Farquhar: 40% of Atlassian staff live over two hours from an office
Scott Farquhar · What’s wrong with the remote vs. in-office debate? (with Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar) · Jan 19, 2024 · at 3:35
Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, discusses employee distribution under the company's permanent 'Team Anywhere' remote work policy.
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“About 40% of our Atlassian employees live more than two hours from an office”
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Farquhar: Daily office attendance does not correlate with employee connection
“And what we did is we correlated those answers with how frequently people come to an office and how frequently they do what we call intentional togetherness gathering. And we found that people just turning up to the office every day was not correlated.”
Farquhar: Deliberate team gatherings boost employee connection for 3 to 5 months
“However, when people did get together deliberately, we saw a huge spike of connectedness to each other and to the company. The surprising part was the decay function. I thought a week or two later we'd be back to baseline, but it turned out that the data showe…”
Farquhar: Office attendance should not be about justifying commercial real estate rent
“We don't need to turn up to offices to make people feel good about paying rent.”
Farquhar: Top talent does not live within 90 minutes of an office
“We also believe that the best talent around the world doesn't all exist within a 90 minute commute of an office, and we have people all over the world working for us, so we got a talent advantage there.”
Farquhar: Teams need intentional togetherness, not daily commutes
“We believe that you do need to get together to build social bonds. Our belief though, is that you don't need to get together every single day to sit next to each other on a zoom call in an office and commute back and forth to get that benefit. We believe that …”
Farquhar: Return-to-office mandates are as arbitrary as dictating pen color
“Some people who are forcing a back to office mandate, in many cases that's like telling people they need to use a blue pen instead of a black pen. Does it matter which pen you use if the output's the same? Does it matter where you are doing the work if the out…”