Brian Chesky, the CEO of the famous housing rental platform, has decided to introduce a permanent and borderless form of teleworking for its employees.
Brian Chesky, the rental giant Airbnb, announced on Thursday, April 28, 2022 in an interview with Time, that he wanted to allow his employees to permanently work remotely, from anywhere in the world and without it does not interfere with their salaries, even if they change countries.
Brian Chesky is now convinced that there will be no going back to the office after the pandemic. According to him, and during the next ten years, most companies will be led to adopt a similar form of remote work: “The world has become more flexible. Our business would not have recovered so quickly from the pandemic if it weren’t for the millions of people working at Airbnb.»
“The office as we know it is over”
At first, the company had asked its employees to return to Airbnb premises and offices no later than September 2022. But, last January, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky himself announced his conversion to “ digital nomadism”, a concept that refers to workers who choose to operate and work independently of their workplace. As a reminder, and as relayed by the New York Times, the American company had launched the program “ Whole Home, with Airbnb in 2021 and already had the idea of offering a few people trips around the world for a year – while offering them the possibility of teleworking entirely in accommodation offered by the platform.
In his interview, Brian Chesky says he is convinced that working in the office is not a necessity (except for certain professions), quite the contrary: ” I think the office as we know it is over. It’s kind of an anachronistic form. He comes from a pre-digital age. If the office didn’t exist, I wonder if we would have invented it. And if we had invented it, for what purpose would we have done it? It is obvious that people will continue to go to hospitals to work, to coffee shops to work – these spaces make perfect sense. But I think for someone whose work is done on a laptop, the question is: what is a desk for?»
The CEO and co-founder of Airbnb continues his speech by insisting that this “working from home” initiative will not be mandatory. employees will still be able to meet at the office if they wish: “The solution is going to be truly hybrid, not three days in the office. It’s going to be about being completely flexible and then coming together in an immersive way when you need it. This is how most tech companies are going to operate. And I believe that almost all companies will be technology companies in 10 years. Technology will proliferate so much that every company will feel like a technology company. There will still be a few analog companies — there will still be cafes. But even media companies are becoming technology companies; everything converges.»
Since April 29, 2022, Brian Chesky had shared on his Twitter account all these new measures concerning this major project. Company employees will now be able to work from any location, including (up to three months) overseas: “You can move anywhere in the country like from San Francisco to Nashville, and your compensation won’t change. »