Brian Chesky suspects that managers who ask workers to return to the office frequently may be less consistent when it comes to their own personal work.
“I guarantee you that many of the CEOs calling people back to the New York City office are going to the Hamptons for the summer or going to Europe in August,” the Airbnb CEO said The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast on an interview released Wednesday.
Early surveys suggest a split in who will work from home. The Future Forum is reported on a survey in April 2022 that only 19% of executives commute to the office every day, compared to 35% of non-executives.
Bosses often complain about remote work when they drive to get people back to the office. An October survey from Microsoft reported that 85% of employers fear that employees who work from home are less productive than when they work in the office.
Big names in technology are also moving away from remote work. Both Salesforce Marc Benioff and Meta Mark Zuckerberg It suggests that employees who join their companies as remote hires are less productive than those who had some personal time in the office before going remote. (Employee surveys consistently report that workers feel they are more productive at home.)
Chesky provides a different perspective on remote work and the question of productivity in his interview The Verge.
“Are you more productive by having people physically in an office and then restricting who you hire to a 30-mile or 60-mile commuting radius to the office? Or by allowing your team to can hire people from anywhere?” he asked.
He maintains that even for roles that may require regular in-person work, such as creative teams, employees probably don’t need to be together “50 weeks a year.”
“If people want to leave for the summer, that’s possible,” he said.
Airbnb has created a “Work from Anywhere” policy permanently in April last year. A month ago, Chesky admitted in an interview with luck that policy change inspired a million people to visit the company’s job page.
‘Airbnb’s number one complaint is affordability’
Chesky’s interview also included the announcement of Airbnb Rooms, a renewed focus on the ability to book an individual room, rather than an entire property.
The CEO of Airbnb said The Verge that the reason for the “new take on the original Airbnb” is to provide cheaper options for users amid rising costs. “Probably the number one complaint with Airbnb is affordability,” Chesky said.
Chesky said luck last week that the idea for Rooms and other new Airbnb features came from the experience of staying exclusively at Airbnb properties for six months. Airbnb’s CEO complained that other hosts have added heavy requests to her booking, such as cleaning fees and a list of chores for guests to do.
“The worst 10% of guest and host experiences make everything worse,” he says luck.
Shares of Airbnb fell 10.9% on Wednesday following the release of the company’s latest earnings. it beat expectations in revenue, and moved to a $117 million quarterly net profit, as opposed to a $19 million net loss last year.
But the company warned that bookings were expected to fall in the coming quarter, and predicted “unfavorable” year-on-year growth in 2022 on what it called revenge travel.