Note: These are my personal views as an Airbnb employee and almost certainly do not reflect the views of my employer. I am incredibly grateful for the facilities and environments team at Airbnb for creating such a wonderful space that I want to come back to day after day. This post is critical of the remote work policies themselves, not the wonderful people who make the office so special.
It’s a joke that if you work at Airbnb, you’re forbidden to use the “H-word”: hotel. In the Airbnb mythos, hotels represent everything the company is not: inauthentic, mass-produced, and superficial. In contrast, Airbnbs are supposed to provide a unique and authentic experience, a sense of belonging, and a warm, human touch.
And yet, every time I walk into the reopened Airbnb office, I walk into a hotel.
One of the many changes instituted in the office post-pandemic was “flexible desking.” The FAQ page for the office reopening declared: “Assigned desks are a thing of the past! Workplace flexibility allows you to work from anywhere, including our open offices.” This policy was to bring the adventurous, breezy romance of the mythologized Airbnb vacation into the workplace. You could just as easily work from a bungalow in Bangkok as you could the sunny desk across from the microkitchen on the third floor. “Flexible desking” took the industry’s most flexible remote work policy to its logical conclusion–working in the Airbnb office could feel just like staying in an Airbnb. Find a desk you like, stay there for a while, and then move on. On the surface, nothing could be more in line with the company’s mission of “belonging anywhere.”
And yet, there’s a reason that the rest of the industry has another name for this seating strategy: “hotel desking”. Every evening as I’m forced to pack up my carefully arranged ergonomic setup, I’m reminded of the truth: I’m just a guest here. During the day, my desk becomes my space. But every evening, my desk transforms into another impersonal, inauthentic, mass-produced space in the office, just like all the other desks. I got to use that space for the day, but now it’s time to pack up and leave. Hotel desking indeed.
Even though I technically belong everywhere in the office, I find that I don’t actually belong anywhere. This is because real Belonging isn’t just warm fuzzy feelings of being safe and comfortable in a space. Real Belonging grows roots.
Real Belonging beings with those feelings of safety and comfort, but if your sense of belonging is allowed to grow and deepen, you begin to connect more and more with the place you belong in. At some point, you stop belonging in the place, and start belonging to it. And it starts belonging to you. You begin to fall in love. And like any lover, you start to give your very self for the good of the one you love. Your love of the place compels you to help others love it too. This is Belonging in its greatest and most human sense–and it starts to look a lot like the other great cardinal virtue of Airbnb: Hosting.
We can see how this Belonging/Hosting principle played out in the early days of Airbnb. I give frequent tours of the office to new people who have joined since the pandemic. A large portion of my tour is pointing out some of the quirkier parts of the office–the 15 foot tall giraffe, the ice cream bike, the ramen bar meeting room, and many more. These places only exist because Airbnb employees decided to do something crazy to make the office better for themselves, and for others.
The cultural legends of Airbnb past didn’t just belong in the office space–they belonged to it. They loved it, and they wanted other people to love it too. Their sense of belonging was active and creative, and it led them to become legendary Hosts within the workplace, creating a legacy that has been enjoyed by countless cohorts of employees. These cultural legends didn’t just belong anywhere–they belonged somewhere. They belonged to a particular place where they could do particular things for the benefit of particular people.
But now, those days are over. We can live and work anywhere, and I belong everywhere in the Airbnb office.
But, If I were to leave a succulent potted in a coffee mug or a picture of my wife on my desk overnight, the cleaning team would dutifully whisk my belongings away to the lost and found.
Just like they would in a hotel.