Building Connection in a Distributed World with Anu Bharadwaj, Atlassian

This episode is brought to you by VanHack. Want the secret hack to staying competitive and building great products? Extend your company's hiring budget with VanHack's pool of 400,000 remote engineers at a lower cost than local hires. Join companies like Dapper Labs 1Password Brex and Dooley, who've hired great engineers with VanHack. Mention Traction Remote when you sign up today and get 10% off your first hire@vanhack.com that's V A N H A.

C K.com think back on some of the deepest connections you formed at work. What was common between those connections? We think that building meaningful connections require three things having meaningful, shared experiences, believing in a shared purpose, and being part of a shared community.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money, and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

Eight years ago, on a cold winter day in Australia, I woke up in my cozy little apartment. Sunshine. Golden sunshine gleamed through the windows, and as I looked out, it was a gorgeous day. My window framed the beautiful Sydney Harbor Bridge, and I was ready to get up and face the day. Eager to get started, I bounced out of bed, going to get ready for work. I bounced out of bed to get ready for work. Wait. I wasn't bouncing out. I wasn't able to move. As I looked down, my legs just seemed to be frozen. I could not get out of bed. I knew something was wrong. I did not know how wrong it was. After what seemed like hours of excruciating pain, I dragged myself out of my apartment, hurled myself into a cab, and got myself to an emergency room. Once there, the doctors told me I would have to be hospitalized until they could fully diagnose what was wrong with me. I was scared. I was terrified. All alone in a new country. What if I was never able to walk again? What do I do? You see, I had just uprooted myself from home, from a community that I had always been part of, to move continents, to work for the small Aussie startup. I knew nobody in Sydney. My friends and family were all still back in the US or in India. But determined to get through this ordeal, I submitted myself to the battery of tests that the doctors had ordered for me. Before that, I texted my manager to tell him I wouldn't make it to work for the day. A couple hours later, I woke up in my hospital bed to look at the faces of two of my teammates wearing worried looks. They had come to visit me to see how I was doing. These teammates were not my friends, not yet, but they had dropped their work for the day just to make sure to come and see me and give me company through the day so I wouldn't feel alone. They brought thoughtful little things like books, clothes and snacks to tide me over what was an unexpected hospital stay. The next day, two more of my teammates came to visit me. That cheered me up. Thankfully, I recovered soon enough to be able to go home. But my teammates continued to check in on me, help me run chores, bring me little supplies, just making sure that I was okay, that I was alright. Their kindness and concern touched me. I no longer felt all alone in in a new country. When I look back on this incident, I'm amazed at how we were able to build such strong connections in such a short duration of time. I was intrigued by what builds strong connections. I did not dwell on it much at the time, but I did not realize how important this question was going to become for our future. Fast forward to 2020 and and the pandemic disrupted our lives in a huge way. We lost the kind of connections that we had built up with our teammates, with our families, with our extended community. Suddenly, we were all, all alone in the world. As the pandemic eased, however, we saw that the dark clouds of isolation that the pandemic created had a silver lining. A new way of work had emerged, one where technology companies continued to run well and serve their customers. Even though employees could not come in into a physical office. We learned that work is not a place. Work can be done out of many places and continue being productive. As the pandemic eased, teams were eager to meet in person. But people had found a new rhythm of working with flexible work, One that would allow them to harmonize their work life and home life in a uniquely personal way. Most people were not ready to come back to office full time. Some companies tried to solve this by mandating in office presence for certain days a week just to make sure that people would come back to office. But connection cannot be forced. It can only be built. Flexible work is here to stay. There's no going back. So those of us building companies need to figure out how we embrace this trend rather than resist it. At Atlassian we did just that. In 2020. We announced what we call Team Anywhere, a policy that allows all Atlassian employees the choice to work out of anywhere, with no mandated in office presence of any kind. We think of flexible work not as remote work, but as distributed work. What's the difference? Remote work implies that there is a primary destination where work happens in the office, and then a bunch of secondary locations where remote workers work out of and try to connect to the central destination of work. But distributed work by design, does not have a central locus. It's multiple, equally weighted options of how and where you want to work. Since Team Anywhere, our people moved away from cities at a surprising rate. You can see we had people spread out to smaller cities like Kanpur, Boise, Ankara to pursue new interests and form new communities. Many people moved back countries to be back home, closer to parents and extended community. In fact, One of the PMs on my team moved recently to Vancouver. We also had several nomads who spent time in exotic locations like Finland, Hawaii or Mexico, enjoying a change of scenery after a long period of isolation. Team Anywhere gave our employees