Name: Dropbox Founder says it’s time to reinvent the workplace
Uploaded: 2022-08-03
Duration: 8 min 23 s
Description: CEO Drew Houston is developing new tools for remote workers.

CEO Drew Houston is developing new tools for remote workers. 

Dropbox Founder says it’s time to reinvent the workplace 

Leadership

CEO Drew Houston is developing new tools for remote workers 

Dropbox Founder says it’s time to reinvent the workplace. 

it was so good to see you again to talk about Dropbox. And let's begin by talking about how the pandemic has changed the way that people view the workplace, right at the beginning of the pandemic, you created a new business model for Dropbox, you call it virtual First. Tell us how it works and how is it different than remote only? So Virtual First is our operating model. So what we're trying to do is get the best of both worlds, the best of the remote or distributed way of working and then also the best of the in person connection. And so the way it works, we basically individual work happens at home. So we ripped out all the desks and we actually scale down our offices to be convening in collaborative spaces. Um and so primary primary orientation is remote, but then we really think about how do we get people together? Really like concentrated doses of relationship or team building or culture. Um but it's different from either being remote only where there's no in person connection or kind of the default model of 23 days a week in the office, which is challenging cause it doesn't give you flexibility because you need to live within commuting distance. And then if you're coming into an office that's half empty, then sort of defeats the purpose of building community. So, um we saw, we saw the pandemic as a great opportunity to totally rethink how work happens. Well, how's it working out? I mean, are you satisfied with the quality of work at your company? Yeah, it's been working really well. Some of the scores we have around the virtual first model. And when we look at our employee engagement surveys that some of the highest of any question that people get better work life balance, they have more flexibility. Uh 90% of our candidates who interviewed dropbox interview because say that our remote virtual first model was a big reason than joining and we've been able to unlock new pools of talent. You know dropbox like so many companies had a real reshuffle, some people left For whatever reasons and you attract a lot of new people. Have you found that this new business model that you have workplace model that you have has been an attractive feature that is bringing in top talents. Yeah. I mean 90% of candidates site are virtual first model is a big reason that they applied and yeah we're a company that has more than half of our employees have joined since the pandemic. What we've also found is that employees are joining from different places. So for example in L. A. Um we went from having virtually no employees there to having 100 boston. I was there for a happy hour a few weeks ago now we went from having zero to a few dozen people there. Most of them have never met a coworker in person. So it's a totally new world. You have been quoted as saying that one of the positive things that came out of the pandemic was that it became an opportunity for all of us to rethink the nature of work, the work week, the workplace. So how are you picturing the future and what are the pros and the cons of making a major split away from the old way of doing things? Yeah, I mean this is the biggest change to knowledge work in our lifetimes. Um and it's been one of the biggest upheavals, but it's also one of the biggest opportunities to be more intentional about work. And, and I think about distributed work or remote work or hybrid work as a new medium. And when you think about other new medium kind of experiences, like a Youtube clip is not just like a short movie, right? And a Tiktok is not even just a short youtube clip, it's its own thing. And I think we're in the beginning, you sort of copy the prior medium and that's where we are in the state of hybrid work right now, we sort of try to move our office way of working into these new hybrid situations. But I think when you really zoom out and think about, there's a few basic modes of working, there's, we find we're finding that you can get a lot done on zoom. Uh, so a lot of the routine meetings can happen on zoom totally as well as they can in real life, um we have all these communication and collaboration tools of slack or, or writing documents are a really important part of making distributed work function well. And so when you think about those different modes of working, I think leaders have to be a lot more intentional about how do I match what match the work to the mode? Or in other words, if you're making people commute a couple hours each way to be on a daily stand up for a half hour, then that's a waste of time for everyone. So these are things that people don't have to think about before, but have to be much more intentional. Now, I think everybody realizes that these new technologies that are available have allowed us to think about rethinking and reinventing the workplace and you know, zoom meetings are a really good example that allowed us to work remotely. But as a tech innovator, what are you looking at as the possibilities, What are you imagining that will make remote work even easier where we see a big opportunity for Dropbox to help you organize all of your cloud content, not just your files. So things like Universal search, we bought a universal search company last year, so you can find things you're looking for, whether they're in the cloud drive, like dropbox or on your hard drive or in any of these news house tools, but there's a lot of opportunities to better organize our work. Is there any single product that you're working on, that in your research that you think shows the most promise? I think just the basics like helping people have all their stuff in one place, helping people organize their content or their documents around different projects because the struggle involved, the manual effort involved in that is should be a lot lower. And so I'm personally very excited about the prospect of dropbox connecting and trying all these different services together. And then I'm also excited about the prospect of machine learning, being able to offload a lot of our busy work or be able to make it a lot take a lot less effort to be organized because ai is really good at organizing things that's sort of that's what it does, but we have there's not a lot of intelligence in our tools or environment yet. So I think we're in the very early innings all this is really exciting. But one issue that a lot of businesses have to deal with is what do they do with all the office space that they've accumulated? I mean what are you doing? You have offices in san Francisco and Seattle, I can keep going New York Washington Austin. What are you doing with all of that? Well, we don't need as much and so we've scaled back our footprint or were planning to scale back our footprint about 80% in total. So we've done things like we ripped out all the individual workspaces because people can work from home and we've taken a lot of the savings and really thought about how do we create, turn our offices into these really great places for convening and collaborating and we call them studios. So our offices are comfy couches, no desks, Right? But if you were designing your company without all this office space, you probably never would have had these studios, right, well, people still need to get together. Um and that's one thing we found as we reopen, is that when we go into these studios, there's still lots of little teams working or people working in kind of our little coffee shop. And so I think there's value in us continuing to operate some of our own space. But but you're right, as I look at a lot of the early stage startups and some founders, well, some of the first things they did after pandemic or break their leases and what they do now is they take all the money they would have spent on office space, get the best Airbnb they can for a week, take the whole team there and then that kind of gasses up their relationship tanks, so the rest of the time they're remote. And so it's like no one would have thought to do that, you know, a few a few years ago. So we we look at models like that, we look at a lot of different sources of inspiration. I'm always interested in lessons learned, What would you say is the most important lesson that you've learned in this new era of manager employees and managing your company? I think the first is that there's always a silver lining to every crisis. I think when lockdown first hit, it was one of the most traumatic things uh that any of us have ever experienced in a lot of ways. Um, but at the same time and it was totally upending how we work and just kind of floorboards are ripped up, but at the same time, there's also once in a lifetime opportunity to design things differently. Like the conversations we're having now about what's the nature of work, what's the best way to do it? We don't have to put the floorboards back down exactly the same way. And the second is I think just adapting, it's it's less about getting the right answer immediately and more being able to shift and evolve. Uh I don't think any company has the, all the answers here and I think there will be multiple playbooks that function well for companies. But I think having an iterative approach and the humility to listen to your employees and try different things um, is that that's worked well for us so far