Airbnb: Stay Anywhere, Work Anywhere 🌎❤️💻🏠
April 28, 2022: Airbnb announced its new work policy. Work from anywhere in the world.
I highly encourage you to read the official announcement and the following Twitter thread from Brian Chesky.
We'll only know whether this decision is good or bad for the company in 1-2 years. I hope this turns out to be good 🤞
With the new policy, we know one thing for sure. Airbnb is going to become the biggest digital nomad workplace in the short term.
Why does that matter? Because hiring talent in the great recession market is hard. And IMO becoming a talent magnet in this market may be the highest leverage for Airbnb.
Here's how I am thinking about it.
Let's look at the following two points from the memo.
2. You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change
3. You have the flexibility to travel and work around the world (you can live and work in over 170 countries for up to 90 days a year)
These two points will create a Tsunami of engineers who would want to join Airbnb. Competition to get into Airbnb is going to rise. That means a higher bar for clearing the interviews, leading to top candidates.
Now the question is, will other tech giants follow?
They may, and they may not. Each organization is different. Many organizations can't adopt the same model as Airbnb. Not because they are old and have an old-fashioned mentality, but because their business model is not similar to Airbnb. So I wouldn't be surprised if they don't follow Airbnb's remote work policy.
But more I think about it; many tech companies are not far behind. They may not have a single salary tier yet, but even without that most companies don't mind 90 days of work from anywhere as long as they have a non-mandatory back to office policy.
Jumping off to another topic that caught my interest is
5. We'll continue to work in a highly coordinated way (The backbone of how we operate will continue to be our single company calendar with our multi-year roadmap. It's centered around two major product releases each year—a May release and a November release.)
And what those product releases would be, you may ask? Here is another tweet from Brian highlighting what they could be.
As I put all this together, I am becoming bullish on Airbnb. Airbnb is doing great work for its employees, users, customers, and refugees from Ukraine.
I am delighted and excited to see Airbnb's new policy take shape. I wish Airbnb the best of luck in its pursuit.
Thanks for reading my miscellaneous commentary on Airbnb's stay anywhere and work anywhere policy. Honestly, I like my headline better than Airbnb's design to live and work anywhere. And happy for them to have it in case they want to reword 😜
If you would like to share your views on Airbnb policy, please leave them in the comments for discussion.