Dropbox CEO slams return-to-office mandates, compares them to outdated malls and theaters
Dropbox CEO slams return-to-office mandates, compares them to outdated malls and theaters
Speaking on an episode of Fortune's "Leadership Next" podcast, Houston said what most people have long thought: that returning to the office is a waste of time...
Here's a rare sight: a CEO of a large company has spoken out in support of remote work for employees, slamming those firms that drag staff back into the office against their will. Dropbox boss Drew Houston compared RTO mandates to trying to force people back into malls and movie theaters.
Speaking on an episode of Fortune's "Leadership Next" podcast, Houston said what most people have long thought: that returning to the office is a waste of time and money when employees can do exactly the same tasks at home.
"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 at home," he said. "There's a better way to do this."
Dropbox seems to be different than other companies. It is known to have migrated back from AWS to their own infrastructure at a time when ever other CEO was propagating to migrate into the cloud. Article is from 2019, though: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after-moving-off-aws-dropbox-infrastructure-continues-to-evolve/
Also, WFH is good for their sales. I don't understand how someone like the CEO of Zoom didn't get that simple fact.
As the election has shown us, these tech bros are not necessarily smart or thoughtful about their choices, and the real motivations tend to be related to personal financial gain. The level of push and coordination behind RTO and every company copying each other's policy probably come down from "on high", and i suspect that's investors with business real estate interests putting their thumbs on the scale to avoid a collapse in their markets
Would you be surprised to learn that business is actually a network of cargo cults, where the thing they're trying to superficially mimic is other businesses that don't know why they're doing what they're doing?
I work for an online edtech company that saw massive organic growth during lockdowns, and has been chasing that dragon since lockdowns were lifted. They spent millions expanding their workforce at the time, while they severely pared down their school outreach team. They made multiple moves that only made sense if you assume lockdowns would last forever.
I raised this with management a couple of times, and their only response was "everyone else was doing it, too".
its mostly about power and control, and the 2nd issue is real estate spaces, plus govt incentives.
I've been yelling at that AWS cloud ever since they started becoming the standard for enterprise. Glad to see sanity prevails somewhere anyway
RTO is either companies looking for a way to cut jobs or a way to utilize their commercial real estate.
I also want to think it's a little bit the management/CEOs who think their employees are their friends who get lonely realizing the stripper doesn't actually love them. Meanwhile they refuse to develop a personality or real friendships.
I didn't think that managers like Michael Scott actually existed.
Lemme fix that verb:
"Dropbox ceo decries defunct despots denying workers their work from home rights"
Seriously can we stop with "slam" though
Please don't replace it with alliteration.
I love alliteration. And puns, especially the multilingual kind 👹
Commercial.
Real Estate.
I am not 100% sure of the physical footprint of office space per employee of DropBox in comparison to other highly computerized companies, but...
...in addition to the just subborn nature of a useless management class at many companies realizing they are basically useless and don't deserve to be paid a wage, because their workers can work just as well, or better, with far, far less 'oversight' from them...
Fucking real estate.
The C Suite knows that if they allow remote work to become normalized, then all their fancy office buildings are worth far less than they otherwise would be, and that then they'd go tits up, underwater, on all their various kinds of financing they've got on them.
Instead of managing a transition to a new paradigm in a sensible and controlled manner, that would allow them to gradually unwind from the RE, from the offices themselves... which could be done over time via the cost savings and increased efficiency from remote work, and laying off (restructuring, whatever) most of their managers... nope, they've almost all decided that that cannot be allowed.
It's exactly this, 1000%. I work for a small company that had a return-to-office mandate a few years ago when Covid began initially winding down as access to vaccines became widespread. I was working fully remote and had leased an apartment over an hour away from the closest branch office in an affordable part of town. We had our most profitable year ever in the nearly 50 year history of the company in 2020 when literally every employee was working remote. Morale was up, I was saving money that wasn't going to gas or car maintenance, and I was feeling positive about the future of work-life balance.
Then, one day, I get called in for performance review, and it was all smiles and sunshine and then they said "You're doing a great job Furbag, but we'd like to see you back in the office for a minimum of three days per week." That was the first and only negative comment I had ever received on a performance review since starting for the company. When I escalated the results of my performance review to management, wanting a more clear explanation for why I am being asked to commute 1+ hours in to work almost every day from the outskirts of the bay area, they told me exactly what you said "We're paying for this building, so we want people physically in the office to justify it. Also, every other industry is doing return to work mandates so this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone."
