Dropbox CEO Defends 90% Remote-Work Model, Says 'Future of Work' is Here
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Fortune:What would Drew Houston, CEO of Silicon Valley software giant Dropbox, say to fellow CEOs - like Google's Sundar Pichai or Meta's Mark Zuckerberg - who seem to believe that three days a week in-person is crucial for company culture? "I'd say, 'your employees have options,'" Houston told Fortune this past week. "They're not resources to control." While Dropbox used to work near-entirely at its Bay Area headquarters, Houston has completely warmed to a distributed model since the pandemic - and is mystified as to why other leaders haven't joined him. (Houston founded Dropbox in 2007, the year after he graduated from MIT, and has been its CEO ever since.) "From a product design perspective, customers are our employees. We've stitched together this working model based on primary research," he told Fortune at Dropbox's WIP Conference - its first in-person event since 2019 - in New York on Tuesday. "We've just been handed the keys that unlock this whole future of work, which is actually here." In April 2021, right when most of the country became eligible for vaccines and people began reconvening again across the globe, Dropbox encouraged the opposite. It officially announced its intent to go Virtual First, which meant employees were free to work remotely 90% of the time, only commuting in for the occasional meeting or happy hour... Granted, not everyone got to appreciate the perks. In April, Dropbox laid off 500 employees - 16% of its staff - due to "slowing growth" and "the A.I. era" requiring a reallocation of resources.... Houston and his team have found, in practice, a handful of two- or three-day offsites per quarter - 10% of the year - works best for their people. Crucially, it provides that oft-referenced cultural connect and brainstorming time that pro-office zealots insist upon, without exhausting workers out with a commute grind or needless hours in drab conference rooms.
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