BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the stories behind groundbreaking Harvard Business School case studies.
As organizations around the world wrestle with questions about remote work, hybrid schedules, and return to office mandates, one tech company has charted its own bold path. Atlassian, the enterprise software firm behind tools like Jira, Trello, and Confluence, made a one-way door decision in 2020 to permanently embrace distributed work. But what does it take to make that model succeed at scale? Today’s case dives deep into how Atlassian built a data-driven approach to flexibility, created new norms around meetings and collaboration, and designed physical spaces and digital systems for a radically reimagined workplace. We’ll explore how Atlassian is not just managing distributed work but actually turning it into a strategic differentiator with a research-backed playbook that may shape how companies worldwide rethink the future of work.
Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Ashley Whillans to discuss the case “Designing the Future of Work: Atlassian’s Distributed Work Practices.” I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR podcast network. Professor Whillans’ research seeks to understand the links between time, money, and happiness. She is the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, and she is a repeat customer here on Cold Call. Welcome back, Ashley.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Thank you so much for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s great to have you in the studio. This is such a relevant and timely case because here, there, and everywhere we’re talking about remote work and hybrid work and how do we do that? And should we do that? And some companies are saying, Come back to work more, and some are saying, Come back less. So, I thought this was really interesting. It raises a lot of the issues. And frankly, some of the questions that Atlassian is grappling with are the very same ones that we’re grappling with here at Harvard Business School, and I’m sure our listeners can relate. So, thanks for writing it. Thanks for being here to talk about it.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Of course.
BRIAN KENNY: I’m going to start you off by asking what drew you to Atlassian as a subject for the case? And how does it relate to the kinds of things that you think about and the research questions that you pursue? And then what’s your cold call to start the discussion?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, so I’ve been doing a lot of work as a time management researcher on hybrid and distributed work because obviously there’s trade-offs associated with remote work, not as much in-person connection, but you get a lot of personal flexibility. And companies are really grappling with whether and how to formalize policies and practices.
So Atlassian is, I think, an extreme example that we can learn from where they make this one-way door decision, We’re never going to force you back into the office, as the way we think about solving the collaborative challenges that arise in knowledge work. Not just hybrid work and remote work, but knowledge work is difficult. There’s a lot of people across time zones. Almost all of our teams are distributed. And Atlassian says, Let’s stop talking about the office. Why are we so hung up on this question of the office? We’re focusing our attention in the wrong place. We need to be focusing on the daily practices of how we collaborate in an intense knowledge work environment and let’s put our brains together, our design hat on and run rigorous studies and take a data-driven approach to figure out how to make knowledge work better.
BRIAN KENNY: So, how do you start the conversation off?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: I say, “If you were a recent graduate with multiple offers as a project manager at a tech company, would you choose Atlassian’s fully distributed model or another competitor’s hybrid model? And why?” And this cold call immediately surfaces the tension between having all of this flexibility about where to work and the team collaboration element that every organization must navigate. So, if you have completely remote and distributed teams, or you never have to come into the office, you have to think more carefully about when you’re going to get together and why. So, it demands this intentionality, this structure about how to work because there’s no structure around where to work. And some students are really excited about never being told what to do or where to work. And some employees scratch their head and think, Well, if I never have to be in the office and my colleagues never have to be in the office, how am I going to get the information I need? Am I going to get the right mentorship? How am I going to learn how to do my job? So that cold call raises a lot of the perspectives that we hear about distributed work in general.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And it might help our listeners to understand a little bit about the scale and scope of Atlassian. Can you describe the firm a little bit?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Atlassian is a large software company, and they have about 12,000 employees across 12 offices, so highly distributed. And their headquarters is in Australia. So, what’s interesting about the company, they develop software for predominantly engineers, so allowing them to organize their code and share tickets with each other about what needs to get done. But they’re starting to slowly take a wider view on being collaboration software for all knowledge workers everywhere. So, of course, distributed work is also part of their go-to-market strategy. If they’re going to move from selling software tech that’s really highly specialized to being a collaboration software company for every knowledge worker worldwide, we better commit to doing distributed work and then figure out how it works and how to make our products make that experience of distributed work better.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and interestingly, so the stakeholder audience that they’ve dealt with mostly are engineers, as you said. And engineering is done in isolation a lot of the time where people are focused very intensely on doing one thing, but they do need to get together and brainstorm and use that time to come up with ideas together, so it’s a really interesting dynamic. How did the one-way door policy differentiate them from other people in their space?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: The co-CEOs of Atlassian, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, during COVID said, This is a moment. This is an opportunity for us to expand. We want to expand our business. We want to keep increasing the scale of our business. And this forced experiment in working remotely during COVID is going to provide us with an opportunity to hire the best talent from anywhere in the world. They kind of looked at the market and they said, I bet you all these companies that we compete against, they’re going to force employees back to the office at some point. And we’re not going to do that, we’re not going to flip-flop because if we flip-flop, we’re never going to be able to invest the time, attention, and resources that we need to make distributed work work. And that matters to us personally, because of their belief that happy employees are more productive and that remote work is something that enables people to spend time more with their friends and family, which is important for getting high-quality work and helping their workers live high-quality lives.
