Epoch hosted a Happy Hour for leaders and innovators in the Employee Experience space to mix and mingle in San Francisco. The event also featured a fireside chat where Jade Choy, Epoch's CEO, has conversations with leaders and innovators in the employee experience and engagement space.
In case you missed it, here are some key learnings and takeaways from our Fireside Chat featuring Allison Vendt, Senior Director, Global Head of People PMO, People Analytics, and Virtual First at Dropbox! View the full recording here. Scroll on for notes! 👇
Epoch hosted a Happy Hour for leaders and innovators in the Employee Experience space to mix and mingle in San Francisco. The event also featured a fireside chat where Jade Choy, Epoch's CEO, has conversations with leaders and innovators in the employee experience and engagement space.
In case you missed it, here are some key learnings and takeaways from our Fireside Chat featuring Allison Vendt, Senior Director, Global Head of People PMO, People Analytics, and Virtual First at Dropbox! View the full recording here. Scroll on for notes! 👇
This Fireside Chat spotlights Allison Vendt, Senior Director, Global Head of People Strategy, Operations, and Analytics at Dropbox! Allison has been at Dropbox for 5 years, where she started in an L&D role. Before Dropbox, she spent a decade in education at several universities. At Dropbox, Allison was initially focused on employee career development, and in the Spring of 2020, she transitioned to leading the People Strategy, Operations, and Analytics team. One of her first strategic projects was figuring out “What could remote work look like at Dropbox?”
Dropbox is a global company with about 3,000 employees, 88% of which are in North America and other employees in Europe and the Asia-Pacific area making for a worldwide and distributed company. Before the pandemic, Dropbox was very office-focused with a strong office culture. Dropbox looked at remote work as an opportunity. Their products and tools support distributed teams, and they saw remote work as an opportunity to live out their mission of designing a more enlightened way of working. They adopted a remote-first operating model, called Virtual First, but also enabled teams to meet in person to connect and collaborate.
Dropbox looked at Employee Experience as a product when designing what Virtual First was all about. They wanted to be thoughtful of their approach and how it would evolve over time. They’ve also focused on being transparent internally and externally, and retain a learning mindset. They are thoughtful of how they get and implement feedback, and their employees have been appreciative of how they’ve approached that process.
Early on, Virtual First was a big transition for employees. The Dropbox team knew there would be challenges as pre-Virtual First only 3% of their employees were remote. They've consistently done surveys and gathered employee feedback, but last year they did a Life in Virtual First survey to learn more about the employee experience, where they were successful and where they could improve. This was also important to understand the behaviors people have when working and being able to iterate on resources and practices to support them.
One finding was a need for better ergonomics to make employees comfortable and productive. As a result of this feedback, they piloted a program to make workspaces more productive. Another insight is the kinds of activities and work behaviors people like to do remotely vs. in-person. A lot can be done remotely, like creating, reviewing, reading, writing, and coding, but activities like brainstorming and strategizing are more effective in person. They also collected interesting insights by career stage and role type. They found only about 10% of employees were interested in nomadic work, and these employees are earlier in their careers. They also found that the Individual Contributor’s (IC) are most productive when they can go heads down with work compared to managers who like collaborating.
Dropbox launched its Dropbox Neighbourhood program in 2022. The genesis for this program was about meeting Dropboxers where they are, which was particularly important as they got more distributed, to build connections with other local employees. Neighborhoods are formed where there are 20 or more employees within a specific location. They host programming and social events for these groups. They also do business activities like quarterly debriefs, All Hands watch parties, and more to connect these employees. Each neighborhood has a Slack channel with community managers and community builders to easily connect employees.
Employees are taking more ownership of their community building. Dropbox provides communities with a budget to help them gather and get to know each other better. These programs have been a success but they know there's even more room to continue to iterate on their approach!
The Dropbox Virtual First team is a highly cross-functional group, across People, Real Estate and Workplace Services, Comms, and ITS, that focuses on the employee experience and ensures that employees can be successful in this way of working.
Dropbox measures the success of the Dropbox Neighborhoods program through a combination of surveys, Slack engagement data, event attendance rates, and employee engagement scores around connection.
Allison shared that there are misconceptions out there that remote work is less productive. At Dropbox, their Virtual First strategy is anchored in an asynchronous by default mindset and encourages non-linear workdays through leveraging Core Collaboration Hours, which is particularly important given the globally distributed work environment. They survey their employees about their productivity but also conduct qualitative research. One of these studies revealed that employees have challenges focusing even during deep work blocks, because they continuously get pings from colleagues. These findings revealed the need to implement internal tools to minimize distractions, which they plan to do later this year.
Dropbox understands that managers play a key role in a Virtual First environment. They truly are the connection between their team and the rest of the organization. Leading a distributed team is also very different - there’s a complexity of not sitting next to someone and learning by osmosis, and making sure the team stays connected and productive. Dropbox is revamping leadership development trainings to help them be more successful in managing teams. Also, they support managers as they plan quarterly offsites for their teams, as a critical component of the Virtual First model is maintaining in-person connection and collaboration. Dropbox understands teams need to be intentional about these gatherings to ensure a high-impact, special experience.
Dropbox used to do Virtual First challenges to engage employees in this way of working, through Virtual First Toolkit practices. The Toolkit, which is Dropbox’s guide to distributed work, includes practical, virtual-friendly exercises organized by different categories like effectiveness, communication, and wellbeing. Through this, they found that employees were adapting to Virtual First quickly, and instead of doing separate challenges, the practices are now woven into existing training.
In closing, Allison encouraged the group to continue building out a community within the employee experience space and adopting a learning mindset is critical, because we're all in uncharted territory together. Learning from each other (and continuing to learn and stay agile) has been critical over the last few years and will continue to be as we all adapt to this new way of working.
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