Atlassian increased its workforce by an eye watering 50% over the past two years, the company said in November.
Now it wants to hire another 5,000 local employees, says Dom Price, Atlassian’s Work Futurist and one of the drivers behind the company’s ‘Team Anywhere’ remote work policy it says is a key factor in its future strategy.
Price told Business Insider Australia the company took a leap of faith when implementing the policy.
Now, following its rollout and what he says has been extensive and ongoing engagement with employees about their experiences, he said it is making remote-first work a key pillar of its vision for the company’s next phase.
“I think intuitively we’ve known for years, if you’re really happy outside of work, you turn up happier at work,” Price said.
The offer the company made to employees, that they could look beyond Sydney’s inflated property market but still have meaningful work, was taken up by an encouraging number of people.
“You don’t lose the upside of having the job that you’ve got, you don’t lose your colleagues, or the mission or your passion for this work,” Price said. “You just change where you work.”
The policy, announced in April 2020, meant that following lockdowns employees would no longer have to return to the office, but could choose how much time they wanted to spend at the office.
At the time, Atlassian’s founders made headlines with the promise that they would only expect their employees to come into the office four times a year.
Co-founder and co-chief executive Scott Farquhar told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald the move to a permanent work from home organisational structure aligned with its background as an Australian-based company that had always had a global workforce.
“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 said.
Amy Glancey, chief of staff at Atlassian, previously told Business Insider Australia the company was already starting to see the impact of its strategy on recruitment, with evidence emerging during hiring that candidates are declining offers from other firms that don’t have flexible working policies.
“We believe that will be a strategic advantage for us, specifically when it comes to talent. And that’s really coming to fruition,” she said.
Price said that as of January around a quarter of Australian staff now live outside Greater Sydney, with a large majority of them still in NSW.
The company considers a remote worker as someone who lives outside of a two-hour commute to the office in Wynyard.
While it employs approximately one third of its team in Australia, a number that currently sits at over 2,000, the plan is to triple this in the next few years to build a 7,000-person strong local workforce.
Out of office
Amid an ongoing conversation around how office work could be reimagined in a future that’s increasingly come to be considered as a ‘new normal’ as opposed to the optimistic ‘post-pandemic’, the company’s policies, modelled on Silicon Valley firms with long-standing remote work policies like GitLab, imagines a future built for mostly untethered knowledge workers.
The policy uses a self-service model to automate the moving process that doesn’t require manager or HR approval or intervention for employees to relocate.
“We believe distributed work is the future of work, and that by living it at Atlassian, our teams will create better products for customers in the future,” Atlassian said in a statement.
“I think even we were pleasantly surprised with the access to amazing talent we got by saying, ‘actually, we’re not constrained to people that are able to travel from our office in Sydney’,” Price said.
Suddenly the Australian market has opened up to “a whole new spectrum of people, a whole new sort of talent pool,” he said.
Hiring remotely was forced on almost all organisations because of stay-at-home orders. But Price said this necessity helped the company understand how their onboarding processes could work alongside remote work.
This “gave us confidence” to move ahead with its longer-term strategy.
“When we first came up with ‘Team Anywhere’, we thought we were onto something, we just weren’t certain? We didn’t have the data back then,” he said.
“What’s happened over the last two years of the highs and lows of the pandemic is that it has actually created a level of adaptability and resilience in our people.”
Price said in surveys 75% of staff have responded on a scale of their happiness with ‘Team Anywhere’ being excellent or very excellent.
Hiring the next 5,000
Proving it could scale up amid a pandemic meant the company could now move ahead with the next phase of growth, Price said.
“Now, we’re not doubling down, we’re tripling down because we want to go from 2000 to 7000,” he said, which is “not going to be a small task”.
“But we know from the last 18 months, we’ve got the mechanisms in place to do that.”
Atlassian’s plan to cast a wide net across the entirety of Australia to find not just tech talent but the “best people” across a range of roles should become more of a norm for a wider array of Australian businesses.
“My hope is that other businesses do the same,” Price said.
“I actually think this is an amazing opportunity for a whole lot of Australian businesses, some of which I think they’re already starting to do this.
“If we take away that constraint of where our physical offices are, we can hire the best people where they are. This is a win-win.”
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‘This is a win-win’: Why Atlassian wants to triple its local workforce by hiring remote talent across Australia - Business Insider Australia
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