But also very pragmatically for their business, they could get better software engineers and talent, and they could also go to the market in a broader way. And they need to pilot these products themselves, so they need to figure out how to be the collaboration software that removes the need to go to the office, that makes the office a luxury. So, they make this one-way door decision during COVID, after a long walk on the beach, sort of thinking about in Sydney, outside of Sydney…
BRIAN KENNY: We were all walking. Everybody was walking on the beach during COVID.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, having this long chat. Well, exactly because, well, Australia too had very strict lockdown policies. So, it was probably a long walk on a beach talking to each other over the phone in Australia during that time, thinking that, Let’s do something different. Let’s make this one-way door decision, never go back, commit 100% that we will never force another employee to come back to an office. We’ll still have offices, but they will be for intentional use, but not a requirement.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And COVID, if we look at silver linings and opportunities never going to waste, COVID forced a lot of organizations to deal with this and with things that they had never had to deal with before. In the education space, we wound up going online, we figured out how to do that quickly. The benefit of that for us was that we now still use that technology, but we use it in different ways. So Atlassian is onto something here as they’re thinking about this one-way door policy, but work doesn’t just happen all by itself. Can you tell us a little bit about their system of work philosophy at Atlassian?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Their system of work philosophy has three pillars. The first is unleashing knowledge. So, they recognize that in distributed environments, information gets buried in emails and chat threads. So, they made their tool Confluence their central nervous system where every meeting starts with a page that gets uploaded on the shared system, creating permanent searchable records for every employee in the organization. Their second system of work philosophy is aligning work to goals. So, they ensure that everyone understands not just what to do but why. The third is planning and tracking work. So, they provide structure for execution, and the key insight is that they separate where work happens from how work happens. So, they give total location flexibility but provide a lot of structure over daily work practices, through page-led meetings, calendar redesign experiments, clear KPIs, and specific collaboration windows. So again, as I like to teach this sort of along a spectrum, what are we being flexible about? They are location agnostic, and they are work practice structured. They are highly flexible on where people work and very structured about how work gets done every day and what the impact of that work is on the outcomes that matter for them.
BRIAN KENNY: Right. I get that. We haven’t talked about the protagonist, Annie Dean, and she leads the Team Anywhere, which, is that like the name of her department team?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, I think it has a new name now, but they always have new names all the time. She got tasked with trying to figure out how to operationalize this one-way door decision.
BRIAN KENNY: So how did she approach that? How do you even begin to approach that?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: So, she is very interesting. She has an interesting career. She did a startup about flexible work way before it was in vogue in 2010, and she wrote a report predicting that flexible models of work would not only help with retention and work-life balance, reduce stress, but would also help in the case of a pandemic. So, she was one of those great thinkers like Bill Gates already predicting this pandemic in 2010.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s kind of wild. I read that in the case, and I couldn’t believe that she actually used that as a potential scenario.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yes, she is very forward-looking. Then she went and worked at a consulting firm during change management after she sold her startup, and that was during the period of COVID. So, she was consulting all of her clients about how to manage this digital transformation, and she got tapped on the shoulder at Atlassian as the co-CEOs were trying to figure out, Okay, we just made this one-way door decision, and we know what it means, we know what we want, we’re never going to force people to work in an office, but we have no idea what the other parts of it should look like.
