Importance of Distributed Work Practices

Most in-office mandates are not well-grounded in data. At Atlassian, we take an evidence-based approach to our work policy. We trust our employees to choose where they can deliver their best work, every day. And our data tells us it’s working. I spoke with Brody Ford and Matthew Boyle about what that means: - We have access to a broader pool of diverse talent. After implementing Team Anywhere, the percentage of our remote hires (2+ hours from an office) jumped from 14% to 54%. - We see no evidence of decreased productivity. Preliminary research shows that our most productive teams are actually those distributed across ~4 timezones. - Our research shows teams don’t need to be in an office 260 business days per year to feel connected and be productive. In fact, bringing teams together with intention just 3 times per year has a greater impact on connection than regular office attendance. Atlassians report high levels of satisfaction. 92% agree that “The flexibility to work from anywhere allows me to do my best work.” Read more from my interview with Bloomberg. ⬇️

Work isn't going "remote" — but it is increasingly distributed. And we're not training leaders for that reality. Most teams in organizations past startup phase now span cities, time zones, and work styles. Yet only 25% of managers receive training on leading distributed teams, according to research by Kate Lister and TechSmith. The gap is costly: projects stall, alignment breaks down, and high performers get frustrated when leaders default to proximity-based management. The fix isn't return-to-office; these teams are spread out. It's distributed leadership skills. My latest taps Sacha Connor for her expertise (there's a bit of Rosie Sargeant and Debbie Lovich in this too). Here are 3 tactical approaches that work: 🔸 Prioritize cross-functional project teams: These drive business results, but they need working norms fast. Spend time upfront establishing how decisions get made and how progress gets shared. 🔸 Start by getting clear on goals: Get aligned on how you'll measure success before diving into processes. You'll be surprised how wide the gap is between what people think they're working toward. 🔸 Master progress tracking and influence building: Leaders need visibility into work, regardless of location. Team members need to understand how to build credibility and influence when they're not in the same room. Bottom line: The future of work isn't about where people sit — it's about how effectively they collaborate across distance and difference. 👉 Read more on the training gap: https://lnkd.in/gBq87DBB What's the biggest challenge you've seen with distributed team leadership? #Leadership #Distributed #FutureOfWork #Management

“Remote Workers Are Unmotivated, Unproductive and Lazy” Let’s Set the Record Straight. Lately some high-profile executives have been saying that remote work leads to lower engagement, decreased productivity, and a lack of motivation. As the Founder and CEO of a fully remote, work-from-anywhere global organization, I strongly disagree. Yes… keeping employees motivated, connected, and engaged in a remote environment takes effort, but it’s absolutely possible. In fact, when done right, I believe remote teams can outperform in-office ones. At Hire With Jarvis we’ve built a strong remote culture through intentional strategies, including: ⭐ Daily Team Stand-Ups → Short, focused check-ins to align priorities, share progress, and remove roadblocks. This ensures seamless collaboration across our global remote team. 🎤 Weekly Town Halls and Kahoot! Games → Keeping things interactive, fun, and engaging. 📈 Company-Wide “Salesfloor” Chat → A space to discuss clients, revenue pipeline, and celebrate wins together. ☕ “Water Cooler” Chat → A dedicated place for lighthearted conversations about current events, TV shows, and personal milestones. 📚 “Jarvis Learning Lab” → A self-paced upskilling program featuring mini-courses, industry insights, expert-led sessions, and cohort-based learning groups designed to foster peer collaboration, mentorship, and real-time skill development. 🚀 Personalized Growth Plans → Structured career paths with clear benchmarks for growth, mentorship, and leadership development. 🔎 Radical Transparency in Performance → We track key inputs and outputs for every role, focusing on outcomes, ensuring real-time visibility into performance metrics. This data-driven approach empowers our team with clear goals, accountability, and a direct line of sight into how their contributions drive business success. But motivation and engagement are always evolving. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and it’s an ongoing process. I’d love to hear what works for you: How do you stay motivated and/or keep your team engaged when working fully remote? Let’s share ⬇️ what works and help each other build stronger, more connected remote teams.

