Dropbox: team collaboration
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Has Dropbox found the solution to global team collaboration?

27 Jan 2017

Is your team based in one room, or do you collaborate across the globe? What if there was a way you could make that easier?

It’s a question that has no doubt crossed many minds: when a company is literally globe-spanning, how do all of the separate elements work together? How can a team be fully in sync when it’s spread across multiple cities, continents and time zones?

Arguably the curse of all multinationals, this is perhaps of most concern in the ever-growing, ever-expanding, ever-on world of tech.

When so many global companies – like Apple, Intel or Google – have a laser focus on innovation, it becomes more important than ever that there be no slackening off on work throughout any given day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the collaboration gurus at Dropbox who may have cracked the solution of … well, collaboration.

Speaking on a panel at a recent fireside chat held at Dropbox’s Dublin office, Adrienne Gormley – global head of customer experience at Dropbox – talked about how a widespread team can be of benefit to a company that is always trying to innovate.

“I have started to try and inculcate this idea of, ‘Let’s work with time zones. Let’s turn it into a 24-hour clock’. So, when I go to bed at night, I hand stuff over to my team in the US and, when I get up in the morning, things have progressed,” said the Inspirefest 2016 speaker.

“So instead of it being an inconvenience, we start to turn it into an advantage.”

With teams across all areas of the business working in offices from Dublin and London to San Francisco and Tokyo, collaboration efforts like that can make the difference between a unified approach to the work and utter chaos.

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Kirsty Tobin
By Kirsty Tobin

Kirsty Tobin served as careers editor of Silicon Republic from 2015 up to August 2017. When she was younger, she had a dream where she started and won a fight with a T-Rex, so she’s pretty sure she kicked butt at this, too. Passions include eating all the cake, watching more TV than is healthy and sassy comebacks.

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