She came in and she thought like a system designer. So, I think a lot of the conversations about hybrid work have been about policies. How many days are we going to come into the office? They haven’t been at that system level. So, she brought together finance, she brought together—she’s a lawyer—so she brought together the legal team. She brought together real estate because a lot of the conversations about bringing people back to the office are because their CEOs and boards are worried that their office space is going unused. And she brought together all of these groups, strategy groups, product groups, to think together about how to create a holistic solution that works for the business and that doesn’t cost a lot of money but actually creates efficiencies.
BRIAN KENNY: You talked about the systems that they require people to work in. I totally understand why that makes sense. One of the things that I think a lot of workplaces grapple with now is productivity: Are we more productive now that we’ve got people working remotely? And I think leaders have a hard time kind of wrapping their brain around, How can we be as productive as we used to be if we’re not all here? So how did Atlassian think about that? How did they measure whether or not people were as productive as they were?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: And I think that this is really key. So, they go beyond traditional metrics like office attendance or self-reported productivity. They develop novel metrics like cost per visit for real estate. So, they take total costs and divide it by actual visits to evaluate office efficiency. And this actually led to certain floors on certain offices getting closed if capacity wasn’t being met. And they do this in a variable way like month over month, week over week. So that is less on the productivity side, but more on the cost side of offering this distributed model. So, they track tidal flows to understand attendance patterns rather than static head counts.
But more to your question, they measure innovation through their Shippit hackathon data where hundreds of peers rate projects. So, they build network models that analyze digital interactions through Jira, Confluence and Slack alongside in-person connections. And this allows them to see that remote teams are just as productive as those that meet in the office. So, they’re running these experiments, doing these network models, using their own innovation tournaments internally as data. And so they’ve hired a bunch of PhDs, and they’re thinking really creatively about productivity metrics going beyond the standard HR tool kit of these engagement surveys that go out every quarter. And so one of their researchers, Molly, who I quote in the case, says, “Companies often conflate office attendance with collaboration, and those are completely different metrics.” And they don’t treat those as one and the same. They try to break out and actually differentially track collaboration versus just simply being in an office.
BRIAN KENNY: And that all sounds a little bit less onerous maybe than, I have to fill out a productivity worksheet every week that speaks to how much I did.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, they’re definitely not doing that. They’re definitely using behavioral data where they can because they don’t want to burden their very busy and focused engineers and product leads with filling out surveys. So, they look at badge data, and they don’t do it in a punitive way because again, they don’t care if people are in the office. They care if they’re creating output.
BRIAN KENNY: Early in my career I had a manager who would literally walk to the window and look out of the parking lot to see how many cars were still there. And that was one-way that he measured whether, and so just a completely misguided way of thinking about productivity. But I think a lot of that mentality still exists at some level.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, there’s a whole literature that we sometimes draw on, the ideal worker, which is this idea that we use physical proximity and whether someone is in the office as a rough proxy for whether that person is committed.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. You talked about real estate earlier. I’d love to look at that because that certainly has become a big issue in a lot of big cities where real estate that used to be filled with workers is now vacant a lot of the time, and people are thinking about, How do we repurpose that? And so Atlassian, in some ways with their one-way door policy is hopefully alleviating themselves of having to deal with all the complications of renting and leasing properties. I mean, how did they deal with that?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: So, this is an ongoing work in progress because they leave it up to employees to decide whether to come in. They started to put formal policies into place based on some intentional team gathering data. So intentional team gatherings are exactly what that sounds like where you bring your direct team together once every couple of months to hash things out on a whiteboard. And they find that those intentional team gatherings increase team connection by 27% and are more effective than simply coming to the office more often. Again, that office presence isn’t synonymous with collaboration, and so they’ve put those policies into place. So now every team has to get together, based on the data that they collected, every three to five months as a mandatory practice. So, they still need the office. And so they’re always trying to figure out, and that’s why they use these very sensitive metrics, these tidal flow metrics.
