We remember the ambient sounds: staccato typing and the breathy hum of the office microwave. Mumbled phone calls conducted unseen over partitions, and heels clacking on tile as they round the corner past your desk. Beyond the windows, city buses lurch and groan. Laughter rises near the communal kitchen — sharp, recognizable — it’s one of your friends. She’s brought coffee, and sets it upon your desk so emphatically that it feels like the punctuation to a sentence.
For many Americans, the idea of returning to the office — after a year or more of remote work — is a looming monolith that fosters complicated emotions. Surveys have found that employees feel a combination of trepidation and excitement about reentering the office, with social anxieties and fears about COVID-19 balanced against the thrill of in-person interaction and the enjoyment of working and collaborating outside of one’s home.
Companies returning to the office have much to consider, from safety concerns and team building to cost-effective work models and long-term productivity. Some plan to catalogue employee vaccinations, many are considering a hybrid model and others are leveraging the cost-effectiveness of going indefinitely remote. Above this looms the question: exactly what will the new normal look like in workplace America?
To learn more, we sat down with Melanie Collins of Dropbox and Colleen Linder of Conga, two Bay Area tech companies that have put a great deal of thought into their plans for the future of office life.
Melanie Collins is chief people officer at Dropbox, a popular file hosting company that offers cloud storage, file synchronization and other services. She says her company made a deliberate decision not to adopt the hybrid work model, and is instead adopting a strategy called “Virtual First.”
First, tell us about what Virtual First means at Dropbox.
Our future of work strategy is called Virtual First, which means that remote work will be the primary experience for all Dropboxers. However, we still believe that in-person engagement is critical to fostering connection, culture and community, so we have reimagined how we use our offices — which we call Dropbox Studios — for intentional team collaboration. Use cases for Dropbox Studios include collaborating with other employees, closing deals with customers and coming together for team-building activities.
We deliberately chose not to adopt a traditional “hybrid-remote” model. While this may seem like the ultimate solution in flexibility, it can have drawbacks in that it creates two very different employee experiences. For example, those in office may have greater visibility and potentially better performance or promotion outcomes while those who are remote may be disadvantaged. Our culture has always been rooted in creating the most inclusive environment that we can. We’re focused on holistically supporting employees through the transition to Virtual First, and onboarding new employees with care so that we don’t lose the parts of our culture that really set us apart.
Maintaining a learning mindset underpins our entire approach.”
What were the most important steps you took to develop this plan?
Our journey started with data, looking at internal trends and conducting external research and benchmarking. It was really important to us that we invested the time and effort in not only announcing what our strategy is but how we planned to get there, which required shifting mindsets and fundamentally rethinking the way we work together. We’re adopting practices like going asynchronous by default — meaning, we’ll leverage email and internal collaboration tools to try to solve problems before reflexively scheduling a meeting.
We’re also implementing Core Collaboration Hours, which are four-hour windows for synchronous collaboration (i.e. meetings), aligned to time zones instead of anchoring to physical locations. The goal with Core Collaboration Hours is to create non-linear workdays where employees gain more control over their time and have more time for things like deep work or doing something that helps them recharge. This could be a midday walk or being able to pick up the kids from school without worrying about missing a call. This does not mean we are shortening the workday to four hours, but holding all live meetings within a shortened period of the day.
Obviously, there are still a lot of unknowns around when it will be safe to return to the office at full capacity. How are you adapting and communicating shifts in planning?
Maintaining a learning mindset underpins our entire approach. We can’t predict what the future will look like, but we can commit to remaining nimble, learning as we go and evolving our strategy based on our learning. Monitoring and evaluating over time is important, as is pivoting away from things that don’t work while adopting new practices that do work. A key part of this is our Virtual First Toolkit, an actionable guide to help teams thrive in a distributed working environment. It focuses on things like managing your time, wellness, communicating in a virtual-first world and supporting your team. The Toolkit is an open-source, living document that we’ll refine as we continue learning from living Virtual First.
At Conga, a platform for the digital transformation of business processes, Global Facilities Manager Colleen Lindner believes that with educated caution and the efforts of their COVID-19 task force, her company can open the office in a manner that makes employees feel safe, comfortable and productive.
Tell us about your current plans for returning to the office.
We chose to re-open our offices in a cautious and phased manner, starting at 20 percent capacity. Our goals are to make reopening Conga facilities a continuous learning journey and ensure that everyone is comfortable before increasing capacity.
In addition to other activities, we will specify that returning to an office is each person’s prerogative, with the flexibility to return as many days as desired each week or to continue to work from home. In addition, we will provide guidelines that clarify safety expectations and prep colleagues who choose to return, and require colleagues complete a health check form each day they’ll be in the office. Additional health and safety protocols include hand sanitizers, social distancing measures, nightly deep cleans and room capacity restrictions.
Returning to an office is each person’s prerogative.’’
What were the most important steps you took to develop this plan?
We quickly recognized and accepted the reality of the pandemic. No one was prepared to deal with such an unprecedented scenario, so there was no handbook to rely on. Early on, it was complex, difficult, and emotional territory to navigate.
The first thing we did was establish a COVID-19 task force (CTF) of cross-functional subject matter experts representing HR, legal, IT, facilities and internal communications. The CTF meets weekly to share updates, debate and discuss related topics. The result of these meetings are vigorously vetted recommendations that are shared with the executives who would make the final decisions. The CTF defined guiding principles (below) guide our recommendations and decisions.
CTF’s Guiding Principles
- Top priority: colleague safety, security and well-being
- Follow local authorities’ guidance
- Make decisions based on facts and data
- Evaluate each office independently, capturing the voice of the employee
- Collaborate and decide as a united team
Obviously, there are still a lot of unknowns around when it will be safe to return to the office at full capacity. How are you adapting and communicating shifts in planning to your team?
Conga’s CTF has been the lynchpin for ensuring our leaders and colleagues, at large, have the information they need. We believe in preparing for as many potentialities as possible, whether a resurgence, the need to close a reopened office or some other event.
The CTF continues to come together to think through various scenarios, document operating procedures to deal with unexpected situations and inform our colleagues so they can feel confident we’re doing our best for them and their families — while considering the needs of the business.
Because conditions can change rapidly, we use our internal communication channels (email, a weekly colleague newsletter, COVID-19 intranet microsite and MS Teams) to provide regular updates. That way, regardless of someone’s preferences, employees can easily learn the opening (or closing) status of each Conga office.
Using a clear set of guiding principles and well-defined decision-making criteria, we’ve been able to maintain responsiveness, mitigate anxiety and minimize the pandemic’s impact to our business.
