Tech billionaire Scott Farquhar reveals ‘secret sauce’ to flexible work

Companies can’t have a foot in both camps when it comes to flexible work arrangements, according to Atlassian’s co-founder.

Tech billionaire Scott Farquhar says companies which fail to adopt flexible working permanently will hinder productivity further as well as their ability to reach their “full business potential”.

Mr Farquhar, co-founder and co-chief executive of software titan Atlassian, has released a guide on what the company has gleaned from 1000 days of remote working, or what he describes as distributed work.

The document is not anti-office. Atlassian is itself building a new Sydney headquarters at a total cost of $1.4bn next to Central Station, and maintains 12 offices globally.

But Mr Farquhar said the pandemic-fuelled trend of more people working from home or in other remote locations was here to stay.

A rendering of Atlassian’s new ‘Tech Central’ Sydney HQ, which will tower over Sydney’s Central Station.

This is despite some of Australia’s biggest companies attempting to rein in the practice, from CBA and NAB to Mineral Resources.

He stressed distributed work was slightly different to hybrid or remote arrangements because it focused more on ensuring how most desk workers collaborate, regardless of the time spent in the office. And focusing on the former can unleash greater productivity.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach,” Mr Farquhar told The Australian.

“Employers need to be deliberate in how they do this. In my mind, there are two sorts of endpoints you get, which is my employee base is going to be close to a particular city or office and whether I get them in two to three or four days a week … or do you say, I’m going to be remote and I going to hire people … all over Australia and the world and we are going to optimise for that.

“I think companies that are trying to have a foot in both camps are going to struggle.”

The main reason companies who try to do both struggle, according to Mr Farquhar, is it can lead to some employees feeling like “second class citizens”.

“Those people going into their office to see half their team, it just doesn’t make any sense. If you’ve chosen to come into the office two days a week but we’re not going to tell you which two days — in which case you turn up Monday and you’re one of four people in the office. You think why did I just travel an hour each way to sit on the same Zoom calls that I could have done at home.

“So what we have tried to do with this guide that we’re launching is to share all the lessons that we have learned as the largest company that’s done remote work, and so the petri dish or experiments that we run, we can prove they work at scale.”

Companies reining in remote work often are trying to solve four challenges: productivity, connection, what to do with office space, and culture.

On the flip side, those who adopted remote working permanently have found they can attract more staff in a tight labour market, with 91 per cent of Atlassian employees saying they have chosen to stay at the company because of its distributed work policy.

Furthermore, Mr Farquhar said the number of candidates per role is two times higher than it was before the company launched its ‘Team Anywhere’ policy and offer acceptance rates had surged 20 per cent.

“This is the sort of a secret sauce that doesn’t really benefit us to talk about it,” Mr Farquhar quips.

Atlassian office in George St, Sydney.

But he says employers needed to adapt to the changing nature of officework, particularly amid flatlining productivity.

“You don’t need an office to do great work. That doesn’t mean offices don’t matter.

“Our offices serve three purposes: connection, company belonging and a place to get work done.

“We know that coming together matters, but we don’t believe that teams need to sit together 260 days a year. We have teams meet in-person at one of our offices three to four times a year, and make sure the priority is social bonding.”

Mr Farquhar said employees also work best when they structure their time around priorities instead of meetings and notifications, which not only made them more efficient but feel less overwhelmed.

“We reserve meetings for creativity, navigating complexity, driving momentum, and bonding, and aim to prioritise the work that matters.

“Neglecting to adapt to the distributed new normal is not just a missed opportunity but a detriment to an organisation’s ability to harness its full business potential. It’s not rocket science: when teams work smarter, they can achieve more, faster. And with better results.”

Since 2020, Atlassian staff saved about 10 days per year in time they would have previously spent commuting, which Mr Farquhar said equated to about half a billion minutes.

In regard to connection and productivity, Atlassian says employees are spending about 13 per cent less time in meetings, reporting a 32 per cent improvement in focus.