Among the many firms sticking with distant work and doing it effectively, Atlassian is a standout. The Australian agency, which makes collaboration software program and has a market cap of $63 billion, adopted a “team anywhere” coverage in 2020 and located that it really works so effectively that it’s sticking to it.
However the time period “team anywhere” is perhaps deceptive. That’s as a result of Atlassian, which has 12 international places of work and operates in 13 international locations, nonetheless desires workers to be primarily based inside a specific set of time zones in an effort to work on a sure staff.
Atlassian has divided the planet into a couple of “collaboration zones,” and it tries to verify anyone staff is inside one zone. As an example, on a staff of, say, 150 engineers, the staff ought to all “have at least four to six hours of overlap and can reasonably work together across that,” Atlassian CTO Rajeev Rajan mentioned in a YouTube interview with Josh Twist, CEO and cofounder of Zuplo, a smaller software program agency.
So Sydney and India work, as a result of these time zones are shut sufficient collectively, mentioned Rajan. However Seattle and London could be much less possible as a result of the sleeping hours for one are the enterprise hours of the opposite, with little alternative for overlap.
If a job candidate is outdoors a specific staff’s designated time zones, they could effectively be turned down for that motive.
“We’ve had to say no to candidates who couldn’t accommodate their team’s time zone and adjust our location policies so they’re clear and specific,” Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar told CNBC just lately.
The coverage contrasts with the corporate’s preliminary stance of letting distant staff select any time zone so long as a supervisor authorised it.
“What we’ve found is that we’ll make exceptions, for example, for one or two people to work in Japan, but the rest of their team is 12 or 14 hours behind, and at the end of the day, their happiness at work suffers,” mentioned Farquhar.
Now, “we actually make sure that our teams are healthy from a ‘collaboration zone’ standpoint,” mentioned Rajan.
General, the corporate has thrived with distant work, Farquhar mentioned, including that the largest advantages have been in recruitment and retention.
Annie Dean, international head of Group Wherever, instructed CNBC that for every open position the corporate has obtained twice as many candidates for the reason that new coverage began, together with from know-how firms with much less versatile work insurance policies.
Dean instructed Fortune earlier this yr that she isn’t a fan of hybrid work, or requiring workers to come back into the workplace a set variety of days per week. The issue with that strategy, she mentioned, is it “requires people to organize their life around the office, and companies have to pay the highest cost of real estate. It means you’re carrying all the costs of the old model, and can’t have any efficiencies of the new model.” She known as hybrid “the illusion of choice.”
Farquhar himself told Australia’s 60 Minutes program that he “might come into the office about once a quarter,” including, “We expect people to be able to work from home, from a café, from an office, but we don’t really care where they do their work—what we care about is the output that they produce.”
Within the wake of the pandemic, firms have diverged of their approaches to distant work. Amazon, as an illustration, has blocked promotions for workers who violate its return-to-office coverage however AI chip powerhouse Nvidia nonetheless permits staff to choose where they work.
Like Nvidia, Atlassian maintains interesting places of work for employees however doesn’t drive them to work in them. It’s now creating new places of work in Seattle and Sydney. Nevertheless it’s adopted new metrics for evaluating its actual property technique, monitoring price per workplace go to and the diploma to which workers make the most of an workplace and have interaction inside it.
To construct sturdy groups, Rajan mentioned, “you need human connection.” To realize that, Atlassian focuses on what it calls “intentional togetherness” to, because it explains on its web site, “round out our sense of one another: digitally, but also in person, so that we might know one another as full humans with lives outside of the digital ‘walls’ of our workplace.”
Such bonding can happen in places of work or at off-sites. For its upcoming Sydney headquarters, Atlassian is concentrated on collaborative areas, realizing it might want to typically accommodate massive groups gathering for meetups.
