CEOs demanding that employees return to the office have many reasons for doing so, but a big one is real estate. Frustration quickly mounts in the corner office when a gleaming headquarters in a high-rent area goes largely unused by employees who feel more productive working at home. The result can be return-to-office mandates that are ignored, cause tension, or, worse, spur top talent to leave the company.
One way to fix the problem is to rethink office space entirely, suggests the experience of Atlassian. The global software firm, which makes collaboration tools such as Jira and has a $48 billion market cap, adopted a “Team Anywhere” policy in 2020 and has stuck with it—bucking the trend of more companies enforcing return-to-office mandates this year.
“We expect people to be able to work from home, from a café, from an office, but we don’t really care where they do their work—what we care about is the output that they produce,” co-CEO Scott Farquhar told Australia’s 60 Minutes program in August, adding, “I might come into the office about once a quarter.”
Annie Dean, who oversees real estate and workplace experience at Atlassian, noted that 40% of company employees live more than two hours away from an office, the workforce lives in 13 different countries, and remote hires (those who live two hours or more from an office) jumped from 14% in 2020 to 54% in 2023.
Of course, Atlassian makes collaboration tools, so embracing remote teams itself makes sense. Today the company announced its acquisition of video messaging service Loom for $975 million. “Teaming up with Loom helps distributed teams communicate in deeply human ways,” said Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian cofounder and co-CEO, in a statement.
Yet despite the emphasis on remote work, the company still has ambitious plans for new offices, including in Seattle and Sydney, where it’s broken ground on a 40-story headquarters.
Dean believes companies just need a different way of evaluating their office space.
“When you treat your offices like a product—meaning you ensure that it meets the needs of your users—you can drive operational efficiency and ROI for your offices, while still providing employees with flexibility to choose where they can work best every day,” she told Commercial Observer this week.
For its upcoming Sydney headquarters, Atlassian is focused on collaborative spaces, knowing it will need to accommodate large teams occasionally gathering for meetups. It’s also using new metrics when evaluating its real estate strategy, including cost per visit and the degree to which employees utilize an office and engage within it.
Many business leaders, of course, have soured on remote work, even if they initially embraced it. Paul Graham, cofounder of the Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, commented on the trend this summer.
“I’ve talked to multiple founders recently who have changed their minds about remote work and are trying to get people back to the office,” he wrote on X. “Why were all these smart people fooled? Partly I think because remote work does work initially, if you start with a system already healthy from in-person work…and partly because it seemed to solve recruiting, which is always a bottleneck.”
Companies that embrace fully remote work do have a larger talent pool to draw from because they are not limited to only those potential employees who happen to live in one particular area. Hybrid work arrangements, where employees must come to the office two or three days a week, still require workers to be near a particular building.
Talking to Coins2Day in July, Dean shared that she isn’t a fan of hybrid work. She called it “the illusion of choice,” noting it requires companies to carry “all the costs of the old model” without “any efficiencies of the new model.”