While return-to-office mandates continue to cause pushback, headaches, and in some cases even employee revenge, one company is using cloud technology to avoid wading into the discourse altogether.
Dropbox is utilizing its signature cloud storage not only in the products it offers customers, but for its own remote workforce. In late 2020, the company announced it was shifting to a “virtual first” model, in light of an exceedingly positive transition to remote work during the pandemic.
“We were meeting all of our business and financial goals. And we thought, ‘What if we explored this further?’” Melanie Rosenwasser, chief people officer at Dropbox, tells Fortune. “The more we looked at it, the more we realized, it’s not just about where we work, it’s about shifting the psychology and behavior and mindset on how and why we work.”
Dropbox’s virtual first model has enabled the company to operate as a distributed work lab. The company created a Virtual First Toolkit webpage that allows anyone (employees and non-employees) to dive into its learnings and best practices for successful remote work. There are dozens of instructional modules, personal exercises, and team workshops on topics ranging from creating virtual “water cooler moments” and “batch and buffer meetings” to setting healthy boundaries and improving “tool habits” to reduce distracting pings.
A “Virtual First Manifesto” created by Dropbox highlights its key guiding principles: everything is a prototype; go async by default; make (virtual) work human; keep it simple; and design for joy.
“We understand the challenges our customers face because we experience them firsthand,” Rosenwasser says. One way the company is addressing those challenges is through Dropbox Dash, a recently updated AI-powered universal search tool intended to reduce the time spent looking for files and applications.
Rosenwasser touts the importance of this technology for asynchronous companies like Dropbox. Given the remote workforce, Dropbox relies heavily on written communication as opposed to the tedious process of aligning schedules to have virtual meetings. Cloud technology allows the company’s 2,200 employees “to consume information super quickly and get a better understanding of what we need to do and by when.”
Over the past five years, Dropbox has seen the ways in which their virtual first model has paid off. About 70% of job applicants cite the model as the reason they’re interested in working at Dropbox, according to internal data. The company has also seen its lowest attrition rates since going fully remote, as well as the highest offer accept rates.
Dropbox’s move to being a virtual-first organization comes as competition in the tech industry is fiercer than ever, with companies racing to integrate new AI models into their products and operations. That makes effective teamwork and collaboration absolutely essential, with little margin for error.
Reliance on cloud technology has “absolutely accelerated with our virtual model,” Rosenwasser says. “We need better [technology] to link, to connect us now that we’re remote. When you kind of layer in this sort of AI renaissance that we’ve been having, it’s become even more critical.”