 Next up, let's welcome Alistair Simpson, VP of Design at Dropbox. Now whether you're a small startup, a midsize company, or a large globally distributed team, redesigning the way you work is no small feat. Dropbox just happens to be entering its third month of working virtual first. And now we're going to get an exclusive look at the lessons they've learned and what they're doing along the way. Alistair will share his guidance on how to steer a company-wide mindset shift, how to focus your team's work, and how to ensure that people feel a sense of connection and belonging throughout the transition. You'll leave this talk with a framework that you can learn from as your organization implements remote first practices. Hello, my name is Alistair, the VP of Design here at Dropbox. And it's wonderful to join you today to share some stories about our transformation as we've shifted to virtual first with a focus on moving from productivity to purpose. Now many of you may be wondering why the VP of Design is up here talking about the future of work. And to be honest, you wouldn't be the first person who's asked me that question. Now I'm going to answer that puzzle in just a second. But first, we all have the ability to be creative. But too often, curiosity and creativity are educated out of us. But the heart of creativity is the ability to ask great questions and to challenge assumptions. But we're not taught this at any point in our schooling. And very little time is spent on things like working with hypothesis and experiments. We're simply programmed to pass tests in order to graduate and get nine to five jobs. The norms are formed and when we follow them without question. Now before I'm a designer, I'm a father. I have two young kids, Frankie and Buddy, who are aged six and four. Now kids are messy. They don't approach problems with process. They're inquisitive and they're creative by nature. And it is proven that giving kids unstructured play time helps with creativity. Yet many parents in schools still structure their kids time down to the minute. Schools even have bells to signal the end of the day. Learning by rote is sadly still commonplace. Now there is a deep societal connection between the way that we teach and the way that we work. And whilst modern officers do not have bells to signal the end of the day, they still mostly operate as they did 50 years ago. Nine to five, co-located, synchronized in time. Fortunately for my daughter Frankie, the school she attends doesn't do tests. Or wrote learning. There are no bells. They don't have single age classrooms and the job of education doesn't solely sit with the teacher. Instead, the children are organized in mixed age classes where they can help one another. Teachers pose questions to the kids. The kids then ask questions in return. They create hypothesis and run experiments to see what they learn. So from a very young age, they're taught the fundamentals of design. Asking questions and challenging assumptions. But in reality, it's simply tapping in to the innate creativity and curiosity that all children have. Like the majority of our education, our work environments have simply not kept up with the pace of change. The tamping down of creativity from a young age has spilled over into work and is why we haven't seen how we work really evolve until COVID-19 happened. But then overnight, we were forced into a big work experiment to challenge long held assumptions and ask better questions. Now I'm guessing for many of you, being forced to work remotely has, for the lack of a better word, really sucked. But it's here to stay and it doesn't have to suck. In fact, we have a unique opportunity to tap into our creativity to redesign work for the better. Now this is why you have the VP of design up here talking about redesigning how we work at Dropbox. Because if you get creative and open your mind to new possibilities, challenge norms and commonly held assumptions, you can use design to address common pain points of everyday life and also work. Now we have to look back to see our path forward. The story of how work begins with the industrial revolution. When our hands were replaced by the machine as the primary tool of mass production, now in those days, we were simply trying to be productive. Today, knowledge workers rely on our minds as well as processes, servers and Wi-Fi networks to grow the global economy. But as we have evolved, how we work hasn't. Just like factory work, we still try to gather in one place at the same time, even via Zoom. We still expect work to start at 9 and end around 5 p.m. Technology and incessant notifications that offer the false promise of making us more productive are actually more intrusive. In fact, modern technology and being always on leads to less time for family and life outside of work and often ends in burnout. And I'd argue that checking off tasks all day or being productive drains the purpose from our lives. So I genuinely believe that the next frontier will be driven by shifting us from productivity into purpose, from our hands to our heads and into working with our hearts or purpose. And so if we focus on purpose, we no longer have to accept the assumptions around how work gets done. I've recently put this theory to the test by helping Dropbox redesign from a co-located office culture to one that is virtual or remote first. From traditional ways of working into human-scentive ways of working. So using the fundamentals of design, I've teamed up with our chief people officer and a crew of creatives to rework all of the habits and norms from pre-pandemic times. This includes how and why we gather, how and why we communicate. And the culture we reinforce through our corporate structures. And what it really entails is a new system of beliefs and behaviors that inform how we show up every single day. Now as a designer, I often start with a set of principles. First principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. The idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements. And then reassemble them from the ground up. And this is where we started our virtual