Promoting a Distributed Work Model with Annie Dean at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hi everybody. We are here at Atlassian, team 24 in Barcelona, Europe.

That's, uh, fascinating to be here because I've had the pleasure of being in Las Vegas at the North America event and now here in Barcelona bring about all the great announcements and talking with some fantastic people of which one person one fantastic people is here. Uh, Annie Dean, welcome. Good to have you.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be on the expo floor today.

It is. It's boy, it's got, it's got a vibe. It's got an energy, right?

It does. It does. So you are VP of team anywhere.

That's right. I know that's a really common title being sarcastic party Of one. Yeah.

Party of one. What is Team Anywhere? What's it being head of team anywhere?

What is So At Atlassian we have an approach to, uh, running our company as being a distributed company. We are the largest distributed company in the world. Um, and what that means is that, uh, our, our folks get to choose where they work every single day.

We have 12 amazing office locations. Um, but 40% of our company lives outside of a commutable distance of those offices. And that means that we're very thoughtful about how we work, and we use the incredible tools and products that we build for our customers to power all of our collaboration.

Um, working at Atlassian is a different experience than I've ever had before, and it feels really good, um, to be able to use technology to get work done in the right ways. Uh, as part of my role, I oversee real estate, so I oversee all of our offices. I also oversee the talent programs that help keep us connected and effective.

So things like enterprise onboarding. Um, and I also oversee a team of behavioral scientists that study how we work to make sure that we're continually learning and optimizing our approach to distributed. I believe I got to talk to Molly last time.

Oh, yes. She was wonderful. Molly's one of my direct direct reports.

Yeah. Brilliant. I love Molly.

Um, and unfortunately she's not here today, but of course so much of the work that she does is powering many of the conversations that are happening today, including, uh, a slide in the keynote featured Molly's research. So That's great. And that's what she is a researcher.

That's right. What your team does then. That's right.

Interesting. So after Covid, Atlassian's always had a strong culture. That's right.

Um, you know, very, very developer at first and now expanded to much more of a kinda workforce workplace. Uh, when, when Covid happened, you know, Atlassian came out with a statement, we're not gonna go back to the offices right. Like we did before.

What was, what was that statement? How did that happen? Well, That happened I think in August, 2020, which was before I got to the company.

Um, and Mike and Scott, our founders recognized that when they looked 10 years ahead, it was clear to them that the world was not going to be less distributed. And they have always been a, a pair of founders that want to be a hundred year company. They're always taking the long-term view.

And that type of leadership and sponsorship has really enabled Atlassian to continue to experiment with distributed and really commit to it and get better at it, um, when other companies are making other choices. Uh, when Mike and Scott initially created the program, there were three big areas of value that we thought we could get for the company. The first was that we thought we'd get access to talent, better access to talent faster.

Um, we thought that our employees would be more engaged and more committed to Atlassian, and we thought we would be able to solve problems for our customers ahead of the experiences that they were having. And each of those things has proven to be true. We have doubled the number of candidates for every open role, and we fill our roles 20% faster now that we're in a team anywhere environment.

93% of Atlassians say that they stay at Atlassian because of our Team Anywhere policy. And the number one reason cited by our top performers is, uh, that they say is because of Team Anywhere. Good.

And then finally, I think you saw today through our keynote that we're really continuing to advance how we work in a modern environment. Um, you know, our system of work philosophy and the fact that we're expanding from tech teams to all teams is because we figured out how to collaborate using technology. Because when you're a distributed company, everything is about how you work, not where you work.

Interesting. I wonder if, you know, not to go into sustainability and climate change. Yeah.

It seems like that's another disruptive factor in today and in our future. Who knows where we're gonna be able to work at? Right, Right.

And you know, I, sustainability and climate change are not something that I necessarily think about every day in my day-to-Day role. But we do have an incredible head of sustainability named Jess Hyman, um, who thinks all the time about, you know, how our footprint, our, our carbon footprint has changed now that we're in a work from home environment. And, um, you know, how we're supporting our footprint differently now that we, um, when we engage in business travel and things like that.

And of course in Mike, we have the most incredible sponsor, um, and leader in the field of sustainability and climate change. And I, I really think that is an inspiring factor for all of us who work at Atlassian. How does the, uh, team anywhere approach affect hiring?

I would imagine some people, this is awesome, some folks adapt to it. Others maybe that it's not their cup of tea. Well, I definitely think that, um, first of all, it helps hiring because we know that people are self-selecting into Atlassian.

And we see, like I said before, that our hiring factors have only continued to improve. Um, but on the other hand, it's hard to onboard into a company that is working in a really different way. And so I do hear from people who are joining the company that it's an adjustment.

