Airbnb employees will be able to work from almost anywhere, the company has announced, and they won’t see their pay docked if they move outside of metropolitan areas.
The new model applies to employees in the US, but also in the UK and other countries. To make it work, the company said it will focus in-person collaborations to roughly quarterly meetings and aim to consolidate collaborative work into two product releases per year, its CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky said.
“We want to hire and retain the best people in the world (like you),” Chesky wrote in an email to employees. “If we limited our talent pool to a commute radius from our offices, we would be at a significant disadvantage. The best people live everywhere, not concentrated in one area. And by recruiting from a variety of communities, we’re becoming a more diverse company.
“Well, I understand the fear of not seeing people in an office – how do you know if your employees are doing their jobs if you can’t see them? For me it’s simple: I trust you, and flexibility only works if you trust the people on your team.”
Employees are not free to move about as they see fit. For tax reasons, they must have a permanent establishment in the country where they are recruited. When working abroad, they are not allowed to stay in any given country more than 90 days a year and are responsible for processing their own work permits. And they still have to consider time zones and how to actually get to the meetings.
Crucially, however, the company will no longer pay employees based on regional disparities. “Starting in June, we will have uniform pay grades per country for both salary and equity,” Chesky said. “If your salary was set at a lower location-based pay grade, you will receive an increase in June.”
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Other companies that have embraced remote work have been less generous. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are asking all employees to take a pay cut if they move to a place with a much lower cost of living.
Airbnb is recovering from a difficult pandemic. The company, whose bookings plummeted as international travel ceased, laid off a quarter of its workforce in May 2020, reduced its investments in hotels and ultra-luxe apartments, and paused plans to move into transportation and content creation.
It went public in December 2020, an awkward time for a travel-focused company, but has maintained a market cap of around $100 billion in the 18 months since.