👋 Happy Tuesday! Table for one, laptop included. A Malibu ad exec noticed restaurants sit half-empty on weekday mornings while remote workers run out of places to go, so he built Laptop Brunch: check into a participating LA restaurant, order an entree within 15 minutes, and your first hour is free.
In this week’s edition:
💪 Dropbox Isn't Backing Off Virtual-First
🗞️ Top Flexible Work News
👀 The Cost of a Static Workplace
Please forward to colleagues and friends!
THIS WEEK’S FLEX FOCUS 🔍
Dropbox has been virtual-first since 2021. When Ashraf Alkarmi takes over as sole CEO, that isn’t changing.
Alkarmi became co-CEO in May alongside founder Drew Houston, after leadership roles at Vimeo and Meta. He told Business Insider that flexibility and autonomy are the ultimate currency in modern work, and he has hiring numbers behind it. Applications per job ran nearly seven times higher in 2025 than before virtual-first. Offer acceptance is the highest it has been, attrition is the lowest. And 74% of this year’s new hires named virtual-first as a reason they took the job.
The distinction Alkarmi draws is between virtual-first and remote-only is one Flex Index fans may find familiar: virtual-first doesn’t mean “never in person.” Dropbox still flies people in. Hack week puts employees in the San Francisco, Seattle, and Dublin studios Monday through Thursday to build, with customer coffee chats and AI sessions running alongside. Leadership holds off-sites for planning, and individual teams hold their own.
Those gatherings do what video calls alone struggle to accomplish: build deeper relationships and alignment faster. People leave with enough trust to go back to virtual and stay aligned. 89% of Dropbox employees say they have greater impact working in virtual-first than they did in other workplace models.
Set that against what Houston described on the Leadership Next podcast last year: forcing people into a car three days a week to sit on the same Zoom call they’d have taken from home. Five years in, Dropbox can point to hiring data. Most companies mandating attendance still can’t say what the office is for.
FLEX WORK QUICK HITS 💥
Stay ahead of the curve with our curated roundup of the trending flexible work stories making waves right now. Here's what you need to know 👇
Fast Company: Venbrook president Alison Myers says the office used to set the shape of the workday, and leaders who haven't replaced that structure are the real reason engagement keeps slipping.
Phys.org: An Osaka Metropolitan University study of 5,645 residents found fully remote work protects life satisfaction in Japan's shrinking cities, keeping people tied to labor markets their towns can no longer supply.
Forbes: Remote work carries a layer of invisible emotional labor, from managing tone in writing to performing constant availability, and it can wear people down long before it shows up in their work.
FLEXPERT INSIGHTS 🧠
Most companies still sign office leases as if they can predict their headcount three years out. On the Workspace Talk Show with Nathan Manuel, Kayley DiCicco, Director of Enterprise Sales at Expansive, named what that habit costs: “The most expensive workplace decision you can make right now is a static one.”
Enterprises have stopped treating flexible space as a stopgap between leases. They use it to test a market with four salespeople before signing anything, and to absorb headcount they can’t forecast. AI is making that forecast harder, which raises what optionality is worth.
Flex is still only 10 to 15% of total office inventory. JLL has predicted 30% by 2030. Kayley thinks the measure changes as it grows: less price per square foot, more quality of interaction per employee. The gap she names is data. Companies wire their own offices with sensors, then lose that visibility the moment they move into someone else’s building.
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