first journey at Dropbox. By creating a set of principles based on competitive analysis, insights from other companies, and insights from our own employees. Now those three principles were to maintain human connection and culture. We recognize the importance of preserving human connection as we still believe that in-person engagement is critical to fostering our culture. But importantly, we want to ensure that we keep a level playing field for all of our employees where everyone has equal opportunity to succeed, no matter where they are located. The second principle, flexibility and freedom. We want our employees to have more control over how and where they work. By increasing these choices, we'll have an expanded and more diverse talent pool from which we can recruit. And the last principle to maintain a learning mindset. This principle underpinned our approach and serves as a foundation for everything that we're doing. We've remained nimble and adopt the same philosophy we use to develop our own products to build, measure, learn and adapt. As a designer, I aim to put the customer at the heart of everything that I make. And in this sense, our customers were the 2,500 Dropbox employees. So as we ourselves were forced to work from home when the pandemic first hit, we started to turn human-centered design inward. And we ran research on ourselves and allowed our employees to co-create this journey with us. My research team conducted a study around how the shift to working remotely was going for people across the company. We talked to a diverse group of people who represented different roles and departments as well as life factors such as caregiver status. Through the study, we uncovered powerful stories about how people finally felt like they could take pause and eat dinner with their kids without feeling guilty, how they felt that because everyone was remote, the playing field was leveled because nobody was at headquarters anymore. We heard about how people are finding ways to spark inspiration for their team as culture is shifting from tangible to intangible. We also heard dozens of ideas that could help us feel more connected while we're apart. The study helped us see that as we redesign major aspects of our company, our people find new and innovative ways to adapt company culture, to help propel us forward. Now sometimes you have to slow down in order to speed up. Momentum does not always mean progress. With the end of the pandemic seemingly near, employees were clamoring for information and decisions around our future of work strategy. Would we ever return to the office like we were before? Would we go remote only? Would we adopt a hybrid model? Instead of rushing to answer these questions immediately, we took time. We communicated clearly about our progress. We wanted to ensure that we were shifting from a focus on productivity to purpose for our employees. Allowing employees to feel purpose in their personal lives, as well as in how they contribute to our company. So purpose beyond the workplace means that modern employers need to look after the entire human. And this encompasses personal life decisions around kids, caregiving responsibility, mental health, and much, much more. Now taking our principles, our insights and our data points, is how we landed on our virtual first approach to work. And at Dropbox, virtual first means every employee's primary way of working will be remote. We will be working from home. But importantly, we are retaining our offices, but switching them to collaboration spaces or studios as we're calling them. We recognize the importance of meeting in-person, but we want to do so intentionally. Our studios are places where teams can come together to collaborate in-person roughly once per month. They're basically not for solo work. We want to keep these in-person moments meaningful and magical. Now as we transition to our virtual first future, we knew that we had to help our employees go from an old way of working or thinking to a new human-centered way of working and thinking. And this is where we anchored our approach on three key behaviors or mindsets that we wanted employees to go from and then to. And I'm going to talk you through those three now. Our first mindset shift has been helping employees focus on the outcomes that they're achieving and less on how busy they actually are or feel. So going from busyness to impact. Now imagine this very common scenario. It's Friday night, you sit down with your partner and you ask how their work week was. The typical response is, it was a really busy week. Now think about that just for a second. As a society, we have equated busy with good or at least we haven't accepted it as the norm. Now how much better would it be if you could respond to that question with, I really did some work this week that positively impacted our customers and our business. So as a society, we need to shift the conversation away from hours spent at work or butts in seats mentality. I find it abhorrent that some companies actively track employees time. We must move towards an outcome-focused culture measured against solving real customer problems with goals that are framed around that problem, not just a win for the business. So how do you actually do that? Now at Dropbox we started with our company values. We've recently updated those values and we updated one of them to they win, we win. This sends a clear message from the top that if we focus on our customers, they, then our business, we, will follow. Now we back this up in product reviews by asking for the customer problem and goal and not just the business goal. It's a really simple yet effective way to connect an abstract company value into real product work and also to let everyone know that we are focused on impact to our customers. Next, one of the key problems employees have felt even before the pandemic was of being always on with numerous meetings all day every day. The old nine to five had been extended by smartphones and the implicit expectation to always respond. Now this may give the illusion of productivity but research shows that it also