Is it time for a ‘burnout bank holiday’?

A dream date for most employees? Surely that must be someone working in Bumble’s HR department with a view to getting a job there.

The dating app company – its USP is that women make the first move – has closed its offices and told its 700 staff to switch off for a week to combat burnout.

There’ll still be some support staff on hand to ensure the app is working properly but they’ll get the same privilege in due course.

This is no quixotic gesture by the boss of a private business with an unusually enlightened attitude towards employee relations. Bumble is a public company with its shares listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Such a move might normally be expected to provoke some, shall we say, plain-speaking exchanges between management and investors, except that the latter probably knew they were buying into something a bit different when they pushed the button.

The pictures of the group’s colourful HQ tell you that. It also has a fairly unique, and admirably flexible, working culture in which people can choose their hours so long as the work gets done.

Cynics will inevitably sneer at the eccentricity of a fluffy tech company in the romance game, and point out that such a move would be impossible to accomplish in other industries, where shutting down to all but a skeleton staff for a week could lead to a business closing its doors permanently.

The latter may be true, but look at it another way. Well-rested, mentally healthy staff are likely to be productive, creative, and less likely to indulge in absenteeism when they get back. So it’s possible that such a move might ultimately pay off for the firm, especially in a country where vacation days are in notoriously short supply. Not to mention the benefits accrued through encouraging the loyalty of existing staff while luring talented new joiners.

The wider issue of pandemic stress, and the toll it has taken on people’s mental wellbeing, is real. It’s something companies are going to have to find ways to grapple with. They may ultimately find themselves losing staff through increased time off sick, or just losing staff full stop. Some have responded by offering counselling, while others have offered “burnout days”, an evolution from “duvet days”.

On the other hand, some will just drive their people into the ground, trusting that they can always replace them while ignoring the fact that recruitment can prove to be both quite expensive, as well as disruptive.

Perhaps what we need is a national burnout day. That’s actually rather easier to accomplish than it might look. You can create one simply by creating an extra bank holiday. If you wanted to, you could create two.

When this has been done temporarily in the past, usually to mark royal events of some kind, it’s been accompanied by a cacophony of moaning and wailing from the business lobby.

One or other of its constituent groups can usually be relied upon to come up with a figure for how much such a move costs UK GDP, and what a terrible idea it is.

This, obviously, ignores the above point about rested workforces and productivity gains, the fact that people often end up catching up in the subsequent days (or working to clear their inboxes in the run-up), and the economic activity bank holidays also stimulate.

That activity is most often of benefit to, you’ve guessed it, the hospitality industry, the services of which tend to be in high demand over extended weekends.

Giving the nation a much-needed extra break to help relieve the stress of the pandemic would give that beleaguered sector a much-needed boost.

It’s also worth pointing out that were the government to take a leaf, or even two, out of the Bumble playbook, it would prove wildly popular from a political standpoint.