Three years ago, Airbnb, like many companies, closed its offices in response to the pandemic. In April 2022, after two years of working remotely—which the company once described as “the most productive two-year period in our history”—Airbnb announced a new plan.
Airbnb’s “Live and Work Anywhere” policy allows the majority of its 6,800-plus employees to live and work in more than 170 countries for up to 90 days a year, maintains the option for employees to work from home, and provides a $500 allowance for workers to travel. (Airbnb’s most recent internal survey found that 55% of employees have worked while traveling in the past year.)
This hybrid plan also included redesigning its offices, setting country-specific salary bands, and coordinating quarterly in-person team meetings. Since the pandemic, Airbnb has begun to modify most of its largest offices, including those in San Francisco, Seattle, Berlin, and Dublin, to better align with this policy.
Of course the company’s employees are not alone in working remotely—and while traveling—for prolonged periods of time. According to Airbnb, during the first quarter of 2023, 18% of bookings on its platform were reservations for 28 days or longer, and nearly 50% were for seven days or longer. One survey from Go City found that 25% of U.S. workers will prolong a vacation by working remotely; 35% have already taken a “workcation”; and 80% say travel is easier as a remote worker. Another survey from Harris Poll found that 23% of people say remote work allows them to travel for longer periods of time, and 22% say it allows them to travel to destinations that are farther away.
After one year of Airbnb implementing this plan, the company claims it is now the most productive it has ever been. The person behind the plan is Dave Stephenson, CFO and head of employee experience at Airbnb. Stephenson sat down with Fast Company to discuss what his team has learned from working around the world, and what the future world of work looks like.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Fast Company: Why did Airbnb take this approach to work?
Dave Stephenson: When we designed this program, back in [the height of] COVID-19, every employee wanted to know, “When are we coming back into the office?” [and] “When do I have to come back into the office?” So many people were appreciating the flexibility they were getting with their families, spending time away, and maybe working remotely from all kinds of different places.
We were slow to respond because we wanted to be very deliberate in our response. We were starting to see that the companies that were fast to respond were having to backtrack. They were like, “Okay, everyone’s going to be back in the office four days a week”; “Oh, well, maybe now it’s three days a week”; “Oh, we’re going to delay for three more months.” And so we started realizing that if you were too fast, and you weren’t spending enough time designing it, then you might have to backtrack.
[Airbnb’s founders] Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, they’re designers. They think in a different way than maybe a typical engineer would, and many tech companies are founded by engineers. And so we stepped back. Brian led this charge, with me, a couple of key employees, and our employee experience team. We talked about the fact that it was important that we hire the best people, and the best people in the world are demanding flexibility. We were seeing this in the expectations from employees. The other thing we were starting to see is that not all the best people in the world are within 50 miles of San Francisco. If you actually constrain the pool of available talent, and make them all move to San Francisco, you’re going to limit yourself.
The way in which we try to work at Airbnb is very deliberate, design-oriented work. And so I’ll step back and say we’re not remote-first. . . . It’s flexibility-first. And it’s intentional.
FC: As a CFO, how do you think about quantifying the costs and benefits of allowing employees to work from anywhere?
DS: The first quantitative thing is we’re able to hire and recruit some of the best people around the world. Since implementing this policy, we’ve increased the rate of hiring; we’re decreasing our rate of attrition; and we have implemented more features and capabilities on Airbnb than we ever have. We’ve launched 350 upgrades in the last two years, and that’s at a faster clip of more important initiatives than we’ve ever done.
Pre-COVID-19, we were divisionally structured. We had all these divisions, more like Amazon, where we had a homes division, we had a plus division, we had a luxe division, we had a transportation division, we had a magazine. Each one had their own GM. Each one did their own work in silos, and they sprinted at their own pace. And then they ran into constraints and weren’t always able to get things launched as effectively, because teams were all running at different paces. . . . And part of how we ended up reducing our headcount by about 25% during COVID-19 is that we removed a lot of these layers of individual silos . . . moved to a functional structure, and then put that functional structure on this one road map.
That’s why I think we’re able to move faster and better. And that’s why “Live and Work Anywhere” works well for us.
FC: What are the tax implications of allowing workers to work from all of these different countries?
DS: It varies by where they end up working. People need to let us know where they’re working, for how long. And then we have a tax team that helps them establish at least what our internal corporate tax liability is. We are supporting tax services as one of the benefits of [the policy] so that they can help the employee file the taxes that are appropriate. Because it is incredibly complicated. There are some states especially—like if you work in New York, day one that you’re working here you actually have some responsibilities for income tax.
FC: One thing I ask every executive I sit down with is for their thoughts on artificial intelligence. Tax services is a category that I’ve been told will be very much eased thanks to AI. Do you think this idea of working from anywhere and the potential AI disruption we’re likely to see are related? Or do you see them as separate?
DS: I don’t think they’re directly related. I think they are contemporaneous.
We’ve been using artificial intelligence for a number of years and doing things like our ranking services, or how we promote certain images so that we feature the best pictures for a given listing. There are a number of different ways that we’ve used historically. I think there’s more that we can do with our existing Airbnb service to utilize AI to be better.
I think there will be more future capabilities that will get unlocked that will impact the ways in which people might travel. . . . You might use freeform text to say “Hey, my family and my grandparents want to go to Italy for a week. Where do you suggest we stay?” I think there’ll be some future things we do on the Airbnb side.
And then internally, there are a number of productivity areas. The one that we’ve already launched is Microsoft GitHub Co-pilot, which increases the efficiency and effectiveness of our software engineers. But there’ll be other [AI] tools that will make people more efficient at their work, so I’m really excited. And I think employees will be excited about it too, because I think it will make their rote, basic tasks simplified, more automated. Then they can work on the harder problems, on the more complex things that can’t be automated.
FC: You previously mentioned reduced attrition. That is one of the most common things cited by executives who are laying people off right now. They say, “Actually, we made things too flexible and now nobody wants to leave. We expected them to leave, and so now we have to right our books.” Have you experienced any of those issues?
DS: I think it’s just important that you maintain an incredibly high performance bar. One of the things we’ve done since COVID-19 is we’ve been more rigorous in our evaluation of our team and set incredibly high expectations of everyone, and are just really clear what their goals and objectives are. So I’m actually really happy with how we’re holding people accountable.
FC: What do you think about the term “productivity paranoia”? How would you ease the concerns of a manager who wants to do their best and is worried that the only way they can do it is by watching people over their shoulders?
DS: This is something that we need to teach our managers how to do. They need to be close to employees; they need to know what the deliverables are; and they need to set clear objectives and measure their employees against those objectives. Measuring a person by asking “Did they come in before me?” and “Did they leave after me?” is such a 1980s way of managing. We need to teach our leaders how to lead through setting objectives and making sure people achieve them.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. We do need to keep working on this. I think some of the other challenges I’m working on include How do you train people? When do you train them in person? And when you train them remotely? How do you get people earlier in their career to be more mentored? Because mentorship is hard to do via Zoom. So when do you have people in-person shadowing a leader?
So I think our policy is, in some ways, harder. But I think if you are thoughtful about it, and take the time and energy to do it, it can work really well. It may not work for every company. Maybe if you’re not functional, maybe if you don’t have one common road map, maybe it doesn’t work as well. But for us, it does.
