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.”
SLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMSSSSSSSSS RTO
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.
say it with me: GET OVER IT CORPOS, MEATSPACE IS DEPRECATED.
I am in a situation where the return to office was a 6k decrease in wages.
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.”
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 now just a tactic to force people to quit.
The jargon you’re looking for a stealth layoff
They should rebrand the stupid “quiet quitting” as “quiet layoffs”
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.
We already did.
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.
It’s certainly difficult to admit that the world has changed.
Sears’ real estate holdings didn’t save it.
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/
I’ve been yelling at that AWS cloud ever since they started becoming the standard for enterprise. Glad to see sanity prevails somewhere anyway
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
Yeah, definitely.
Ed Zitron of the Better Offline podcast had a piece a few weeks ago that explains so much.
I just want to say thanks for sharing this link. That was amazing.
It is the single best explanation for what is going on. As someone raised around these types ypu grow up with so much smoke being blown up your ass about jow much “better” your schools are which isn’t always the case.
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”.
Yeah, anyone that’s had a job for any significant amount of time realises that the people at the top aren’t there because they’re somehow smarter. Quite the contrary.
“If every other company jumped off a cliff, would you?”
They’d be off the cliff before you finished the statement.
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 👹
Hear, hear.
Thank you for posting this article, OP.
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…
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.
