“You can’t force, but you can lead by example” — Culture At Airbnb
If you’re unfamiliar with our project, Diving Into the Bay Area Work Culture, read our intro here
Company Snapshot
Airbnb
Founded in 2008
Has 19 offices worldwide and more than 1.500.000 listings in 2016.
Mission: Belong Anywhere
Meet Kelly
Title: Global Brand Strategy Manager at Airbnb
Background: Kelly moved from Google to Airbnb 4 months ago. Has 10+ years of experience in brand marketing, communications strategy and integrated media sales.
You in 3 words: Empathic, Thoughtful, Adventurous
What is your advice to Millennials?
Really be in tune with your personal values and know the values of the company you’re going to be working for. I’ve found that when my personal values and the company or my team’s values are out of alignment, it becomes harder to contribute meaningfully or as easily.
Innovation Challenges
Kelly’s role at Airbnb is on the Global Brand Strategy team and what she thinks is challenging in her role is how Airbnb, a design-led company can work more data driven around it’s brand and marketing efforts without losing the heart [emotion-led] of the work.
Another challenge is how to deal with communication around complexity at scale. How to find the time, the structure and way to talk about data, information and extract the meaning and value from numbers in an agile way that is inspiring and insightful.
Collaboration & Creative Processes
Airbnb being a design-led company, as mentioned above, visuals are important in the work processes. They do a lot of journey mappings and industry mappings and in terms of collaboration there is a big focus on being inclusive. Kelly also said that at Airbnb they don’t like to do things that have never been done before.
For internal collaboration, Airshares is something Airbnb employees do to share skills within the company to other employees. The topics and skills shared can vary and have everything and nothing to do with Airbnb. Kelly mentioned a friendship bracelet class as an example. She sees the value in getting to learn various skills from your co-workers and to strengthen human connection within Airbnb, something Airbnb works towards, also with their mission, to belong anywhere.
Work Culture
Kelly called San Francisco a city of creators, and because of that there is often no balance or boundaries between work and life. In that sense there a holistic style to it. Burning Man and festival culture is becoming more and more popular with many seeing it as a way to get new inspiration for work and creating things. A lot of people also commute and because we are so mobile now, it means you can work from anywhere all the time. If you don’t set your limits, you can work 24/7.
It’s also a solutions-driven city. There is an awareness about how things can be better. Kelly thinks this stems from the culture here and from the types of people who want to contribute. They are altruistic, passionate and progress driven.
Kelly has worked at Airbnb for 4 months and had great insights about the culture there, since as a new employee you see everything new. She came from Google, who is structure-driven and in comparison Airbnb is more fluid and in a different growth stage. Like Kelly said “we’re building the plane while we’re flying it”. Company on-boarding at Airbnb, you have 1 week in a new class of employees, that is highly designed around Airbnb values and living the mission of Airbnb. On the last day of orientation, Kelly told us they do a community volunteering project along with hosts in SF, giving back to communities and recognizing that Airbnb is part of that community. Kelly said she has great support from that class still, but that team on-boarding varies by department, which should have equal importance.
Something Airbnb currently is working on very actively on is iterating on their company values and how to tie those to employee performance. Kelly is involved in working with the culture of Airbnb’s community both internally and how it’s reflected externally, being on the global brand team. They have recently released the statement on fighting discrimination and bias in their community , to make sure they live up to “belong anywhere”.
Like Kelly said, “you can’t force, but you can lead by example”. And that is something Airbnb is working on being better at doing.
Co-written with Paula Vivas-Avila
Thank you Kelly for your hospitality and for sharing your thoughts!
