Thai company offers employees time and Tinder subscription to find love

In Asia, young people are having fewer babies. Governments can’t find a solution to stop this drop in the birth rate, so companies are experimenting with things like helping their overworked employees meet people.

In Asia, governments find themselves somewhat helpless in 2024 in the face of the falling birth rate affecting many countries, so companies are multiplying initiatives to find a remedy. In Thailand, a group has just decided to offer special paid leave to its employees who get romantic dates.

Thai communications agency Whiteline Group launched the program this summer. Management realized that more than half of its employees were still single and that the work pace was a little too intense to have time to organize “dates”.

A few months ago, an employee complained to her management about her inability to free up time to find a partner. This group does a lot of public relations, event planning and the working hours are not really fixed. Management has therefore decided to offer these special paid holidays to its employees who want to take time off to meet a potential partner. The company claims that studies have shown that people in love are more peaceful, happier and therefore potentially more productive. The company therefore also hopes to benefit from this initiative.

Concretely, the group will test these special paid holidays for a period of six months, until the end of December.To be absent during working hours, you will need to notify your management one week in advance, so that they have time to organize themselves. There is no question of disappearing every day to go for a walk in the park with a potential lover. On the other hand, to help its single employees, Whiteline agrees to pay them subscriptions, for these six months, on the dating application Tinder. When you pay a subscription on this application, you have more opportunities to see the people who like your profile and you can also distribute more likes, than in the free formula. Soa bunch of Whiteline employees signed up for Tinder this summer with their boss’s blessing.

It is quite rare but other Asian groups have already proposed somewhat similar solutions, notably in China, which, like Thailand, Japan and Korea, is facing a collapse in births. Companies in Hangzhou city have started offering paid leave to find partners since 2019. But there, it was reserved for young, single female employees over 30. They were entitled to an extra week during the Chinese New Year holidays. In China, this is the time when everyone goes home to the provinces. The idea was to help these thirty-somethings find a partner in their home region.