Inside our Virtual First approach: defining async

Here’s a question that probably hits most working professionals hard: how many meetings do you have that are just about status updates? Almost always, the answer is too many.

Reducing the work about work has been a part of the conversation at Dropbox for a long time — specifically with the amount of meetings we schedule. While meetings are obviously necessary in some circumstances, but when we reflexively depend on scheduling meetings to get the information we need, we end up with jam-packed calendars and no time left over to focus on our own work — much less our personal lives.

When we closed all Dropbox offices last year, there seemed to be an immediate spike in meetings. Team members who were once able to quickly exchange information by walking over to each others’ desks were now relying on video calls to replace those in-person interactions. International teams, who had already often adopted nontraditional working hours in order to collaborate with their teammates across the world in real-time, were left with even less flow time than before. And employees who had suddenly taken on additional childcare or other in-home responsibilities struggled to maintain a working calendar that allowed them to protect both spheres of their life.

By the time we announced that Dropbox would be a Virtual First company, we knew we needed an alternate strategy to replace a meeting-heavy culture that wasn’t sustainable for our employees’ life-work balance. That’s when we developed a company-wide principle of async by default.

Async by default means trying to solve problems over Paper docs, email, and other quick collaboration tools before reflexively scheduling meetings. This approach reduces interruptions and gives us back time to focus.

But how do you decide what exactly can be solved async versus holding a meeting? We encourage our employees to schedule meetings only when related to the 3 Ds: Decisions, Discussion, or Debates. For these important functions, it’s imperative that we work together in real time instead of in siloed, delayed correspondence, especially when the outcomes of these topics are difficult to reverse. But if it doesn’t fall under the 3 Ds, it can probably be handled via async.

And of course, there are exceptions to every rule! We don’t want all meetings to be abolished; we also recognize that some meetings really do help with the interpersonal connectivity of a team. In this case, we are empowering each other to save time by thinking about what topics need to be brought to those meetings and what can be done asynchronously.

When we’re running our meetings more effectively, that also helps to ease the burden on attendees. We’ve created a set of internal guidelines to help ensure that we get organized from the get-go, stay on track, and keep our meetings inclusive. Those guidelines include (but are not limited to):

• Schedule during Core Collaboration Hours
• Name an owner who can keep everyone on track
• Set a goal, context, and agenda
• Include the right people, and try to keep it under seven people
• Send reference docs in advance
• Name a note-taker
• Be on time
• Make it shorter
• End with an action plan
• Actively include folks who aren’t speaking up
• Make it safe to disagree (or be wrong)
• Take tangential discussions offline

So far, our async strategy seems to be working. Without dozens of extra meetings crowding their calendar each month, our employees have been able to focus their time where it’s needed most.

Susanne, a QA Tech Lead based in New York, said, “Async means that dealing with my son’s remote learning schedule won’t result in my missing anything important at work. I know that if there’s information that I should know or something I should be involved in, it will be organized in a way that lets me catch up or chime in when I’m able to.”

Jeff French, a Senior Product Designer from San Francisco, has had a similar experience; he says, “To me, async (bydefault) means resetting basic expectations around availability and being more mindful about the different modes of collaboration that are available to us. Most notably, it means I have the flexibility to do things like take my son to soccer practice in the afternoon, without it feeling disruptive to my work — something that wouldn’t have previously been possible.”

As we continue to explore the definition of a Virtual First workspace, we’re excited to see how strategies like async by default make an impact in our employees’ lives. If you’re interested in seeing what working Virtual First could look like for you, you can visit our jobs page to explore opportunities.