Why Atlassian is running experiments to solve remote work challenges

The shift to remote work that started during the Covid-19 pandemic has been dubbed a “great experiment.” Atlassian, a software company that produces project-management tools like Jira and Trello, is actually treating it that way.

“One of the most important things that I’ve discovered in doing this work over the past decade is that you have to treat it like a product, and really do the research to understand what problems you’re solving,” said Annie Dean, Atlassian’s global head of “team anywhere,” who previously served as director of remote work for Facebook (now Meta) from Nov. 2020 to Jan. 2022.

About six months ago, Dean set up a “team anywhere lab,” staffed by behavioral scientists who run controlled experiments with the aim of solving the biggest challenges Atlassian faces as a distributed workforce. The lab’s research will help inform how Atlassian shapes guidance and policies for employees in the future, Dean told HR Brew.

Timeboxing for productivity. One of the lab’s first experiments set out to improve how Atlassian workers structure their time. The company has more than 11,000 employees, and since 2020 almost all of them have been allowed to work from one of Atlassian’s 12 offices (including headquarters in Sydney and San Francisco), from home, or a combination of the two. Teams are structured by time zone, so employees ideally have no more than four hours’ difference from their colleagues.

Through internal research and conversations with Fortune 500 executives, Atlassian figured out that one of the common problems with the way companies work today doesn’t center around where we work, but how we work, Dean said. Employees tend to have too many meetings, and not enough focus time.

To solve this issue, Atlassian recruited employees to participate in an experiment with “timeboxing,” a time-management approach during which employees dedicate a set amount of time to completing a task. For this experiment, participants were told to timebox their most important work.

Participants in the experiment were given the following guidance for timeboxing, according to a recent study published by the company:

• Dedicate no more than 30% of the week to meetings, and decline any that are not “mission critical.”
• Dedicate 10–20% of the week to “open collaboration,” blocking off time when key collaborators are online.
• Dedicate 30–40% of the week to “focus time,” spending at least 90 minutes at a time on work that requires open thinking.
• Spend no more than 20% of the week responding to messages. “Blocking time to do this removes the temptation to constantly check notifications,” Atlassian posits.

Atlassian employees who timeboxed their top priorities declined 17% more meetings than usual and spent 13% less time in meetings, a trend that continued even after the experiment was over. What’s more, most found they made more progress on top priorities when they timeboxed than they did in a typical week, with 67% of individual contributors, and 71% of managers, responding this was the case.

The results are in line with what Atlassian wants to see, Dean said. “This whole conversation is about company performance and productivity. So, we want to get in there and figure out how to help teams work best, using the fact that we’re all in different locations as an advantage.”

Taking their time. Despite the success of the productivity experiment, Atlassian isn’t changing any of its policies right away, Dean said.

“The next thing that we’ll be studying is how we can influence broad behavior change across the organization,” she said. “We’re telling our stories, but we’re not yet in a place where we’re saying, ‘Hey, do this.’”

Atlassian recruits about 100–200 employees for these experiments, and their goal is that 30% of the workforce will touch an experiment by the end of the year, Dean added. Implementing changes that align with the findings is another thing they’ll experiment with along the way.