leads to burnout. To combat this, we created a set of core collaboration hours which is roughly 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in an employee's local time zone where we ask employees to be online and available for meetings or synchronous virtual collaboration. This encourages short bursts of synchronous work which research shows makes teams more effective. Outside of this time, employees can create their own non-linear workday which suits their own personal needs. So instead of mandating be present all day nine to five, we're focusing on outcomes instead of measuring time. So for me and many other parents, this means being able to pick up my kids from school a couple of days per week or take breaks in the middle of the day to get some air. It has given me and many employees permission to focus on their own personal needs without feeling guilty. My calendar is also open for everybody at Dropbox to see. It's not locked in private. I've published an internal company blog post sharing how I'd set up my calendar to give me better work-life balance. Changing people's mindsets is hard and you need to model the behaviors that you expect from the top down and then make them incredibly visible. Creating a non-linear workday with core collaboration hours built in also encourages space and distraction free time to really focus on a specific problem or as author Cal Newport calls it, deep work. Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It will make you better at what you do and it will provide you the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. It is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st century economy. And yet most people have actually lost the ability to go deep instead spending their days in a frantic blur of email and social media not even realizing that there's a better way. So all of the above has allowed us to focus on impact to our customers and our business versus just being busy and always on. Our next mindset shift has been helping employees change how they feel from being overloaded with too many meetings and notifications into a state of being focused and effective. And one of the most common reasons that we are overloaded is that we create too many synchronous meetings and we make it okay to constantly bombard one another with emails and instant messages. We've created a cultural norm where being back to back all day long equates to some badge of honor and the illusion of being effective. Sending a quick Slack or email is also deemed okay when if you think about it both of the equivalent of walking up to a colleague and tapping them on the shoulder to ask them a question every few minutes. That's hardly very humane. Now we all like having meetings because we enjoy bringing people together. We assume that our teammates are committed to paying attention to the issues that we're discussing. We also assume that someone else must need the information that's being shared and we often forget to ask to question why we're in the room and what the purpose actually is. We assume that someone else important scheduled the meeting and there must be a reason. The same for that report that we write every week. Someone reads it, right? Now these kinds of assumptions are convenient and they help maintain our office rituals. But to combat this, the Dropbox, we made it okay to say no to meetings. We've given official guidance on how to say no using messages like this. Thanks for inviting me. I'm experimenting with limiting my meetings to the 3Ds, decision making, discussion and debate, so I can get back time to focus. Since this is a status update meeting, I'm wondering if we can try to cover it over Slack or email first. If that doesn't work, I'm happy to chat more. Now I have personally emailed meeting organizers and asked the purpose of a meeting and declined until I received one. A meeting without an agenda should be automatically declined. Again, as a leader, it's incredibly important that I model these behaviors that I want to see in my team and the rest of the company. Now I just mentioned the 3Ds and we communicated that synchronous meetings must be reserved for those 3Ds. Important discussion, important debate and important decision making. If your synchronous meeting does not meet this bar, for example, if you're just giving an FYI or a status update, then you should not be having it. There are better ways to cover things like status updates that do not involve a meeting. Many of you may be wondering if we've cut down the number of hours available for synchronous collaboration, made it okay to say no to meetings and prioritized what meetings are actually used for, how does the majority of work actually get done? Now to support moving from overload to focus, we've asked employees to work asynchronously by default. This means instead of reflexively scheduling a meeting for everything, try to figure out what you need answered and how you can share it asynchronously. For example, via a Dropbox paper document, in JIRA or one of the other asynchronous tools that we use. This forces you to be more inclusive and thoughtful in how you communicate. This is inclusive because your teammate may be in a different time zone or looking after a child as part of their non-linear workday. So you can allow them to respond in a time that is convenient to them, as well as keeping work moving forward. Spending time to write down your own thoughts is also much more thoughtful than tapping someone on the shoulder every few minutes via Slack or just reflexively scheduling a meeting without an agenda. Now our last mindset shift is helping people move from disconnection to feeling like they actually belong at work. Now it is a common misconception that working remotely means you are automatically disconnected from your team. We need to help people unlearn this. I have worked in plenty of office-based environments where the culture was sterile, not inclusive and did not foster a sense of purpose or belonging despite everyone being located in the same four walls. You must be deliberate about building purpose and belonging into your