Bumble gives employees week of paid vacation to de-stress

Bumble has awarded its employees a week of vacation to de-stress. Yahoo Finance’s Akiko Fujita and Zack Guzman discuss.

Video transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, dating app Bumble getting high praise for some for giving its entire staff some time to recharge. The firm is offering a paid week off to allow employees to destress. Zack, I feel like you're itching to make a comment here. Of course, we're talking about this in the context of so many companies trying to cope with lower morale, people getting exhausted from remote work. I am all for this. And I just hope our employees are listening, right? Our employer is listening. I don't know. What's your thought?

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to be against that hot take, Akiko, for sure. But I'll go further here, right? My hot take would be a week's not enough. That's my hot take. My hot take would be we should go back and listen to what President Taft said more than 100 years ago. He was pushing for about two to three months vacation is what he wanted to see. Of course, he didn't do that. But it is kind of worth noting.

I don't know about you, but a lot of people talking about what more companies could be doing. Burnout's real. If you think about how long vacations might be in kind of this work from home environment that we're coming out of, you might take Monday, you might take a Friday. You know, no one really wanted to use their vacation days, and that's something we've talked about, too.

But when it comes to burnout, there are studies that have looked into this. And you don't really start to unwind in the way that maybe President Taft would have wanted you to do until about the eighth, ninth, or 10th day of vacation. So, you know, I would say a week is nice. And maybe, you know, workers there at Bumble are going to be building off that free week.

But studies have shown you might need a little bit more to really fully unwind. And I don't know how many people have been doing so if they can work from home, aside from just taking a few days. In my experience, it's just not enough. I would say--

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, I mean--

ZACK GUZMAN: --it's a nice start.

AKIKO FUJITA: You could also argue the US doesn't have enough vacation days, right, compared to our European counterparts, for example. So we're already starting with sort of a low bar. There's also the other route you can take, which is what Credit Suisse did. They offered their junior members or junior employees a $20,000 lifestyle bonus to boost morale. That's a hot take. One week of paid vacation or $20,000 in bonus.

ZACK GUZMAN: I suppose you could really do some math here on your own, wherever you find yourself on the wage scale here, to do the math to figure out which one of those might be better. But I do think, you know, when you think about well-being and burnout, I think at this point, a lot of people might fall into the camp that I fall into, which is just, please, give me a break. And that would be probably a good way to go over the extra pay if, at the end of the day, you're not to be able to keep working.

So I think that's a good thing. Generally, though, I think, Akiko, this is something that if a company is not doing, you know, it's going to, I think, come back to bite them. Because we talk so much about labor shortages right now and hiring. If you're a company out there and you don't do this, I'm not sure you want to find yourself on the flip side of the coin, having to bring workers in. Because then who knows what kind of added benefits you might need to tack on top of it, like you're saying, maybe perhaps extra pay. But at least, we can celebrate maybe the incentive here that Bumble is taking the lead on.