After “hard days and long weeks” of labor, staff at major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, will be given a week off every quarter in 2022.
On Monday, Coinbase’s chief people officer, L. J. Brock, wrote on the business blog that “nearly the whole company will shut down” for four distinct weeks this year as part of an experiment to provide employees time to rest and recharge after completing demanding projects. Workers at the exchange, according to Brock, aren’t constrained to working a standard 40-hour week and may be required to “pivot at a moment’s notice,” a situation that sounds like it may lead to burnout.
According to Brock, “in 2020, we saw that many workers weren’t taking enough time off to recharge, either because they didn’t want to force their peers to cover for them or because they didn’t want to fall behind on work.”
The news comes at a time when many Americans are fighting back against harsh working conditions by switching careers or departing without a clear exit strategy, a phenomenon that has been dubbed “the Great Resignation.” In September, Cointelegraph said that the number of jobs that require knowledge of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology would rise in 2021. Many businesses now accept cryptocurrency as payment in order to attract new workers and take advantage of the sector’s growing popularity.
During the outbreak, Coinbase altered its policy to allow employees to work from home, with CEO Brian Armstrong promising to keep the option open after the “restrictions of quarantine are removed.” As part of its mission to “become remote first,” the cryptocurrency exchange announced in May that it would permanently abandon its San Francisco headquarters sometime in 2022.
Binance, which is also a well-known cryptocurrency exchange but is based outside of the United States, agrees with this point of view. The exchange doesn’t have a home base, but its holding company is in the Cayman Islands. Before that, it had ties to China, Japan, Malta, and Seychelles. It has been reported that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, resides in Singapore and that the company’s staff comes from all corners of the world.
