Dropbox To Let Employees Work From Home Permanently

Dropbox is the latest company to allow employees to work permanently from home, CNBC reported.

The San Francisco-based company said Tuesday (Oct. 13) that it wouldn’t require employees to come into the office even after the pandemic ends.

In a blog post, the company said the shift to digital work, while jarring early in the year, has proven effective for many companies since.

“We believe the data shows the shift to remote work, though abrupt, has been successful overall,” the post stated. “A new study from The Economist Intelligence Unit commissioned by Dropbox finds that knowledge workers are more focused at home and just as engaged as before. In our internal surveys most employees say they’re able to be productive at home (nearly 90 percent) and don’t want to return to a rigid five-day in-office workweek.”

For employees who want to work together, the company is setting up a series of spaces called Dropbox Studios, located in Seattle, Austin and Dublin, when it’s safe to do so.

“Every employee aligned to one of our offices will have access to a Studio,” the company said in the post. “To ensure a fair and consistent employee experience, we felt it was important to be prescriptive about how these spaces are used — so Dropbox Studios will be specifically for collaboration and community-building, and employees will not be able to use them for solo work.”

With the move, Dropbox joins other companies like Twitter and Square, which are letting employees work from home “forever,” CNBC reported. Microsoft has said it will be more flexible moving forward, while Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg opined that around half of the workforce will work from home within the next decade.

While the work-from-home transition will benefit workers looking to change up the routine, it could have effects economically as people stop buying gas and making various spontaneous purchases to and from their work routes.