By now, millions of people around the world have fully adjusted to working from home, with all of the complications and blurring of personal and professional lines that go along with it. With the future still very much TBD some eight months into the Covid-19 pandemic, one thing feels certain: How we work will never be the same.
A funny thing happened, though, when people stopped fretting over workplace shutdowns and began to lean into their new virtual reality. They discovered that there are actually quite a few benefits to distributed work—things like increased productivity, a greater emphasis on trust and accountability, a true understanding of the need for, and benefits of, flexibility. They learned that the end of offices doesn’t have to mean the end of office culture. They found out that Zoom fatigue is real, but hardly fatal, and an acceptable tradeoff for a new sort of intimacy it can create among teammates who were never quite as intentional—before they had to be—about how they connected.
One key learning from the distributed work model is that it may be more than just simply compatible with creativity and innovation—it might, in fact, foster such qualities. All of which may help explain the findings of a recent poll, in which three in five workers who have been doing their jobs from home during the pandemic said they would prefer to continue to work remotely.
The future of work is, quite literally, now.
Recently, as part of a four-part conversation series sponsored by Dropbox, journalist and podcast host Guy Raz, sat down with entrepreneurs and small business owners to hear about some of the adjustments they’ve had to make in response to the challenges of the pandemic. In “The Drop In: Essential Conversations About Business Now,” Raz spoke with guests from the fields of entertainment, education, professional services, and technology to discuss the many issues transforming entrepreneurship, including how to maintain productivity, engagement, and effectiveness among teams they can no longer physically see all day, not to mention how to optimize growth and profits under some of the greatest limitations of our lifetime.
Among the five guests—Steven Galanis, Sal Khan, Tilane Jones, and husband-and-wife team Coltrane Curtis and Lisa Chu—a through line quickly emerged: All have approached the pandemic less as a problem to be solved than a challenge from which to learn. As a result, their businesses were not only surviving, but thriving. “This is a moment to be radically different,” said Galanis, the cofounder and CEO of Cameo, an app that sells personalized video shout-outs from celebrities, and which has seen growth skyrocket during the pandemic. For Galanis, being “radically different” has included scrapping plans for a new company HQ in Chicago in favor of moving to a fully distributed workforce. It was a transformative decision that single handedly, and instantly, expanded Cameo’s talent pool and allowed Galanis to make hires he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make. “I completely rebuilt my top team,” he told Raz. “I got the best people by deciding that the best people can be anywhere.” A third of Cameo’s current employees have never worked together in an office.
Tilane Jones, the president of Array, a distribution company and arts collective dedicated to promoting films by people of color and women, told Raz that while she missed her coworkers desperately, the time apart has been an invaluable bonding experience. “I see people face to face more often now, over video chat, than I ever did in the office,” she said. “In so many ways, remote working has brought my team closer together.”
Dropbox has always been a company that aimed to design a different way of working—one where business owners and their teams could be less tied to place but no less effective or collaborative. The brand—which will transition to a virtual first working model in 2021—has used this time to build new products and enhance the tools that can help small and medium business owners, and their distributed teams, navigate the emerging landscape by maintaining control of their workspace and work connections—wherever and however they want to work. By organizing work life and allowing for an everything-in-one-place functionality, Dropbox Business provides the new office HQ—a place for individuals working separately to come together as a team. In creating the collateral for their new Teams@Work campaign, Dropbox itself was tasked with applying its own principals to the new work landscape, managing a remote shoot and conducting what would previously have been in-person brainstorming sessions via video conferencing, messaging apps, and Dropbox Paper docs, all the while accommodating team members in different time zones and with different work habits.
While the future of work may look different than it did even just a year ago, the importance of teamwork will undoubtedly remain, however the landscape looks a year, or five, from now—none of Raz’s guests disputed that. Coltrane Curtis and Lisa Chu, the married heads of consumer marketing agency Team Epiphany, told Raz they have always viewed their firm’s tight-knit team and strong office culture as their key differentiator. When their offices closed in mid-March, the couple had a single goal: Keep the team feeling whole. That’s included collaborative creative projects, helping employees set up remote rooftop offices, and Zoom-free Fridays. “Flexibility is what this new world demands,” Curtis told Raz. “We are a stronger shop because of what we’ve gone through.”
Sal Khan, the founder of the non-profit educational platform Khan Academy, talked to Raz about scrambling to adapt his company to accommodate real-time demand. As schools began to close, Khan Academy’s numbers began to grow rapidly, and they have not stopped. When asked to predict the near-term future of education, Khan offered a suggestion that could just as easily apply to that of the workplace: “2025 will be a world where earning and proof of knowledge is not bound by time or space.” Or as Jones put it, “There is and will be no other way to be as a business leader than flexible.”
Discover the full Drop In series here.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Dropbox.
