Airbnb bosses sought inspiration from Apple when the COVID-19 pandemic caused business to slump.
The holiday home rentals site appeared to be in trouble when coronavirus first swept across the globe, sparking an 80% drop in business, but CEO Brian Chesky has explained how they moved to become a "functional organisation" instead and even though sales are now strong again, their new way of working has proven to be more effective.
Asked how the crisis changed the company, he told Fortune: "By necessity, we switched to being a functional organisation. We had about 10 divisions before the pandemic. We were overextended. We couldn’t do everything—and we wouldn’t have the money to do it all.
"There were people who were predicting our demise, articles asking if this was the end of Airbnb. So I looked at companies like Apple and what they did when people were predicting that they were going to go out of business—like Apple in the late ’90s. Steve [Jobs, the late founder and CEO of Apple] basically took a divisional company and turned it into a functional organisation.
"He took about 80 business SKUs and got it down to four. He made everything really simple. And we decided to simplify our business and go back to the basics, back to our roots, really out of necessity.
"But as we did it, we realised it was actually easier to run a company this way. I wanted the whole company rowing in one direction. The best way to do that is to create an alignment mechanism; ours is a calendar. Most companies do this with metrics, but a creative company doesn’t try to hit numbers. A creative company has a calendar, it has deadlines."
And the new way of working has contributed to the firm's policy of staff being able to work anywhere in the world, without an impact on their slaries.
He added: "So now we have two big releases each year, one in May and one in November. It really helps allow people to be distributed, because when people can roam around the world and live in any country they want, as long as everything’s on a calendar, everything’s coordinated."
