We must protect staff from dangers of burnout

DThroughout the pandemic, we have seen this kind of vague, vain commitment to the wellbeing of workers

ATING app Bumble has temporarily closed all of its offices this week to combat workplace stress. The company’s CEO has urged 700 staff worldwide have been told to switch off and focus on themselves.

One senior executive revealed on Twitter that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had made the move “having correctly intuited our collective burnout”.

The company announced in April “that all Bumble employees will have a paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June”.

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

As far as steps to address the mental toll of working through a pandemic on the workforce, it is certainly a newsworthy one. I am sure Bumble employees are not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

But I do wonder if this is the latest incarnation of the naff workplace perk.

The kind of bright, shiny (hollow) perk popularised by Silicon Valley, often to distract from toxic work environments and unsustainable working hours.

Google is king of the quirky workplace perk. Free food, nap pods, table tennis ... you can even bring your pet to the office.

It has trickled down here too, which is why a Glasgow-based firm has a fireman’s pole in the middle of the office. Anything to seem cool. But Covid has moved the goalposts. If employees were charmed by these gimmicks before, they certainly aren’t now. And wooing workers back to the office is going to a lot more like a weekly “pizza and prosecco” party.

The biggest workplace perk -after working through a pandemic for more than a year, maybe the only one that matters -- is an employer that invests in the mental wellbeing of its employees.

Does that mean an extra week off a la Bumble? Sometimes, sure. But anyone who has ever been completely burned out by a job knows that a week of annual leave is the professional equivalent of a band-aid on a bullet wound.

Throughout the pandemic, we have seen this kind of vague, vain commitment to the mental health and wellbeing of workers.

The leading culprit: a one-off mindfulness session that no-one has time to attend because they have to routinely work through their supposed lunch break just to hit deadlines. Zoom yoga comes a close second.

In truth, investing in employees’ mental health is not particularly flashy. It involves decidedly unsexy things like hiring enough staff to complete projects on time. Facilitating real flexibility, like permanent remote working and four-day working weeks.

It also involves kicking managers with outdated views on mental health to the curb, like KPMG’S UK chair of accountancy, now famous for telling staff to “stop moaning” about Covid working conditions and accused them of “playing the victim card”.

And it’s over to the employers. We’ll see.