Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar reveals secret to turbocharging productivity

Meetings are the bugbear of most corporate employees. But Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar has up-ended that at the software giant, slashing the equivalent of more than 375,000 of them.

Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar says managers ‘need to stop obsessing over where people work, and start focussing on how they work’.

Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar has found the key to turbocharging flatlining productivity – a move key to securing pay rises.

Mr Farquhar has released new data that show how many minutes Atlassian has saved in unnecessary meetings since acquiring Loom for $1.5bn last October – its biggest acquisition in dollar terms to date.

It comes after Atlassian – which has market value of $US49.69bn ($77.17bn) – acquired Loom to accelerate its push into distributed work, a 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

At the time of acquisition, Loom had more than 25 million users who are recording almost five million videos a month. It specialises in asynchronous work, which means videos or even meetings do not need to be viewed or attended in real time, allowing employees to view content when it best suits their workflow.

Crucially, it slashes the number of meetings the company needs to hold, allowing employees to focus more on productive work. In Atlassian’s case, it has saved 3.75 million minutes, which it says is the equivalent of 375,000 meetings, since unleashing Loom across its 11,000-strong workforce.

Mr Farquhar said the platform was proof managers “need to stop obsessing over where people work, and start focusing on how they work”.

“People aren’t scheduling meetings because they want to waste time or feel unproductive – they default to this old school way of working, because they don’t know any different.” Mr Farquhar told The Australian.

“Optimising to an asynchronous style of work means I can free up hours of time in my diary each week – but the work still gets done. My teams and I rely on tools to help us get information out of peoples’ heads and into a Confluence page or Loom video.

“Not only are we freeing knowledge, but it’s much easier to edit and comment on, and a more inclusive way of working for people in different time zones and with different working styles.”

Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar has found the key to turbocharging, flat lining productivity – a move key to securing pay rises.

Atlassian surveyed 1000 knowledge workers last month, finding that meetings were ineffective 76 per cent of the time, while 51 per cent of respondents said they had to work overtime a few days a week due to meeting overload.

“80 per cent of respondents say they’d be more productive if they spent less time in meetings. But that’s easier said than done. For 54 per cent of knowledge workers, meetings dictate the structure of each day instead of time for “real work” taking priority,” Atlassian said.

According to the research, 74 per cent of respondents said they are often in meetings that result in the decision to schedule another meetings, further draining productivity.

Australia’s biggest companies – from the big banks, law firms to engineering businesses and health giants – are turning to technology to lift sluggish productivity, according to The Australian’s latest CEO survey. But most of these efforts have been focused on artificial intelligence, which the Albanese government has forecast will inject up to $600bn a year into the economy by the end of the decade.

Mr Farquhar said: “asynchronous work can be adopted by everyone – whether you’re in an office three days a week, or once a quarter”.

“Companies that make this transition will waste less time and make faster progress.”

An Atlassian spokeswoman added that since the company had introduced Loom internally, it had been more effective than written updates.

“In fact, people whose managers used Loom to share information were twice as likely to feel more connected to their manager,” she said.