I’m excited to share a new paper just published in Organization Science with my co-authors, Melissa Valentine, Katherine DeCelles, and Justin Berg. For years before the pandemic, remote workers were treated like second-class citizens. 👕 Pajama jokes came easy. 💭 Assumptions came even easier: less committed, less hard working, less promotable. And that was despite solid research from folks like Nick Bloom and Prithwiraj Choudhury linking remote work to a host of benefits, including higher productivity. But the "status gap" between remote workers and in-office workers was deeply entrenched. Then the world went remote. And suddenly, something shifted. We studied employees who'd been working remotely pre-pandemic inside office-first cultures. As they watched their colleagues experience remote work, many for the first time, they described seeing the "playing field level out." The surprising part? At the core, it wasn’t about adopting new technologies. Too often, leaders treat technology like a magic fix: ✅ Install Slack. ✅ Roll out Zoom. ✅ Problem solved. Remote worker "inclusion" is reduced to a software rollout. But at the core, the shift wasn’t about new tools. It was about *how* people used them. Before the pandemic, most of these organizations ran on what we call an “in-person default.” The office was the center of gravity. Digital tools were more like duct tape: patched on for remote folks. Then the default broke: 🟣 Teams started using async by default. Remote workers no longer had to prove they were “always digitally on.” Green dots stopped being proxies for productivity. And loyalty. 🟣 Decisions were documented, not whispered in hallways. Remote workers spent less time hunting for scraps of secondhand intel. 🟣 Digital tools became places to connect, not just coordinate. Remote workers didn’t just dial in—they belonged. And with those shifts, remote workers gained relative status in their orgs. Many remote work critics still confuse proximity with presence. And presence with productivity. Tossing Slack and Zoom at the problem doesn't fix the problem. ✅ It’s about designing for async by default—in both remote and hybrid orgs ✅ Making work documented and accessible (easier than ever with AI) ✅ Using virtual tools for connection, not just coordination I’m grateful to all our participants for sharing their experiences, to our wonderful Senior Editor Mandy O’Neill, and to the distributed work experts who I've learned so much from over the years: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Jen Rhymer, Paul Leonardi, Pamela Hinds, Nick Bloom, Tsedal Neeley, Justin Harlan and the Tulsa Remote team, Sacha Connor, Brian Elliott, Michael Arena, Lauren Pasquarella Daley, PhD, 🧚🏻♀️ Rowena (Ro) Hennigan, Lisette Sutherland, Hancheng Cao, Phil Kirschner, Daan van Rossum, Danielle Farage, Kelly Monahan, Ph.D., Nick Sonnenberg, Annie Dean, Molly Sands, PhD, Laurel Farrer, and many, many others. Link to the full paper in the comments👇

Final post in my mini-series about organizational health and remote-first culture: work practices that enable distributed work are also good for your company in other, place-agnostic ways. In this final example I'll share one specific practice from the McKinsey #OHI framework, which is featured in an article I discovered while working with my fully-remote client on their #organizationalhealth assessment. If you read any posts or reports from the many thought leaders here, and generous resources shared by remote-first advocate companies, you'll see a lot about creating a culture of writing things down. This includes low-context communications, centralized handbooks, #asynchronous voice/video, and other means to enable transfer and independent recall of knowledge. One of the 43 OHI practices is just that -- knowledge sharing -- and it's related to the outcome of #innovation and #learning, which supports how an organization renews/resets its vision and direction. The question that OHI asks on this topic is basically this: how frequently do you see leaders encouraging people to share learnings across teams? So it's not surprising that companies doing the fully or remote-first thing tend to be really, really, really good at #knowledgesharing...because if they were not, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. In fact, the client we studied basically set the highest bar for this question McKinsey had ever seen. Seriously. But that's still not the coolest part. Early in the pandemic, our org scientists looked to see what practices were most helpful to preventing financial disruption (i.e., enabling #resilience) which is a nice way of saying probability of bankruptcy. What practice topped the list? You guessed it: knowledge sharing. So, as I have said throughout this thread: even if your company wants people sat next to each other most of the time, they should still be adopting the ways of working that enable flexible and distributed work. Don't fight #remotework , learn from those who are good at it. #futureofwork #flexiblework #agility #leadership #culture