Worklabs: Allison and Sharon explain how they played a part in developing our Virtual First strategy

As organizations around the world have learned in the last year, creating a new work strategy for a global company is far from easy. It takes months of ideating, planning, and coordination to pull such a massive shift off — but in order for it to be a success, people have to be at the heart of it all.

And that’s exactly where Sharon Choe and Allison Vendt started. As Global Head of Workforce Planning, HR Technology & Operations and Global Head of People Strategy and Analytics, respectively, they were the first Dropboxers who were approached to start exploring the alternative work options open to Dropbox as we navigated the effects of the pandemic.

Sharon said, “It ended up starting with our people strategy. Melanie Collins, our Chief People Officer, and Allison and I were asked to come to Staff (Dropbox’s executive) with a recommendation of where we should go with our remote work strategy. This was about three months into the pandemic, and companies were already starting to announce their remote work strategies. We didn’t want to be the last to go, and we also wanted to be a thought leader for other companies.

So we did some external benchmarking research to see what was out there, and we talked to several companies as we looked at our full spectrum of options, from going back to our old lives in the office to going fully remote and everything in between. We were really interested in the pros and cons of a hybrid model, but we pretty quickly realized there were drawbacks to that; one of the immediate benefits we saw as we all began working remotely because of the pandemic was the creation of a level playing field for all employees. A hybrid model, however, creates two distinct employee experiences and creates issues with inclusion.

As we worked closely with some of the senior leaders at Dropbox (a group we called our ‘SteerCo’) to align on goals and guiding principles that informed our thinking, it became clear that Virtual First was the right approach for both our talent strategy and our product strategy.”

But the work was far from done. As Allison and Sharon started digging into the details, they needed multiple working sessions with many partners (including our CEO Drew) to figure out the specifics of things like Dropbox Studios and Core Collaboration Hours.

What are Dropbox Studios and Core Collaboration Hours?

• Dropbox Studios are spaces in which Dropboxers can collaborate in-person, close deals with customers, and come together for team-building activities. Every site that was previously aligned to an office will have access to a Dropbox Studio, and we expect to add more Studio locations over time. Studios are designed for collaboration, which means that you’ll mostly see spaces for groups to meet, but we’ll also have space for Dropboxers to touch down in between meetings, as well as other homey touches.
• Core Collaboration Hours is a company-wide block of time reserved for meetings, outside of which Dropboxers can manage their own schedules to give themselves focus time.

Allison said, “Sharon and I focused on engaging with all the teams we needed in order to make Virtual First a reality. We quickly realized that Virtual First was so much bigger than simply an HR strategy, because of the very nature of what we do at Dropbox and our mission to design an enlightened way of working.

We immediately started partnering with teams across Engineering, Product, and Design as well as many others, and ultimately mobilized eight different workstreams within the larger effort. We wanted to make sure our Virtual First strategy was thoughtful and comprehensive, and we needed cross-functional partners in order to do that. In total we brought in key insights from nearly 100 cross-functional partners that informed our strategy and go-forward plan!”

Once the Virtual First announcement was made, Allison and Sharon made it a priority to listen to feedback from Dropboxers — and there was a lot of it. Allison said, “There was definitely surprise that we had taken this bold and opinionated stance, and in a lot of cases there was excitement around the fact that this really aligned to our mission as a company and presented us with a very unique opportunity. On the flip side, there were definitely concerns from employees because we were a very office-centric culture before. Our offices were pretty spectacular and they were a huge part of our community and culture, from the cafeteria to the design.

While we were already mobilizing several workstreams to focus on various aspects of Virtual First, including our community and culture and Studios, we realized a lot of the work that the Virtual First team was doing wasn’t very visible to the company. It was really important for us to be transparent and demonstrate that we were listening, so we created a lot of channels to provide feedback, from feedback forms to email aliases to Slack channels to Soapbox (our biannual employee engagement survey). And we created a regular cadence of employee communications — updates like opening up more areas for employees to locate, as well as sharing tips and tactics to support employee capability, how we’re progressing along our roadmap, and how adopting Virtual First has benefitted teams and individual employees.”

And the relocation assistance didn’t end there. We added tools and services that our Dropboxers can use to help calculate the cost of and plan their moves, and even began offering a relocation bonus. This has already seen pretty dramatic results that Sharon is excited about.

“We’ve already moved about 200 existing Dropboxers this year alone, which is almost 10% of our workforce. And beyond that, we’re also experimenting with hiring and seeing wins there. We’ve had a huge increase in applicants, really successful hiring in certain locations, and we’re starting to see more diverse pipelines. We have really early signals that all of those things we were hoping for are happening. We’ve even won out to some competitors — we’ve heard from candidates that had more attractive offers from companies that haven’t communicated post-pandemic work policies yet, and so they chose Dropbox on account of the flexibility they will have to relocate.”

Even beyond the relocation flexibility, Sharon and Allison believe that Virtual First will continue opening doors that empower Dropboxers to protect their life-work balance while still growing their careers, no matter where they are.

Sharon said, “A lot of what we’re trying to do is create equity and inclusion. If we think about the person on the video tile who isn’t in the room and isn’t getting the benefit of hallway conversations with our executives and isn’t being literally seen, that leads to inequities around who gets the project assignment, who’s thought of in calibration meetings in terms of visibility, and how that impacts promotion decisions. One of our key principles for Virtual First was around preserving the level playing field that we felt remote work provided — apart from how time zones affect collaboration, we want to become location agnostic.”

Allison added, “What we’re hearing right now is that Core Collaboration Hours are giving people time back to get work done and to do personal things, like spend more time with their kids or get their workout in. We’re doing this because we really do believe it will help us become more effective and efficient as a company and influence the types of products we will build, how we will go about building them, and how we’ll work as a business and become more effective. I’m excited to see how that positive impact grows from individuals to teams to our business too.”

If Virtual First sounds exciting to you, we’re always looking for help. Visit our jobs page to discover how you might be able to join our team as we define a new way of working.