Dropbox
Dropbox Work-Life Balance & Wellbeing
Frequently Asked Questions
Employees describe workloads as manageable, well-prioritized, and structured to allow real time off. They point to supportive managers, clear prioritization, and effective planning as evidence PTO is respected and modeled.
Employees describe Dropbox as operating within a Virtual First model that’s built on trust, autonomy, and intentional design. They highlight clear collaboration hours, async workflows, ‘walking meetings’, and team connection rituals—like virtual meetups and in-person gatherings—as evidence flexibility is part of daily life. This flexibility helps employees integrate work with personal priorities, strengthens engagement, and opens hiring opportunities beyond traditional office hubs.
Leadership reinforces this by maintaining clear distributed work policies, providing tools that enable seamless collaboration, and training managers to model and support async practices. Additional signals include Built In coverage highlighting Virtual First innovation and inclusion in Built In’s Best Places to Work award (2023, 2024, 2025), recognizing companies with modern approaches to collaboration and balance.
Dropbox supports mental health and wellbeing through Modern Health sessions, focus days, neurodiversity support (US) and Peloton perks (US), demonstrating a strong commitment to employee health and accessible, meaningful resources for everyone. The company also provides a perks allowance showing that wellbeing extends beyond mental health.
Employees highlight encouragement to use resources, focus days, and support for walking meetings as evidence that wellbeing is part of everyday culture.
Dropbox Employee Perspectives
Tell us about your usual day working remotely.
I tend to start my day similarly to when I went into an office. On most days, I’m up early for a morning run followed by breakfast and coffee. Working from home allows me a little extra time to catch up on the news before I typically sit down around 8:30 or 9 a.m.
Meetings for me are typically stacked towards the first part of the day to allow for collaboration across time zones. For me, this was a bit of an adjustment because I previously did most of my focused work time in the morning, however it allows for big uninterrupted blocks in the afternoon.
What habits or routines help you to thrive as a data engineer in a remote environment?
I try to structure my day pretty similar to how I did going into the office. I don’t do anything particular to mimic a commute — that was the worst part of my day! — but I am still exercising most mornings. I often take small walks during the day, but for me keeping work time focused on work helps with my productivity.
Working from home sometimes means there are more opportunities for distractions, so I typically assign myself one or two tasks daily that need to get done. Outside of meetings, those are my priorities, and I like to set myself a timer to dig into them and focus before allowing myself to get distracted on other projects. This is super helpful for getting myself into a flow and remaining productive. I almost always do my “most annoying” task first to get it out of the way because I work best when settled in without big disruptions.
How do you balance “heads-down” concentration with collaborative work while working remotely?
My team at Dropbox generally does a great job keeping standing meetings within my morning hours of about 9 a.m to 1 p.m. This means that afternoons are almost always free for either heads-down work or deep collaboration! One of the tricky aspects about remote work is needing to be proactive in reaching out for more casual brainstorms and collabs. I try to utilize quick Zoom syncs as much as possible and often spend one-on-ones simply brainstorming and talking out loud even if we don’t have a super-focused agenda topic for the day.
Part of my role is to help shape team strategy through data and insights. Since I don’t have as much casual conversation time, one technique I deploy is to create a personal insights channel and invite several people to it. This is where I share in-progress work, random insights I find that might not be fully packaged or ideas I have. I have found this super helpful in driving conversations and inspiring future work as colleagues can comment on their own time and keep up with my progress!