the option to pursue their dreams unfettered, while continuing to do a job they loved. And Atlassian. Hearing these stories of Team Anywhere, you would think, okay, great. It's all roses and ribbons. That's awesome. I guess everyone lived happily ever after. But many of our employees were very skeptical about Team Anywhere two years ago. Many feared the loss of connection that came from a dispersed workforce. The newer workforce was worried that they would never have what we did, the kind of camaraderie and relationships that we could build up by working together for a long amount of time. These fears were not unfounded. Like many of you, when we started with Team Anywhere, we focused on the mechanics of how work can be unlocked in different physical locations. Things like tax laws, relocation, compensation policies, home, office equipment. But beyond all of these mechanics, the crux of distributed work problems that we had to solve was human connection. How do we build these lasting human connections that help teams foster collaboration and trust in a distributed environment? Think back on some of the deepest connections you formed at work. What was common between those connections? We think that building meaningful connections require three things. Having meaningful shared experiences, believing in a shared purpose, and being part of a shared community. Shared experiences in a physical office happen serendipitously, but in a distributed world, it requires some more planning and intentional design. So to create these shared experiences, we've found a few guidelines that have helped us at Atlassian. When forming a team, we cluster everyone within a time zone such that most people have four hours of working time overlap. So employees can choose their working hours based on their lifestyle and location, but it also gives them the reassurance that most of their team's available for them when they need them. Synchronous time becomes more precious with distributed teams. So we replace synchronous activities with asynchronous activities wherever possible. To solve this, we released a product called Atlas last year. We built Atlas for ourselves. Atlas eliminates status meetings with async roll up updates from teams, so this frees up precious synchronous time for creative work across teams. Lots of our distributed customers love it and I know many of us are sick of wine tastings, virtual wine tastings on Zoom and magic shows, and we're eager to gather in person. At Atlassian, we made sure that we put out a set of guidelines for teams to gather with purpose to be able to define a purpose for the gathering. How and why are teams getting together? The Workplace Experience team provides automatic services around organizing location, facilitating workshops, taking a bunch of the grunt work away from organizing in person gatherings so teams can focus on the social and creative aspects of getting together to get the most out of it. And when you do get together in person, we ask that teams spend at least 50% of their time doing social fun activities. It might seem weird. What's this weird rule that you're asking your teams to spend at least 50% of the time having fun? That's thou shalt have fun. But really the foundation for building trustworthy strong collaborative bonds are formed when people are able to interact with each other socially and get to know each other as people. And finally, the question that I get asked the most Are you going to shut down your offices? No. On the contrary, we are redesigning our offices to to be especially suited for distributed work. From private booths, for dialing into meetings so that everyone dials in from a window of their own and nobody has a primary and a secondary experience to inspirational open spaces for gathering and recording rooms for creating async content. We don't see team anywhere as a way to save real estate costs, but as an opportunity to reimagine the best possible experience for distributed teams. Second shared purpose A few summers ago I was leading a company wide transformation to pivot our business model to go from on premise to cloud. As a result, I had to go tell our sales and channel team that they had to shift from their well worn GTM motion of several years and switch to selling this brand new set of SaaS products. This was a big change. It was a tough sell to a sales team, and I'm an engineer, not a salesperson. So to share this change of direction, I landed at the sales kickoff at Amsterdam, where I saw hundreds of our sales and channel people gathered. We'd grown rapidly as a company, and I did not know most of them personally. I was nervous and I sat down at the dinner table with a few of them and. And the conversation turned to what was the latest purchase that we had made that we were all very excited about. So one woman at the table talked about her vacation home in North California that she was really excited to spend the summer in. A man next to her talked about his new sailboat that he was really excited to get on the water and take friends in. The woman next to me talked about her sports car and raved about how amazing it was and how excited she was to get more miles on it. And when it was my turn, I shared what new purchase I had made that I was very excited about. And it was a textbook on the evolutionary history of slime molds. And I was so excited to read all about it. Yes, I was sitting at a dinner table and I was talking about how excited I was about slime molds. Clearly that did not make me the most popular person at the dinner table. Feeling like a fish out of water, I went to our then president, Jay Simons, who was here at Traction a few years ago, to ask him for advice. I said to him, jay, I don't feel like I have a whole lot of things in common with this crowd and tomorrow I have to get up in front of them and tell them to change direction completely. Why would they trust me? Some random person from the R and D group asking them to change