got that going. Just kidding.
JULIE HYMAN: Akiko and Zack are going to pick it up in two minutes from us. Have a great day, everyone, whether you're on vacation or working. We'll be back tomorrow.
