The CEO of Dropbox has a 90/10 rule for remote work
The CEO of Dropbox has a 90/10 rule for remote work
"If you trust people and treat them like adults, they'll behave like adults," Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told Fortune.
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I'd say, 'your employees have options. They're not resources to control,'" Houston told Fortune when asked about what message he had for CEOs who believed in return-to-office mandates.
"You need a different social contract and to let go of control. But if you trust people and treat them like adults, they'll behave like adults. Trust over surveillance," he added.
“But but but you can’t just treat the servants like people who are capable of completing their responsibilities while managing their own time! What if they finish their work early or take an extra ten minutes at lunch?! Sweet lord, what if they aren’t jiggling their mouse enough??!! Time theft is the most heinous crime in human history!!!1!”
- Every other CEO and corporate media stooge for the last three years
Yeah, honestly when I see people claim that CEOs just want people back for the tax benefits I call bullshit.
These are people who have to justify their own existence through control over whatever company they're a part of. They don't want you back in the office because they're afraid you're screwing them over, they want you back in because otherwise the veil is lifted on how worthless they are as a leader.
Another thing to keep in mind is that pretty much all the C levels spend the majority of their time doing in person stuff with other high level narcissists where they have to focus on body language to avoid being the victim of interface politics and they don't understand that most other people have positions that require long periods of focus on individual tasks.
Any time they say that people want to be in the office or that interpersonal communication only works in person they are projecting. They just have the ability to force it on everyone else.
I mean, it can be both at the same time.
Ok, fair enough, let's compromise on it not being the "primary motivator".
Honestly, it’s even stupider than that. Everyone who works for me or that o work with is a professional making 6 figures, ranging into the mid-six range. They’re great at their jobs, and prior to Covid we had all kinds of flexibility for who worked where. Now it’s a one size fits all, and I’d honestly be shocked if the company wasn’t losing more money in policing and attrition than it was gaining in some hypothetical bonus of being in the office.
I love working from home. But I do go in more because it's partly mandated but I take great flexibility with it. It genuinely helps me to be in a couple of days a week, but I'd like that to be my decision, not management. It isn't the same for everyone either. Many roles are better off remote tbh. Our employer assesses category of work done and applies some full wfh where it makes sense, but some I feel get mischaracterised.
I like almost all of his rhetoric, but his 90/10 rule is only 90 percent of the way to being correct.
A few social events make sense. Working completely anonymously doesn't work IMO. Meeting someone in person is completely different from seeing them on a screen.
But why? Why can't that work for you?
So you can ensure that the person who is doing great work isn't one of "them"?
Work is professional. It's work. Social is informal. It's not work.
What exactly is it that makes you need to mix the two?
I am an extremely introverted person with pretty extreme social anxiety.
The only reasons I can come up with for NEEDING to force social situations into work are nefarious.
And notice, I'm not saying work anonymously. Zoom makes sense when the processes are that lacking.
Because it has been repeatedly shown that better social connections help get the right stuff done.
Trust, empathy, and liking each other allows for a generosity in dealings that is very conducive to communication, to problem solving, to finding ways to affect change in the organisation, to train/socialise workers into effective practices, to notice when the work is unbalanced or unaligned with the employee, to correct poor behaviour, and many more reasons.
A competent event organiser could plan to accommodate your introvert preference, and still achieve the prosocial goals.
You could have interactions in smaller groups at a time, have activities/breaks with social recovery (like solo or silent activities, spa/massage/meditation, simulators/noisy activities/activities in heavy gear), have solo parts of group activities (like solo brainstorms or reflective walks), have planned recovery time, etc.
If your social anxiety is that bad, you might need an exemption for health reasons, in the same way a ski trip could exempt someone with a broken leg.
But at least healthy people, including introverts, seemingly benefit immensely from prosocial activities at a workplace.
I've worked in many projects where I met people only over phone and WebEx or similar. It was always pretty "dry" and tensions rose quickly whenever shit on one end hit the fan. Typically after just one personal meeting (kick-off, war-room, whatever) that changed completely. You start to joke together, you let your guard down more easily. You talk differently, even on the phone and in virtual meetings then.
I also often enough witnessed people bitch at each other over some formulation in a pull request or a comment in a chat room. In person they completely behaved differently and were able to talk it through.
Not everyone ticks the same, but in a large team you can be sure to have at least some people who have an easier time reading body language than hearing nuances in a voice filtered through a microphone. And for these people it's then less stressful to work stuff out in person.
So from this I hear "stress out the introverts to bully them into silence and it's so much easier for the extroverts scheduling the meetings to figure out where they can claim credit having only scheduled meetings".
Gotcha.
Well, welcome to society, which consists of different types of personalities all mixed together. You want to stress-out everyone else too. That isn't better. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. As others said: the solution is to have individual exemptions, not preventing everyone from get-togethers in the first place.
Edit: btw. not even "introvert" is a good-enough category. I am also introvert and am completely depleted of energy after a day in the office or a team event. But I still enjoy it. You need to force me to attend, but afterwards I am typically glad I did.
I have said nowhere to prohibit social people from being social outside of work.
This entire thread is about forcing everyone to socialize with their coworkers for 10 percent of their time on the clock.
Stop goal post moving.
I got called back in after “essential employees” became a thing during Covid. I’d been out for 3 days remote work. A month later everyone got called back.
When they found out I’d been back nearly a month before them they asked why I had to come back in.
“How do you know you have slaves if you can’t see them?”