direction. Jay listened to that and he said, anu, you have more in common with them than you think. You and them, all of us, we are trying to do the best possible thing for our customers. As a company, Atlassian has committed to a future in cloud and it's our responsibility to get our customers into the right spot for the future. Explain to the sales team how the R and D team is trying to help customers get to the right spot in the future and how they can help contribute to the the same cause. And Jay was right. Shared purpose of serving our customers bound us all together. And the sales team responded beautifully when I referenced that shared purpose. We've learned that in a distributed world, we need to over index on establishing the shared purpose. A strong writing culture helps. Just as the printing press scaled the bounds of human knowledge beyond a few people verbally passing things down. Establishing a writing culture can scale your company beyond the bounds of a central office. Our company history, mission and values are embedded into a Trello onboarding plan that every new hire that comes into Atlassian goes through. Every quarter we put out a State of the Union Update from our CEOs talking about a bird's eye view of what's happening with the company. We organize monthly AMAs with our exact team and weekly All Hands featuring customers. We are mindful about sharing this content in multiple formats video recordings, podcasts so people can listen to it on the go and written blogs for those who prefer text over video. Products like Loom Miro Trello help make this really easy. To verify the state of our shared understanding, we use an Atlassian practice called Team Health Monitor where teams can self assess their shared understanding of how the work they do contributes to the shared mission of the company. Clyde said before great companies don't just cascade goals, they cascade purpose. And to build shared purpose across a distributed workforce, you need different kinds of content in different formats, shared and refreshed continuously. It takes extra effort, but it's well worth it. Which brings us to the last segment Shared Community One of our company values at Atlassian is open company no bullshit. We're an Australian company, we like to swear a lot. So our company values have a bunch of swear words in them. And one of the ways we live the value of open company, no bullshit is that most of the work that we do, almost all of the work that we do, is shared on Confluence openly for the rest of the company to see. When I first encountered this, I did not know how to make sense of it. I had spent 10 years at Microsoft before where I was taught to hone my work to produce multiple revisions and drafts of my work until it was perfect enough to share with the world. I got Atlassian and they asked me to do the reverse. I was asked to do all of my work on Confluence, where everyone could see working drafts of my work. I would publish a Confluence page and some random person I never met within minutes would be posting a comment on my work. This was very awkward to me. Initially I felt vulnerable sharing content that was not quite perfect with the rest of the company. But soon I came to see that this fosters collaboration at a level I had never experienced before. It was so easy to discover other people who had solved similar problems before or had completely new perspectives that that changed my thinking on the problem. Confluence made collaboration the default behavior for us, not something we had to plan and think about and have a grand event and unveiling of our work. This created a culture of psychological safety and collaboration where you knew that you could share your work openly with your teammates and they would help make it better. Confluence made collaboration safe safe. And this culture of sharing openly in a safe space wasn't just limited to work. Atlassians would blog on Confluence about personal moments they wanted to share with their team, baby pictures, road trips, a new hobby, and over time, people also shared stories of their hardships, struggles with mental health, divorce, death of a loved one. Through Confluence, Atlassians were able to connect with each other in a wholesome and meaningful way, bringing the full measure of their humanity to share with their teammates. The outpouring of love and support for each other came to define the Atlassian culture just as much as our collaboration at work did. As we expanded to fully distributed teams, Confluence continued to be the home for the shared community across Atlassian no matter where in the world they lived, no matter whether they had met the other person they were reaching out to personally before or not. So that's it. Those are some of the things that we've learned on our Team anywhere journey. Today, two years into Team Anywhere, we are at well over 8,000 employees, with 25% of all of our employees and 50% of all of our new hires living more than two hours away from any physical office. In fact, over the last two years we've hired 3,800 employees, many of whom have never set foot in an Atlassian office. At Atlassian, we are running one of the biggest social experiments in history. We have ambitions to go from 8,000 to 25,000 people, forming a fully connected but fully distributed workforce. No other company that I know of has attempted something at this scale. Distributed work is no longer the future of work, it's the reality of now. I hope the lessons that we've learned with Team Anywhere is helpful to you as you think about how you are going to build connected teams that thrive in a distributed world. Thank you.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us A five star review and you.

Can find all the information mentioned in Today's episode at TractionCoff IO that's T R A C T I O N C O N F IO Be a.

Hypocrite no I've done some silly shit focused on the tech stack, thinking it was brilliant. Now I know that it's no way for you to.