culture regardless of whether you're remote or in office. If you're not deliberate about building purpose and belonging, whether you're remote or in office, you will have problems. Now at Dropbox we're being deliberate about encouraging connectivity and a sense of belonging. Belonging to us means a sense that your perspective is welcome and that you are accepted, full stop, by your team and the company. So we rewrote our own definition of culture and we shared this with the company. And so for us, Dropbox culture is our shared set of values, beliefs and actions as we work together each day. We then set about sharing a set of practical practices around how employees could reinforce our culture through their day-to-day actions. So to really scale our practices, we share our company values and tools through our virtual first toolkit. The virtual first toolkit is an open source guide on how to live and work when virtual first. And it's based on our own lessons and democratizing design thinking practices. Now as we evolve in virtual first, the toolkit will evolve with us. In fact, our second major update will hopefully launch today on June 30th. And I highly recommend you go and use that latest version. Now for example, a toolkit has a simple how-to guide of how to run an inclusive virtual meeting. Virtual meetings are incredibly important moments where you can share your virtual, show your virtual teammates that you care about them and are creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone. We also have practices around how to structure your calendar to enable better work-life balance or how to say no to meetings and much, much more. To be clear, the virtual first toolkit is not a set of hard and fast rules or policies. We hire smart people and we don't want to tell them exactly how to do their jobs. That is how productivity happens. We want to give them practices, frameworks and guides to help them achieve great purpose in their work as well as their personal lives. And we believe that the workplace of the future must help people create an environment in which they feel like they belong. And so inspired by the principles of tarot, we designed a set of corporate tarot connection cards to build connection through the power of stories and play. A simple set of cards can take a team from dysfunctional to aligned to fostering trust and care. And we also developed the diversity and inclusion toolkit to help teams build more diverse and inclusive cultures. The lens of design is what distinguishes this kit from the many excellent resources that already exist for diversity and inclusion. When designing, we ask questions, we define problems and we explore a range of solutions. We work alone and collaborate with others and iterate as we go. And this kit suggests a similar practice when building culture. Both of these kits, if you search for them are available online for anybody to use. As part of a research study we carried out, we found that one of the facets to cultivating belonging was encouraging cross connections between colleagues. In an office environment, architects will design accidental collision spaces deliberately to foster this type of connection. The keywords here are deliberately designed. And we've taken this to heart as we've redesigned our offices into studios. While we are remote first, we have retained our offices and repurposed them to intentionally designed studio spaces. These are intended to enable meaningful moments of collaboration and culture for employees. They also help us live our principle to preserve our human connection and ensure a level playing field for everyone. This means that our studios are designed to foster collaboration and culture building moments, not individual or solo work. We've kitted out meeting rooms with large virtual whiteboards, made sure that there are intentional areas for focused deep work between meetings and rooms can be easily reconfigured to suit the size of the team that is gathering. These studios are supported by a set of local champions who curate in-person cultural events for their teams. And we also have a complete guide of how and when to use them for team collaboration as we reimagine the future of the in-person work. Now, all of these investments help us to encourage a true sense of belonging for our employees. Our behavior change at scale is hard. We're unpacking hundreds of years of ingrained habits. It's why you need to have both a macro, top-down point of view on where you think you're going. You need to give people permission to uphold your beliefs and permission to challenge the status quo, but also provide the tools to employees to empower micro-behavior changes from the ground up, things like the virtual first toolkit. So redesigning how we work may seem like it is outside the scope of traditional design teams, but it really doesn't have to be. All of us are experimenting as we define the future of work. And at Dropbox, we're simply deciding to be deliberate and apply an intentional design lens to the problem of how great work gets done. Now, as I close, I'm reminded again of my daughter, Frankie, and her perpetual question-asking at the dinner table. Questions like, Daddy, why do we have jails when we could find another way to help people change? Or, Daddy, why do people say you have to put the fork on the right side of your plate at dinner? And her constant creation of ideas, hypothesis, drawings to solve problems that she sees in the world. It would be easy to get mad at the questions or the drawings and the ideas. It would be easy to tell her why they just simply won't work and ask her to stop, but I don't. I encourage the curiosity. So next time you hear the same questions from your kids or your employees about why something is done a particular way, I beg you, please don't squash it. Encourage it. This is creativity at work. It is where we learn to unlearn habits or beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve us. And this is where magic happens and the future of work will be designed. And with that, I'd like to thank you and thank GitLab for putting us on. Thanks.