Dropbox is a virtual first company. Remote work (outside an office) will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work.

Location Strategy: 

And, once it’s safe to do so, we’ll continue to facilitate a cadence of in-person collaboration and team gathering either through our existing real estate or other flexible spaces. We’ll call these collaborative spaces Dropbox Studios, and we’ll have Studios in all locations we currently have offices—whether they’re dedicated spaces in places we currently have long-term leases and a high concentration of employees (San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and Dublin to start) or on-demand spaces in other geographies. Every employee aligned to one of our offices will have access to a Studio. To ensure a fair and consistent employee experience, we felt it was important to be prescriptive about how these spaces are used—so Dropbox Studios will be specifically for collaboration and community-building, and employees will not be able to use them for solo work.

While there may be some exceptions based on team and role, employees will also have flexibility to relocate outside of locations where we currently have offices. There will be some parameters but the choices will be much greater. As a result, we expect Dropbox to become more geographically distributed over time, and hope this offers our teams more choices in where they live, work, and hire from. Utilization of Dropbox Studios will vary by team needs, so we may set up new ones as our geographic distribution and employee concentration changes.

Non-linear workdays: 

We’re embracing what we call “non-linear workdays.” We’re setting core collaboration hours with overlap between time zones, and encouraging employees to design their own schedules beyond that. As our workforce grows more distributed, this will help balance collaboration with needs for individual focus. We want to prioritize impact and results instead of hours worked.

Employee Experience: 

Finally, we’re designing the whole employee experience around Virtual First, from IT to HR. We’ll invest in a holistic ecosystem of resources, including a dedicated team, to support employees and track our progress by measuring impacts on productivity, engagement, and culture so we can continue to adapt. As a first step, we’ve developed a Virtual First Toolkit, which we’re also open-sourcing here, so that we can add to it and share our learnings as we go.