Media mogul Barry Diller says working from home is a ‘crock’

Media mogul Barry Diller griped that working from home is a “crock” as employees at his travel-booking site Expedia remain reluctant to return to a lavish, $900 million headquarters the company built in 2019.

The billionaire chairman of Expedia and IAC – owner of People, Daily Beast, Travel & Leisure – is fed up with employees who don’t want to work from the office, not to mention Expedia’s new 40-acre campus in Seattle with breathtaking views of the Puget Sound, he told the Skift Global Forum on Tuesday.

The campus is so beautiful that 1.6 acres along the waterfront is open to the public.

Expedia’s headquarters was completed in late 2019 and the company’s 4,500 employees were moving into the new digs when the pandemic hit.

Now Expedia is trying to coax its workers back to the office, which was designed to replicate the amenities of a luxury hotel. 

It has cappuccino machines and fridges stocked with healthy snacks every few hundred feet, a full service cafe, soundproof phone booths, and wiFi enabled rocks all over its manicured grounds, according to The Seattle Times.

Expedia began calling workers back to the office in May with a mandate for them to spend “half of their time” at headquarters.

Diller says the hybrid work from-home-model was “imposed” on his companies by other tech companies and that his management team tells him that a five-day work week would result in a mass defection of employees.

He’s not happy about the policy, which is partly informed by employee surveys asking about what people think about working from home as opposed to coming to the office, he said.

“Sitting at a laptop computer at a dining room table,” is “kind of stupid,” Diller said at the conference.