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The company also commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit to dig into the pros and cons of a distributed workplace. Teams started testing new ways of work, like a four-day workweek or a much more flexible schedule than a 9-5. Employees were sent surveys with questions about remote work and office life. Not long after sending everybody home, Dropbox started researching itself. Houston called 2020 "a really bad, buggy beta test of distributed work." Now he hopes he's on the leading edge of designing a system that works. Houston and Dropbox are a bit further ahead: They've spent the last eight months overhauling both Dropbox the product and Dropbox the company in an effort to help define the future of work. But what, exactly, does the new world look like? What are its rules, its routines, its practices? What new tools, new skills, new societal shifts does it require? Those are the questions most CEOs are still asking. Much of this seems obvious now: that the future of work won't look like it has before. Maybe we're actually on the cusp of delivering on that promise." "This promise has been around since the '80s, with telework and things like more flexibility, being able to work from anywhere, not being stuck in commutes all day. "It's the same thing with distributed work," Houston went on. "In a lot of ways," Houston said over Zoom, where he said he now spends nearly all his waking hours, "you can sort of squint and be like, 'I can imagine how this could really open up a new world.'" He compared it to the early days of the internet: Everything's basic and primitive, nothing quite works right, but if you can see through the growing pains, you'll see there's something big on the other end.

And they felt like Dropbox needed to lead the charge in figuring that out. Change that would stick around, in some form, long after the pandemic ended. But pretty quickly, Houston and his team started to realize that 2020 was going to bring lasting change to the way people work. The first thing Dropbox CEO Drew Houston did when the pandemic hit was roughly what most other CEOs did: worry like crazy, send his employees home, and just try to find a way to keep going.