Dropbox CEO says going to office for work belongs to past, slams work-from-office commands
While Silicon Valley bosses remain divided between giving employees the option to work from home or calling them back to the office, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston believes that office-based work is now an outdated and impractical practice in the age of AI and remote collaboration. In a new episode of Fortune's 'Leadership Next' podcast released on Wednesday, Houston likened forcing employees back into offices to bringing back relics of a bygone era.advertisement'The world's different,' said Houston. 'Forcing people back to the office is probably going to be like trying to force people back into malls and movie theatres. Nothing wrong with the movie theatre, but it's just a different world now.'Notably, Dropbox was one of the first tech companies to fully adopt remote work during the pandemic. It announced in 2020 that the company is shifting to a 'virtual-first' model. Since then, the company has doubled down on its belief in distributed work. Dropbox believes that when remote work is done right, it's not only viable but can be more productive and empowering for teams. Under its current 90/10 rule, Dropbox employees work remotely 90 per cent of the year and meet in person for occasional team events.
In the podcast, Houston also spoke about how office mandates often lead to inefficiencies. 'We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week or whatever, to literally be back on the same Zoom meeting they would have been in at home. There's a better way to do this,' he said.advertisementHouston also stresses the fact that planning work for a remote environment requires more than just replicating the office digitally. He said it demands a rethinking of workflows and smarter use of technology. Houston shared the example of Dash explaining how AI tools can reduce day-to-day friction, helping with knowledge retrieval and task coordination. 'The manual way of auditing your calendar is about as annoying as it sounds Why would a human have to do this? These are the most automatable things Dash is an example of that. No one has a functioning search box. That's going to be like the first level of our silicon brain at work,' he said. The Dropbox CEO also argued that in the coming years, AI and automation will play a key role in making distributed work more effective.'We're going to find all kinds of ways from getting the information you need at work, to actually helping you do the work,' he noted.Meanwhile, this is not the first time Dropbox CEO has spoken in favor of remote working. In an interview from 2023, Houston revealed that the early decision of the company to adopt virtual-first transition made it successfully transition to remote work policy. 'You need a different social contract and to let go of control,' he said in a 2023 interview. 'But if you trust people and treat them like adults, they'll behave like adults. Trust over surveillance.'
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