Large employers should follow Atlassian's lead & declare if staff can 'work from home forever' or not

Large employers should follow Atlassian’s lead & declare whether staff can ‘work from home forever’ or not

forever

Atlassian only recently unveiled some impressive, $1 billion-plus, plans for its new Sydney based headquarters, so its recent announcement that staff will be free to work from home forever came as a surprise to some.

But the tech giant will go ahead with the development. It will retain its offices around the world, while also allowing staff the ability to choose where they want to work.

The ‘work from home forever’ aspect of Atlassian’s recent memo to staff is what got a lot of media’s attention.

However, a much more significant component could actually be the tech company’s commitment to flexible work: a promise to better measure output over time and work on determining clear approaches to how people will work — although the details are still being mapped out.

Also of interest — and something more companies should follow the lead on — is Atlassian’s commitment to giving staff certainty now over how and where they can work in the future. Particularly staff who may be thinking about moving out of metropolitan areas, as well as those who want to put some long term planning into their at-home work spaces.

“Our policy has been very clear about communicating to employees and giving as much notice as possible that where you work is going to be up to you – within some constraints of your team and time zones and other things. But how we work has to be standardised,” Atlassian co founder Mike Cannon Brooke said during an online session with the CEO of Slack on Wednesday.

More employers could follow this lead. They could make the commitment now to telling staff whether of not they will have the option to “work from home forever” in the future, giving staff the opportunity to put long-term planning into where they live — and also enabling potential new recruits to further expand on the list of employers they may want to work for in the future.

Cannon-Brookes said they are pressing on with the office plans because they suspect a good portion of people will still want to go to an office, and at least have the option to attend an office for meetings or on certain days of the week. He noted how work from home options give staff greater opportunities to consider living in areas two to three hours out of metropolitan areas, while still being able to come in to attend particular meetings or catch up in-person with teams.

Workplaces that could have staff working from home, moved quickly to enabling their staff to do so during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. There were teething issues at first, and there’s certainly some fatigue and a push to still enable in-person collaboration opportunities, but some of the most conservative employers — like law firms and government departments — have successfully made the transition.

Now, these staff need certainty over whether they’ll be able to continue to access real work-from-home options in the future — options that will come at no cost to their careers. It’s the kind of certainty employers can give, at a time when we have little certainty over so many other aspects of our lives.

Employers should communicate now what staff can expect. Being able to work from anywhere is the first step, can they commit now to enabling staff to have more options over when they complete that work? And commit now to seeing the benefits of measuring productivity via output, rather than time spent sitting at a desk?

For too long, we’ve seen women particularly suffer silent career consequences because they have needed to work at home or “part time”. We’ve long needed flexible work to be mainstreamed, and this year’s adversity has created the opportunity to make that happen.

What we now need is the certainty that flexible work and work from home can continue forever. The certainty that employers won’t retreat to their traditional setup and requirements that have hampered the careers of some, and significantly reduced their ability to attain and retain the best staff possible.

Atlassian’s new office plans are revealed in the video below:

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