At the beginning of the pandemic, we were told to stay home, work safe, or else. Businesses had to adjust rapidly, and many learned that they don’t need extensive and expensive physical space to run a successful business. Many employers who sent their workers home are telling them to stay there. Or, in the case of Airbnb, employees can live anywhere. It’s another innovation from Airbnb.
A year ago, Airbnb announced its live and work anywhere policy. One employee was on a sailboat in the Florida Keys when she received the message. She thought, “Why not just stay on the boat?” For the next three months she did just that. And when the workday was over, she could immediately go snorkeling. For her, it was a dream come true.
Airbnb’s Chief Financial Officer says, “The business has actually never performed better since we moved to this program. It’s working really well for us.” He went on to say that the policy is about attracting the best talent. “The best talent in the world is not all within a 50-mile radius of San Francisco,” he said.
Undoubtedly, stay at home orders exposed many businesses to the possibility of remote workers. And it is equally undoubtable that, lacking lock downs, many businesses would have experimented with remote workers as a way to keep employees and customers safe. More to the point, in the absence of lock downs, all businesses would have had a vested interest to develop best practices to protect employees and customers. We could have avoided the economic destruction wrought by the lock downs, as well as the inflation caused by the massive spending by government to deal with that destruction.
Companies like Airbnb are successful because they innovate. They find new and better ways to produce and trade, and they don’t need government mandates to do so. That is true whether we are in the midst of a pandemic or not.