Not a HR policy, a product: How Dropbox built virtual first to last

“Flexibility and autonomy are the ultimate currency in modern work,” according to Dropbox co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi.

This explains why, as he prepares to become sole CEO, Alkarmi’s keeping the company’s virtual first model, instead of joining the return to office (RTO) wave sweeping the rest of tech.

RTO makes no sense for Dropbox because the tech company has spent the past six years building virtual first not as a HR policy, but as a product; it’s the operating model for Dropbox’s 2,000 employees. Virtual work was co-designed by the People and Design Teams, and led by with Allison Vendt, VP, People Operations and Head of Employee Experience.

She tells UNLEASH that the goal was an equitable experience that enables all 2,000 Dropbox employees to do their best work, no matter where they’re based.

The model has evolved – by design – since its launch in 2020. This year, 94% of employees say they are successful working virtual first, and nine in ten believe it enables them to have a greater impact than other working models.

These results explain Alkarmi’s decision on virtual first. He has experienced firsthand how virtual first provides the discipline to prioritize “spending time on the work that creates the most impact” balanced with in-person time that “gives teams that foundation of trust they need to operate virtually,” says Vendt.

Not remote. Not hybrid. Virtual first

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Dropbox was no different to most employers; 97% of workers worked in the office – “we very much had that focus on the in-person, office experience,” says Vendt. Conversations had begun about flexible working options – the pandemic just accelerated them.

Dropbox seized the opportunity to “challenge the assumptions that we’ve always made around the way that work needs to happen.”

Rather than default to remote or hybrid, the People team spent months in what Vendt calls “design discovery mode,” researching industry trends and reviewing internal data.

“What we kept coming back to was the research” – it became clear that neither remote or hybrid worked for Dropbox, instead the right decision was virtual first: an operating model where remote and asynchronous work is paired with deliberate in-person gatherings.

“We deliberately did not want to use the word remote in the title…Human connection is at the core of our model,” states Vendt. 

While it started as a HR project, Vendt notes that the team realized “we had to reinvent things end to end,” pulling in IT, Comms and Finance. The most consequential partnership was with the Design team, which pushed the People team to treat virtual first as a product designed around employee and business needs, not a policy.

That decision framing shaped how Dropbox handled early stumbles. The company is transparent that turnover spiked in the first two years, but Vendt doesn’t pin that on the model itself.

“There’s a lot of other factors at play that contributed to the spike in attrition,” she says – a volatile labor market, and pandemic lockdowns that meant Dropbox could not yet deliver the in-person piece of the model.

Treating virtual first as a product also meant accepting that “some people will opt out…it wasn’t necessarily going to be the right fit for everyone.”

What kept the model alive early on was staying “receptive to feedback, and then tweaking our approach,” rather than treating the 2020 design as complete. “We communicated that to employees: we want you to help us build this model.”

One standout example is that Dropbox had planned to launch core collaboration hours and async working as soon as virtual first went live, but employee feedback suggested this wasn’t a good idea. Managers and teams needed training on how to work this way before it became the norm. Vendt and her team delayed the launch for a few months and trained the teams.

That lesson has shaped every iteration since: “Flexibility without structure quickly turns into chaos: meeting overload, inconsistent expectations and always on.”That lesson has shaped every iteration since: “Flexibility without structure quickly turns into chaos: meeting overload, inconsistent expectations and always on.”

Virtual first now “looks very different from early years” – an evolution validated by employee success data.

From sentiment to systems: How Dropbox measures virtual first

The lowest attrition rate in company history. Record highs in retention and sentiment. In 2026, 92% of Dropbox employees say virtual first is pertinent to why they stay – rising to 93% for high performers – while 74% of new hires cite virtual first as a key reason why they joined. Applications per role are 7x higher than before the model launched, and hiring quality has remained stable.

Those numbers are important, but they don’t tell the whole story. As virtual first has become embedded in how Dropbox operates, Vendt’s team has shifted from exploring whether employees like the model to whether it’s helping them do their best work.

Because their work produces clear, measurable signals, Dropbox has studied developer productivity in virtual first. The data shows that in 2026 they’re submitting 35% more pull requests aka code changes reviewed by team mates, time from new code to production has dropped 40%, and developer experience scores are up 8 points since 2024.

Dropbox also partnered with developer leaders to pilot whether reducing unnecessary meetings could create more focus work time for engineering teams. Dropbox reduced weekly meeting hours by 27%; coding time increased 28%. 80% of participants thought the pilot was successful, and 90% recommended scaling the approach.

While no single data point drives business performance alone, Vendt believes taking all these stats together shows that virtual first is key to positive outcomes for people and the business.

Tweaking continues at Dropbox; Vendt notes that virtual first is an evolving model that focuses on “continuously improving how work happens.” Top of mind currently is experimenting with AI, including around digital twins and offsite planning.

Virtual first, Vendt notes, has given Dropbox a “really strong foundation for our employees to really thrive in the AI era.”

AI and virtual first are complementary; they reinforce each other. “It can be really tricky working in an asynchronous, distributed work model – you have a lot of documentation, you have to think about the workflows,” notes Vendt. AI helps remove the friction.

At the same time, as AI accelerates execution, “virtual first helps provide some great guardrails and intentionally around how that increased capacity is getting used.”

That doesn’t mean AI hasn’t created new challenges. There are new questions around responsible use: “how are you ensuring you’re not over-relying on AI?”

Dropbox’s answer has been to name and hire for what it calls “durable skills” – judgement, awareness, adaptability – alongside technical ones, and to build an AI Proficiency Framework that clarifies what good looks like as AI becomes central to daily work.

There’s no universal solution to work design

As the return-to-office debate rages on, Vendt advises her peers to move the conversation away from a false binary - “try to remove it as much as possible from this ideological debate around remote versus the office,” and instead tie decisions to business problems.

“I keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on externally with return to office mandates – I don’t see a lot of data showing how this is working to improve culture or business performance,” Vendt tells UNLEASH.

Vendt is careful not to sell Dropbox’s virtual first model as a template for all companies.

“There’s no universal answer,” she says – Dropbox’s model works because it was designed around the company’s business and it had buy-in from the top.“There’s no universal answer,” she says – Dropbox’s model works because it was designed around the company’s business and it had buy-in from the top.

“The biggest lesson is how can you get more intentional about the way in which work gets done” – this question only becomes more important given the “rapid AI transformation phase that we’re in,” concludes Vendt.