Naturally, this is still a sore spot for me. The company didn't learn it's lesson and still follows industry trends like little lemmings (and not the good kind that post here) while looking into buying up more real estate in other parts of the state to expand operations. They could be selling the building I'm working in now, and use the profits from the sale to fund everybody with equipment to work from home (desk, chair, monitors, hardware, etc) and work would continue as usual with a lot more employee satisfaction and work-life balance, but I've learned that owning real estate as a business is in itself a prestige that the C-Suite loves to show off to it's competitors. "Look at this historic building we own, isn't it grand?", "Oh, you think that's grand? We rent 12 floors of a 40 story skyscraper in San Francisco, beat that!".
Managers need the physical locations to continue to exist so that they can justify their own existence, and they've fully convinced gullible CEOs that productivity will wane if people are allowed to do work from home "unsupervised", even though there's plenty of data that suggests the opposite is true.
/endrant
Yep, your personal anecdote illustrates broad cultural tendencies of the American managerial and owner class.
Office space and location is the same as buying a lambo.
Its peacocking, its dick waving.
They very rarely care about running a business well.
They care about being better than, wealthier than, more powerful than other people.
If anyone needs a refresher, go watch American Psycho again.
As another commenter once pointed out when I said something similar:
Same exact shit, just worse fitting suits and slightly better haircuts these days.
Sounds like you need to start a new company. Out compete the dinosaurs and drive them into bankruptcy.
they don't want to unwind from RE if they are board members on RE companies as well as the RTO-mandate company. We should never have allowed people to be board members in two busineses.
We should never have allowed people to be board members in two busineses.
Ding ding ding!
Correct!
But then we couldn't capitalism as hard, so... I'm sorry but that issue is a political non-starter.
... Where I grew up, literally every single city council board member just also ran a real estate holding company at the same time.
I figured out as a literal child that this was why our local government only made nonsensical spending and taxing decisions, its the definition of corrupt, but everyone acted like I was insane.
Oh well, we're all renters now, good job to all the people who kept voting for actual landlords to run the government.
Capital beat Labour to death 40 years ago but can't get enough of the taste of victory and they keep digging up the rotten corpse of the Workers to screw it some more.
RTO is just posturing to share holders.
"Look, look, we're treating our staff badly, so you know we're a good investment!"
Hm, I don't think that's likely. I have some other tinfoil hat theories:
- it's so that they can watch their workers to make sure they're working;
- it's to ensure the workers don't have other commitments outside work (like looking after a kid);
- people who are board members of both real estate businesses and RTO companies.
It's actually:
- To ensure the corporate real estate market doesn't collapse like the the consumer real estate market did in 2008 despite the same problem with massive loan fraud inflating the value of business real-estate for toxic bank loans that are rated AAA, but are actually worth shit as no one needs corporate real estate post - Covid.
It's the 2008 housing crisis, but with corporate real estate. COVID forced work from home, which caught banks with their pants down, having no way to actually drive the demand back up for these buildings that will continually house less and less people from less and less businesses (Work from home + businesses not surviving Covid, now Tariffs.)
Our entire banking system is backed up by debt packaged with corporate real estate that's rated as AAA, but is just more toxic cat shit no one wants wrapped in dogshit that banks need. It's a bomb that's been growing as giant corporate buildings become ghost towns, and city centers become more horizontal than verticle.
Big companies with big loans from banks know they're fucked if the corporate real estate market collapses. So they force work from home as a band aid that gives their corporate property some value, or at least justifies it on paper. In reality, the cost to force workers into the office always offsets the billions in losses if their corporate office real estate ever followed real market forces and depreciated in value.
I would qualify your first point. Parkinson's Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they're working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors' supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.
- that is true, but they love to do it to stroke thier own ego.
Step 1: Create one of the greatest tools in human history, one of the benefits being that it can allow a ton of people to work from home, increasing their quality of life, reducing traffic, and improving air pollution.
Step 2: Get forced to experience a worldwide pandemic in which we are made to utilize this tool for such a function so we can see that it actually works as intended.
Step 3: Ignore all that for the profit of the few, to the detriment of the many.
Humans = Trash
humans are fine. you should be pro-human.
capitalism = trash
RTO is now just a tactic to force people to quit.
The jargon you're looking for is a stealth layoff
They should rebrand the stupid “quiet quitting” as “quiet layoffs”
This reasoning plays in my mind on repeat whenever I'm stuck in traffic, wondering how much I'd be getting done if i didn't have to stop working so i could drive to work.
There's also that period before you leave when you prepare to be away from home all day, and the period after you return home when you decompress. Most people aren't magically relaxed after dealing with the commute home.
It used to take three hours of my waking life per day. About 18% of my weekday life. 540 hours per year. At $40/hr that's 21k of free money to the house. FWIW I'd rather have that time to myself and family, but there's the number.
