Airbnb CFO and head of employee experience Dave Stephenson doesn’t believe that ‘water cooler’ moments will spark employee creativity

As Airbnb’s CFO, Dave Stephenson’s job boils down to making sure the company gets a good return on its investments—the biggest of which, he told HR Brew, is its people. Put that way, he doesn’t think it at all strange that as the head of finance, he’s also tasked with managing employee experience.

“[As] the head of employee experience, we’re investing in people to unlock the best of their talent and capability,” he said.

Stephenson has had to make some tough calls: In 2020, for example, he led a company-wide restructuring, including layoffs of 25% of the workforce as the pandemic disrupted travel. Since then, however, he’s helped guide Airbnb into the future, rolling out its “live and work anywhere” program last spring, which drove 800,000 applicants to the career page within the first week and has been adopted by 11% of its US workforce.

We talked with Stephenson about how he’s approached employee-experience decisions—both the good and the bad—to understand where the company is today and where he thinks it’s headed.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

On where employees work

Right now, the work-from-anywhere program is largely limited to domestic jobs—why was that an important caveat?

[It] is important because we still want people largely working in similar time zones with similar responsibilities, and the constraints for working within a country are much different than trying to get work authorization for a long period of time in other countries. We actually created a whole team—[who] we call the live-and-work-anywhere team—to help navigate all of these things [including] work visas, tax obligations, and supporting people with benefits.

If another company was considering rolling out a similar policy, what might they not expect?

We found our employees do want to get together in person, they just don’t want to do it five days a week. But we want to do that in an intentional way. Some other companies are feeling like you should get in the office five days a week, or even three days a week. But I think that [gathering] randomly versus intentionally won’t get the same benefit.

We’re actually more productive than we’ve ever been—we’ve delivered over 150 innovations on Airbnb over the last year; in fact, we had the largest upgrade to Airbnb in a decade this last May.

That’s quite a shocking statement—some leaders want people back into the office hoping random “water cooler” moments will spark innovation.

I think the idea of randomly bumping together [in] the halls is [of] low value, relative to intentionally getting people together for a specific kind of work task. Bumping into each other at the water cooler isn’t going to unlock the creativity of the company.

What does an intentional get-together of employees look like?

If we have a specific project where a dedicated team needs to get together, we have a group called Ground Control that helps facilitate the logistics of getting people together so that when they are gathering, they’re efficient and effective on the task at hand.

I think kick-off meetings are important to get aligned with everybody in the room—the other [essentials] are design…We think that approximately quarterly works pretty well for the larger population of Airbnb to get together. Some of the design functions get together much more frequently.

What about offices?

What, if any, effects does this work-anywhere policy have on your real estate decisions? In May 2021, Airbnb decided to sublease out a lot of real estate. Will there be any sale of offices to further streamline real estate?

We have about half the square footage that we had prior to Covid. And the half that we do have, we’re going to continue to modify and improve to make it more user effective for this type of work.

From an employee experience perspective, if you were going to design your ideal office for the post-Covid world, what would that look like to you?

Large spaces where we can design and collaborate together, some workspaces where people can do small team work. And then we have a section of the office that’s just heads-down places. Sometimes people just need quiet time, and maybe they can’t do the work at home, so we have some space for that. Then, many of the meeting rooms…they’re actually modeled after Airbnbs.

Looking forward…

As we think about what’s going on in 2022–2023, do you perceive a recession impacting your business?

What we found is that Airbnb is highly resistant to almost any kind of economic shock. We were actually founded in a recession. We did make some tough choices in Covid to reduce the size of our workforce and focus on what makes us unique and different, which is our individual hosted community. So, we’ve made those tough choices, and now we are growing our headcount, but at a more modest pace than we did prior to Covid—we will grow headcount this year in the high single-digit percent.