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Four times a year in the office: Atlassian goes all in on WFH
By Cara Waters
Atlassian’s billionaire co-founder and co-chief executive Scott Farquhar has only been in the office three times over the past year.
His absence from the project management software giant’s famously worker-friendly George Street headquarters in Sydney is not just a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but rather signals a broader shift in the way the $80 billion tech giant is planning to operate. In short, Atlassian is going all in on working from home.
Atlassian co-founder and co-chief executive Scott Farquhar wants employees to be able to work from anywhere.Credit: Christopher Pearce
Under its new “Team Anywhere” policy, Atlassian’s 5700 staff around the world can work from any location in a country where Atlassian has a corporate entity, where they have the legal right to work and where the time zone they are in is broadly aligned with that of their team members.
“If you think about Atlassian historically we’ve basically been a global company, we’ve had a belief that talent exists everywhere in the world, not just in Silicon Valley,” Farquhar tells The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald ahead of Atlassian’s annual summit set to begin on Thursday.
The policy is remarkably lenient, even for the tech industry. Google recently outlined requirements for employees to live within commuting distance of its offices and apply if they wish to work from home for more than 14 days a year. Other prominent tech companies such as Netflix and Amazon have also signalled a desire for their employees to return to the office.
But Farquhar is confident the policy makes sense for Atlassian, which after all, is a global collaboration software company that has always faced a fierce battle for talent. “We’ve built a great company, tapping into a global talent base and so the idea of ‘Team Anywhere’ is that talent still exists anywhere it just doesn’t happen to need to exist within 50 kilometres of an existing office,” he says.
Pay will be based on labour costs in the region a worker is based in, rather than the more commonly used measure cost of living.
Atlassian’s staff have indicated they expect to be in its offices on average around 50 per cent of the time but the company only requires staff to travel to their nearest office about four times a year. Farquhar thinks these office visits will resemble attending a work conference.
“A conference you go there, you meet a lot of people. It’s an intense experience, often residential, you might be away from family or at least you’re dedicated towards that particular endeavour,” he says.
“It’s a lot of learning, it’s a lot of building social networks and connections and we think that the office will be dedicated more towards those activities versus ‘Let’s come together to do the work’.”
The pandemic has accelerated the shift to remote working.Credit: iStock
Atlassian will still maintain its physical offices and is proceeding with plans to build a massive new Sydney headquarters. But the company will ‘pause’ efforts to acquire more space beyond its existing commitments. It will also consider creating smaller co-working hubs closer to where employees live.
The company is estimating it will have around 50 per cent office attendance based on surveys of employee sentiment.
“If you want to have an office environment you can do that, but you’re not allowed to have meetings with only some of your co-workers, if one person is on Zoom everyone’s on Zoom individually,” Farquhar says.
Atlassian employees have adapted quickly with over 1000 moving location since the advent of the pandemic and about 1500 new hires in the same time period.
“I think a lot of companies that are just doing it two days a week, they’re going to really struggle because they are not going to attract or retain talent, and I think they’ll end up going back to the old way because it’s inertia.”
Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar
“Overwhelmingly people are taking it up way more than I had thought,” Farquhar says.
Atlassian’s approach contrasts with that adopted by tech giants such as Google which has outlined requirements from September for employees to live within commuting distance of offices and apply if they wish to work from home for more than 14 days a year.
Farquhar said companies requiring staff to return to the office a certain number of days a week are not really enabling staff to work from different locations and are just saving a bit of commuting time.
“I think a lot of companies that are just doing it two days a week, they’re going to really struggle because they are not going to attract or retain talent, and I think they’ll end up going back to the old way because it’s inertia,” he says.
Farquhar says change needs to come from the top because if managers or bosses are in the office five days a week there is going to be a social norm to follow suit. Research shows people who spend more time with their boss get promoted at a higher rate.
“People taking advantage of this two or three days at home maybe are disadvantaged in terms of career progression which we know generally falls on to minorities and women,” he says. “It’s pretty bold what we’re trying to do, there’ll be some mis-steps along the way, no doubt, but we really want to do that because we have got to bake it into our product, in our practices, into the way that work happens.“