Dropbox has announced a full transition to remote work

Dropbox, a provider of cloud technologies and a collaborative content platform with over 600 million users worldwide, has announced its new global long-term global work strategy – Virtual First, making home-based work the default.

Accordingly, Dropbox will offer additional options for employee mobility, which will help them adapt to the new form of work. Among other things: a grant that will help them set up their home office with the necessary equipment or a grant to rent a physical workspace (for example in a shared work space).

Subsequently Dropbox will establish “Dropbox Studios” that will provide flexible physical spaces on demand, for spot-on teamwork to encourage creativity, community building and the preservation of corporate culture. However, these spaces will no longer be intended for daily individual work – all the work is done alone and most of the meetings will take place in a distributed environment.

Remote labor has seen a slow growth in recent years, but the corona plague has been a catalyst for a growing trend of moving to decentralized work. According to Idi.org, 30% of employees and about 60% of the self-employed in Israel worked full-time from home during the crisis. A Colliers International study based on 3,000 people surveyed in 25 countries found that 82% would prefer to continue working remotely even after the crisis, and 77% believe their productivity remains the same, or even increased as part of working from home.

A study conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for the global Dropbox reveals that workers think the benefits of working remotely outweigh the disadvantages. Most employees (90%) claimed they were able to be productive at home and stressed that they did not want to return to a rigid five-day work week. In addition, it was found that remote work opens up employment opportunities for new sectors, improves the attractiveness of an organization when recruiting and retaining employees, contributes to the environment and sustainability, improves labor productivity and more. The increase in decentralized work heralds an unprecedented opportunity to advance the personal, social and economic well-being of future knowledge industry workers.

Dropbox’s new work strategy is very different from the hybrid approaches that many companies have planned to adopt. As a company whose products are designed to accelerate online collaborative work on users’ content, and are currently used by over 500,000 professional teams, Dropbox sees this fundamental change as an opportunity to redesign the work method and experience.

Jonathan Seroussi, Director of the Dropbox Development Center in Israel: “Unlike other companies in the world, Dropbox did not choose the hybrid approach (in which employees choose whether to come to the office or not) as this approach may perpetuate different experiences for employees and cause barriers to inclusion and inequality in performance or career path.

The Virtual First strategy is an option to design an enlightened and innovative way of working while supporting employees who will make remote work easy. We will do this while maintaining five goals: supporting the company’s tasks, freedom and flexibility for employees, preserving the human connection and company culture, preserving the health of employees and creative and instructive thinking. There is no doubt that our cloud technologies and remote tools also support this strategy. “