Airbnb employees will be able to work wherever they want

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Airbnb employees will be able to work from anywhere within their countries, vacation rental company chief executive Brian Chesky said in an email to his team on Thursday afternoon.

“Two decades ago, Silicon Valley startups popularized the idea of ​​integrated environments and workplace perks, which were soon adopted around the world,” he said. “Similarly, today’s startups have embraced the home office and flexibility, and I think that’s going to be the predominant way of working in 10 years.”

According to Chesky, there are exceptions for those who need to be in specific locations, but the measure applies to the “vast majority of employees”, who will be able to work either from home or from the office.

Those who want to change cities must stay in the country where they were hired and will not see their salaries decrease or increase, regardless of cost-of-living differences. Starting in September, however, it will be possible to work from almost anywhere in the world —170 countries— for 90 days a year.

Team meetings are also planned every quarter.

Vinay Gaba, the company’s technology leader, wrote on his Twitter account that he expected flexibility, but that the announcement was “the best-case scenario anyone could hope for”. “It’s great that our team managed to make it happen,” he said.

Since the pandemic made remote work a possibility, Chesky has become an enthusiast of the work model — one that can benefit your business. In January, he announced that he was now “living on Airbnb”. He would return to San Francisco with some frequency, but he wouldn’t stay there—or in any city for more than a few weeks.

In the last email, the entrepreneur defends his idea: the flexibility of work allows talent to be recruited from anywhere, not just from the surroundings of the office, and would increase diversity among employees.

One of its biggest assets, however, is maintaining the company during the pandemic, when employees were working from home. In June 2020, three months after the WHO (World Health Organization) classified Covid-19 as a pandemic, Chesky spoke about the crisis facing the company in an interview with CNBC.

“It took us 12 years to build the Airbnb business and we lost almost everything in a matter of four to six weeks,” he said at the time. Also in 2020, the businessman listed the company on the New York Stock Exchange, in the largest IPO (public offering of shares) of the year in the United States. “We rebuilt the company from the ground up, went public, upgraded our entire service and recorded record earnings, all while working remotely,” he wrote in the message to employees.

Like other tech companies, though, Airbnb flounders. Since its debut on the Stock Exchange, its shares have already dropped 24.92%, between highs and lows.

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