And even in the talk that I'm going to be give, give giving later today, um, I kind of reflect on the fact that, you know, I started my career as a corporate attorney on Wall Street, and we did handwritten markups and passed 200 page documents from partner to partner to go get, you know, the feedback from the tax guy or the, you know, gal who was running m and a. And now, um, when I first joined Atlassian, I was hired by a new, who's now our president. And, um, you know, she told me right away, you need to write differently, you need to be more focused on being concise.

And as a person whose professional job was to make sentences more complicated, you know, um, that was a new thing for me. And working in a way that is more focused on communication, more focused on tooling to create visibility of information, um, is feels really good and is so much more effective for teams. And it's just a matter of getting teams to really figure out how to unlock that, that I think we're doing within Atlassian and we're seeing within our customers as well.

It, it's interesting you bring up writing because that's something I'm more visual than I am a reader, though. A lot of reading. Yeah.

And I'm always thinking, boy, if we could do, do two or three sentences instead of two or three paragraphs, right. We're all good. We're all good If you're communicating electronically, not talking with each other.

Right. Being verbose isn't necessarily a, a helpful positive skill. Exactly.

And we are obsessed with this. Um, so we have really focused on a framework that we, that is called Smart Brevity. It was architected by the founders of Axios.

And what they say is that each individual only spends about 16 seconds on any piece of written information that they come across. And obviously we're all habituated to this because of the way that we, you know, interact with technology in our consumer lives. And so it's really important to be able to convey to your reader what you're trying to say in a very small number of words in a very plain English way.

So that's a competency that we're building within our company, but we also use Robo to help us be better at it. So for example, um, you saw Mike this morning showed how easy it is to create a bot within Robo. And as a non technologist, it's so cool to be able to speak the language of technology and help use technology to get better at the things that we need help with.

Um, and so we created a smart brevity bot and it helps us rewrite much faster, um, and much more succinct language. So as an example, this week I released a new policy to the company related to team anywhere. You know, PO employee policies are dense, they have some kind of compliance and legal considerations.

You wanna make sure people are notified about what the changes are. And if I were to look at that policy and really boil it down to those succinct elements, probably take me 45 minutes, you know, to really think through what are the few things that people need to know. Um, but instead we just had the smart brevity bot read the policy and create its own announcement, which was four to five bullets long, and it took 10 seconds and I had no edits.

None. Which is amazing. Right.

That really is. So have you tried the natural language interface to create bots? Yes.

And it's, Uh, agents, I should say. Yeah, Exactly. Agents.

Um, and yes, I have, and it's incredible. I mean, I remember when we first were set and, and we're using them now in all different use cases. So as somebody who owns the Team Anywhere policy, I wanna make sure that people have the right information to pull from to understand what they can and can't do as an employee, for instance, where they might be able to travel to versus not travel to.

And setting up an agent to be able to manage that information is incredibly useful for the employee and insanely easy for me. Um, similarly, we are refreshing our onboarding program right now and we're setting up a agent to help new hires know exactly what information they need to manage from a benefits for perspective, you know, from a policy perspective. Um, and it's just incredible how easy it is to set these things up.

And, um, it sounds like you, you're an engineer by training, and I am not a technologist, but each of us has had our own relationship with kind of figuring out the language of commanding technology, whether you are using an Excel spreadsheet or figuring out as a lawyer how to control find every single uncapitalized word. Right. Um, but now technology speaks our language.

And to be able to interact with technology in that, you know, natural language is so incredibly easy and intuitive. And I think that's why these investments in AI are so powerful. Let me ask you about hybrid work.

Yeah. You know, sometimes you compromise and nobody's happy. Right.

And I don't know if that's true of hybrid work. It seems like it some, you know, come into the office two or three days a week and then you can also work at home. Right.

What, what do you think are some of the misconceptions about hybrid? Are you a fan of that or you think it's, you know, something we'll see if it works or what? Right.

Well, I think we all have to meet everyone where they are. Right? And so I think at the, the fundamental misconception about the conversations that are happening about offices versus distributed, or some people call it remote work, is that it's not about where we work.

It's about how we work. And when you work in a technology, first way you make information available to everyone, you're good at communicating. You, uh, use technology to get information.

Instead of meetings, you're focused on getting poor work done because you have time in your day because you're not wasting it all trying to play telephone in meetings. Everyone works that way. It's not limited to the people who are outside of the office versus inside of the office.

And when you get that kind of work, right, if you do it well, it just doesn't matter where you work from. So that's the most important thing for people in companies to understand. Um, however, I also know that everybody's taking on that transformation in their own way.

And that there isn't this clear playbook that companies can follow today about exactly how to work differently in this environment. Um, that's unfolding over time. Not every, you know, organization gets to have a team of dedicated behavioral scientists to discover the right ways to work.

