Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who lets employees work from anywhere, says many CEOs calling workers back to the office are ‘going away to the Hamptons for the summer’

• Airbnb’s CEO recently shared his thoughts on different work models in a wide-ranging interview with The Verge.

• Brian Chesky said many CEOs mandating a return to the office will spend their summers in the Hamptons.

• Airbnb lets employees live and work from anywhere without a loss of pay.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who lets employees work from anywhere, says many executives mandating a return to the office are likely spending their summers traveling.

Chesky discussed different work models in an interview with Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, on an episode of the “Decoder” podcast published Tuesday.

“I guarantee you that many of these CEOs who are calling people back to the office in New York City are going away to the Hamptons for the summer or going to Europe in August,” Chesky said. “I still think that’s happening. So you still have incremental flexibility. That’s way more than the old world before Zoom.”

Airbnb announced last year that it would allow employees to “live and work from anywhere” with no loss in pay if they stayed in their home countries. Chesky said at the time that Airbnb “had the most productive two-year period in our company’s history — all while working remotely.” The company later said its careers page drew more than 800,000 views after the announcement.

“I don’t think most people will find that they need 100% of their workforce together 50 weeks a year to do that,” Chesky told The Verge, adding that Airbnb asks employees to get together at least one week per quarter.

Chesky said he thinks his employees are more productive working remote, but “we don’t want to recreate this world of ‘Wall-E’ where everyone’s just staring at screens all day and no one has any interaction in the physical world.”

“I go to the office not every day of every week,” he said. “Probably, every other week, I go in multiple days a week.”

In San Francisco, home of Airbnb’s global headquarters, roughly 18.4 million square feet of office space downtown is vacant, and more than 30% of office buildings have space available to lease or sublease, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

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