Airbnb staff will be able to work from almost anywhere, the company said, and they won’t see their pay cut off if they move outside of metropolitan areas.
The new model will apply to staff in the US, but also to those in the UK and other countries. To make it work, the company said it would focus in-person collaboration on roughly quarterly meetings and aim to consolidate work into two product releases per year, said chief executive and co-founder Brian Chesky. .
“We want to hire and retain the best people in the world (like you),” Chesky wrote in an email to staff. “If we limited our talent pool to a commuting radius around our offices, we would be at a huge disadvantage. The best people live everywhere, not concentrated in one area. And by recruiting from a diverse set of communities, we will become a more diverse company.
“Now I understand the anxiety of not seeing people in an office – – how do you know if your employees are doing their jobs when you can’t see them? For me, it’s simple: I trust you and flexibility only works if you trust your team members.
Employees will not be entirely free to move around as they see fit. For tax reasons, they will need to have a permanent base in the country where they are hired. If they work abroad, they cannot spend more than 90 days per year in a given country and are responsible for managing their own work authorization. . And they still have to consider time zones and think about how to actually get to gatherings.
Importantly, the company will no longer pay people based on regional differences. “Starting in June, we will have unique compensation levels per country for salary and equity,” Chesky said. “If your salary was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you will receive a raise in June.”
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Other companies that have embraced remote working have been less generous. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are all asking employees to take a pay cut if they move to a location with significantly lower living costs.
Airbnb is recovering from a difficult pandemic. The company, whose bookings plummeted as international travel dwindled, laid off a quarter of its workforce in May 2020reducing its investments in ultra-luxury hotels and apartments and suspending its plans to turn to transport and content creation.
It went public in December 2020, an uncomfortable time for a travel-focused company, but has maintained a market capitalization of around $100 billion in the 18 months since.
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