"Tell me you're not invested in office real estate without telling me you're not invested in office real estate."
say it with me: GET OVER IT CORPOS, MEATSPACE IS DEPRECATED.
When a significant part of your economy is commercial real estate and every surrounding business that supports it (transportation, retail, restaurants) it’s very hard to reverse course.
It's certainly difficult to admit that the world has changed.
Sears' real estate holdings didn't save it.
That’s the problem with how we built our cities by having a “commercial” district. If you look at Asian cities everything is all together, so when people weren’t able to work on the office, whole swaths were affected because homes were nearby. We don’t need these glittering towers of arrogance when you can have loads of mid rises with business, home and shops in them.
We already did.
Rare to see a CEO saying something sensible I agree with.
I'd love to see labor organize so when management is like "come into the office" they can be like "no". Let management try to do anything by themselves. They can't. Labor has untapped power.
I would still go to a mall if they didn't have overstock on slim fit clothing. I would also go to the theater more if they had reasonable pricing and actually showed movies I want to watch. There's nothing wrong with either of these things, it's just that capitalism has yet again, ruined them to appease the 1%.
Sounds like somebody doesn't own any commercial real estate.
or tax benefits for hiring x amount employees, plus govts also dont want WFH, because then they wouldnt get tax revenue from cars, roads, businesses.
People generally don't give up their car or stop buying things when they work from home. Those taxes just shift away from commercial districts and toward residential ones.
The entire population knows it's a real estate issue. They still have to pay out the agreements that they foolishly made years ago. This is, yet again, another attempt at a lie. How are they so out of touch? As if I have to ask.
Make your own businesses. Be in control. Be happy.
I wouldn’t say any agreement from before Covid was foolish. That was a revolutionary event in our society. I’d say any agreement made after 2020 would be though. And since most agreements are on 5 year contracts, why are they renewing? Every company should have reduced or eliminated their office space by now. If they had 10 or 15 year agreements, they need to learn to just eat that cost.
Amazon and others 100% used RTO as a “soft layoff” which I’m not sure if I like more or less than them just doing an honest layoff. At least workers had the opportunity to find jobs elsewhere without finding themselves suddenly without income.
75% or more of corporate office space needs to be converted to apartments. I know it’s not a simple process, but it’s the best way to deal with empty office space. It also helps drive population density, which helps businesses like grocers, restaurants, and convenience stores.
This the one who hired Condi Rice to sit on the board?
I am in a situation where the return to office was a 6k decrease in wages.
If he and other corporate leaders valued the savings more than the control, they would consolidate offices and corporate campuses, sell the unneeded ones, and use their more efficient, leaner company to crush their competition. Let's see what they actually do, though...
Personally I wouldn't want to work in an office where (almost) everybody is remote. I believe that the best option is to do a hybrid.
Edit: I prefer working with others in person instead of doing it remotely over the phone or teams. Not sure if I am more productive at work or at home due to the distractions at home. But I am in the minority it seems, but then again my commute is about my rewind time so I am refreshed when I am at home. Traffic isn't an issue either and I can bike if I wish (and didn't sweat as much)
Not sure if I am more productive at work or at home due to the distractions at home
Everyone I know is more productive at home, office is all the time coffee breaks, deciding where to go for lunch, then going to lunch, then another coffee break, smoke break, etc
There are specific things that are more efficient in person, mostly meetings with multiple people.
It’s easier to interject and the conversation flows better in person.
With zoom and the like you get to to the “no you go ahead” loops when people talk over each other.
Everything else is just fine remote.
"Where to go for lunch, you go out lunching everyday? We just bring our own lunch.
But yes I am generally less productive at home because I am inclined to do other shit while at work and considering I have to write hours on customers I cannot get away with working 5 hours and writting 8 hours (that's also illegal, but okay)
Thank you for posting this article, OP.
I used to manage a team of people who were all remote except one and myself. It's not hard. You set expectations and they either meet them or they don't and you address those issues. I do think some of them struggled due to working from home creating a "barrier" to asking for help when you don't know your coworkers as well, but I did everything I could think of to reduce that so they'd feel comfortable reaching out via teams (creating group chats, designating "helpers", etc) or even coming into the office if they chose but there were very mixed results and in general things were worse than when we were primarily working from the office. I don't think the problem is working from home, it was communication skills and some people just lacking the discipline to not goof off when they are at home (I'm one of these, I need an office environment to focus). That is a case by case thing though that needs to be addressed with the individual.
Hear, hear.
Didn't some Dropbox executive demand their workers come back to the office after covid? Was it someone else at the company or maybe a different cloud company?