There are many reasons why CEOs are asking employees to return to the office, but one big one is real estate. When gleaming headquarters in high-rent areas are largely vacant by employees who feel more productive working from home, frustration in the corner office can quickly build. The result could be that requests to return to the office are ignored, causing tension, or worse, prompting top talent to leave the company.
Atlassian’s experience shows that one way to solve this problem is to completely rethink office space. The global software company, which makes collaboration tools such as Jira and has a market capitalization of $48 billion, adopted a “Team Anywhere” policy in 2020 and has continued to do so, bucking a trend this year of more companies enforcing return-to-office mandates. .
“We want people to be able to work from home, from cafes, from offices, but we don’t really care where they work – we care about the output they produce,” co-chief executive Scott Farquhar told Australia 60 minutes plans for August, adding, “I’ll probably come into the office about once a quarter.”
Annie Dean, who leads real estate and workplace experience at Atlassian, noted that 40% of corporate employees live more than two hours away from the office, with employees spread across 13 different countries, and remote employees (living two hours or more away from the office time (place) office) jumped from 14% in 2020 to 54% in 2023.
Of course, Atlassian makes collaboration tools, so embracing remote teams makes sense in its own right.today company declare Acquired video messaging service Loom for US$975 million. “Partnering with Loom helps distributed teams communicate in a deeply human way,” Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a statement.
Yet despite its emphasis on remote work, the company has ambitious plans for new offices, including in Seattle and Sydney, where it has broken ground on its 40-story headquarters.
Dean believes companies just need a different way to evaluate their office spaces.
“When you treat your office like a product (meaning you ensure it meets the needs of its users), you can improve your office’s operational efficiency and ROI while still providing employees with the flexibility to choose where they work best each day .”she Tell Business Observer this week.
for The upcoming Sydney headquartersAtlassian specializes in collaboration spaces and knew it needed to accommodate large teams that occasionally meet together. The company is also using new metrics when evaluating its real estate strategy, including cost per visit and the extent to which employees use and engage with offices.
Of course, many business leaders are averse to remote work, even if they initially embraced it. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator, commented on this summer’s trends.
“I’ve talked to multiple founders recently who are changing their minds about remote work and trying to get people back into the office,” he said wrote “Why are all these smart people being fooled? I think part of it is that remote work does work initially, if you start with an already healthy system from in-person work…Part of it is that it seems to solve the recruiting problem, which has always been A bottleneck.”
Companies that fully embrace remote work do have a larger talent pool to draw from because they are not limited to potential employees who happen to live in a particular area. In a hybrid work arrangement, employees are required to go to the office two to three days a week, but employees are still required to be near a specific building.
talk to wealth In July, Dean said she was not a fan of hybrid work. She calls it the “illusion of choice,” noting that it requires companies to bear “all the costs of the old model,” while “there are none of the efficiencies of the new model.”
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