SAN FRANCISCO—Dropbox, San Francisco-based tech company, announced on October 13 that it will become a “Virtual First” company, making remote work primary for all employees permanently, while it’ll continue to gather at existing real estates or other flexible spaces once it’s safe to do so.
In the blog posted on October 13, Dropbox announced “Remote work (outside an office) will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work.”
They cite a study result from The Economist Intelligence Unit commissioned by Dropbox, saying “knowledge workers are more focused at home and just as engaged as before.” In their survey, nearly 90% of the employees answered that they are able to be productive at home and don’t want to return to a rigid five-day in-office workweek.
When they need to gather and collaborate, they will use spaces called “Dropbox Studios,” which will be installed in every office (San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and Dublin to start). These spaces are specifically for collaborative work, not for individual work. They may change or add the locations of the studios according to the utilization of studios and employees’ concentration at each office.
Dropbox also decided to embrace core collaboration hours with overlap between time zones, while they let employees make their own schedules except for those hours. They believe that that policy will increase work efficiency and balance between collaborative and individual work.
Regardless of what kind of work the employees do, remote work is its mandatory policy through June 2021 to protect the health and safety of their employees and communities, they said.