Right, right. Um, and I totally understand that. And in that case, I think hybrid can be a good way to give a lot of flexibility, but protect against the downside of needing to stay coordinated, um, and needing to maintain your culture if you haven't invested in other potentially more effective ways of getting that done.

So if that's the middle step that we take on our path to, you know, a more fully unlocked digital ways of working, then I'm okay with that. Do you think we've, uh, found ways to accommodate or replace the serendipitous meet at the water cooler? Talk to each other in the hallway?

Kind of the things that you do when you're physically with each other in a technology digital world? Are we, are we getting better at that part of it? 'cause that's one of the things we miss about being in person.

Yeah. I think when people talk about the water cooler and spontaneous interactions, I think they're talking about two things. And one is a sense of community.

So the idea that you, you know, run into people that feel like they add an important, even if it's not a long conversation, just the exchange you have makes a richer fabric of your community experience. And I think that's really important. So that's one consideration.

And on the other hand, people are talking about innovation, so, you know, creating new ideas and un unleashing different types of creativity. And I think both of those things are addressable in an environment, in, in today's modern environment, and certainly we are addressing at Atlassian. Um, so on the community front, one, I do think that every serious enterprise at a certain scale should have an office footprint.

I think it's really important to have community and cultural spaces that help people get that sense of community and remember that they're part of something bigger than themselves. Um, an office is an incredibly unique opportunity to communicate the values you have and to create that fabric of community that make people feel enriched, not just for the company, but because it's good in their personal life. Um, and then on the innovation side, I really think it's about focusing on innovation.

So get your people out of meetings. Take the things that are not useful off their calendar and let them spend time together deeply. 90 minutes to be creative, schedule time for innovation, and let it, I don't mean 30 minutes, I mean a half day or whatever it might be, to make sure that you can, you know, unleash that creativity in people.

Um, and also don't forget that the new ideas that you need to bump into can come from anywhere, right? We have more information at our fingertips than we ever had before. Um, and, you know, we can seek inspiration and new ideas from anything.

And especially you and I were just talking about what it's like to see Gaudi's architecture here in Barcelona, and, you know, that's transformative and that type of thing is the, that that's the type of interaction where we really wanna inspire the creativity and innovative thinking in our people. Not necessarily, um, you know, brushing shoulders with somebody that you're sitting 50 feet apart from anyway. Excellent.

Is, uh, your work, your team's work, how does it influence the products, uh, that Atlassian creates? Is it indirect? Is it direct?

How does that happen? That's a great question. So when I was originally hired, we knew that there was immediate set of people problems to solve, and we got to work solving those problems pretty quickly.

But we also hoped that we would be able to figure out ways of creating that alignment between the fact that we were working differently as a company and the problems that customers are having. And so now through our research, those things are quite closely aligned. Um, so as part of Team Anywhere, like I mentioned, we stood up this new, uh, research lab, which we now call the Teamwork Lab.

And that research directly contributes to the pain points and solutions that are created within our Teamwork Foundation's product set. Um, including, uh, the element of practices. So we, uh, have studied with 5,000 Atlassians different interventions using our tooling and new behaviors with our tooling and measured those outcomes.

So now we can kind of say, Hey, not only should you use this set of products, but if you use them this way, you're going to have, um, you're going to be able to work differently, you're going to be able to succeed in this modern environment. Um, and that is really exciting. Sometimes we, sometimes we take the old model of working in a new tool and it doesn't always work, right?

You have to kinda retool how we work Well and there's such a huge opportunity to do things differently. When I see customers experience loom for the first time, for instance, it really opens people's eyes that there's kind of a different way of doing things because loom feels so different. And we were talking before about hyper concise communication, but in a loom, you can be rambling, you can express your emotions, you can, you know, I just had somebody on my team who lives in Australia, had a baby, so I can send a loom, um, that, you know, he can see my face and see how genuinely excited I am for him about, um, you know, the fact that he's had this new arrival.

But, you know, we don't have to line up the time zones to have that call. Certainly he doesn't wanna, you know, pick up the phone from me probably while he's on paternity leave, dealing with a, a baby who needs to be fed every three hours. Um, so, you know, I think that type of experience can be really disruptive for people.

And similarly, roho, you know, when you saw it in the keynote this morning, it really is incredible to use. And when you, when you experiment with it, you can easily see how there's a whole new way to do things. Fascinating.

They tell me we're out of time. I can talk to you for another two Hours. Same.

Okay. Been, it's been a great pleasure, Annie. Thank you.

Who is VP of team anywhere, right? That's right. With Atlassian.

So stay tuned with, have other great interviews. I don't know if it was be as good as this one. It'll be hard to be, it'll be good.

But, uh, thanks Annie. Thank you So much for having me. You bet.