So, if you have low tide, that’s low attendance. If you have high tide, that’s the most people that are ever going to be in the office. And they do their office planning around low tide and high tide, both regular users, so people who are using that as their home office as well as people who are traveling. If you think of the Sydney office, a lot of people travel to the Sydney headquarters to travel and be with the global team that they might not see very often. And again, employees don’t have to go to the office on a regular basis. So, they’re constantly monitoring this space and how it’s getting used and how people are feeling about the space.
They treat offices as a service, and they have a hospitality mindset. So, Gina Creegan’s team at Atlassian asked, “What makes you come in?” And then they design for all of these kind of hotel-like experiences. How do we want you to feel when you walk in, and do we want you to be able to take your food to go? Oh, actually they don’t. So, you can’t take food to go because the whole purpose of going to the office is to socialize. Again, it’s all about these intentional design choices. So, with them, for the real estate, they always in this conversation based on nuanced data of, Are we going to close floors? Are we going to rent out our floors that aren’t being used on kind of a regular basis, that medium tide, that sort of everyday average to other local businesses?
It does pose a challenge for thinking about opening new offices because they don’t know exactly how many people are going to use them. So, they do what is the buying-clothes-for-kids metaphor where they allow, when they open a new office, they use a lot of data, but then they’re like, Okay, well we’re going to grow into the space. What’s the most people who could ever potentially be here in the Seattle office? I think is one example. But in terms of cost-cutting, because they made that one-way door decision, they did, they made some difficult decisions: they closed floors, they closed offices, they ended leases. But this one-way door decision means we’re going to have to figure out how to make the distributed model work and not just try to solve every people challenge with a forcing of workers back to the office when we said we weren’t going to do that solution.
BRIAN KENNY: I think the case makes it pretty clear that they have to find a way to make the office a place that’s desirable to go to, so what can we do to make this a draw for people to come in? And again, I think if we just look at Harvard Business School as an example, we try to do lots of things to make it a place that people want to be. We have students here all year round, we create social activities to bring staff together with each other and with students and others. So, I think it’s a pretty common problem, and they had some creative ways of addressing that.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. And I think this is something that’s important: it’s not that everything that they have tried has worked, and so they’re constantly testing and experimenting. They had a WeWork partnership for Atlassian employees who lived far away from a primary office, and that fell apart because there was not enough of a social network. So Gina talks about, yes, you need to have this hotel-like/concierge-like experience, you need to make sure the outlets are working and that people can easily and seamlessly get onto the internet and that the regulars know that they’re always going to have a place to work, and then the people who are in Sydney for the first time, it feels like a five-star hotel to them. So, they have put a team in place for the employee experience of the office.
BRIAN KENNY: So, in that scheme, employees become customers, in some sense.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: 100%, and that is how Atlassian thinks about the distributed work model, is that they are focused on improving the employee experience of both the office and the distributed work environment, because they want employees to come and know that they’re at Atlassian when they walk into the office as opposed to any other tech company.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. One of the big concerns that we hear a lot about the hybrid work environment is that bringing new people into the culture, assimilating new people into an organization, is much more difficult now. You hire somebody new, maybe they have to get together, but they’re not going to be seeing their colleagues for another two months or whatever. How did Atlassian think about that?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: So, the case reveals, absolutely, this is an ongoing challenge. So, I told you the opening cold call raises some challenges; that’s one of the first things students point to, I don’t know if I could onboard in a company where I don’t have to meet necessarily my colleagues on day one in person, that just seems like I’m flying blind a bit. And even in the case, employees that I interviewed noted that without office informal touch points, it took longer for new team members to feel connected.
So, they have taken, again, a design perspective; they’re testing and iterating. They did structured interventions, so mandatory intentional team gathering, attendance for new hires, page-led meeting training that teaches communication norms. And I think one of the most interesting innovations on the onboarding front that happened just as I was about to sign off on the case was they created an AI agent that employees could ask silly questions to. So, they just made it in a day, the HR team vibe coded it, and it would be like, “Can you tell me how to access my benefits?” The things that you might secretly tap someone on the shoulder, all this tacit learning, all this institutional knowledge that you would feel too shy to ask your manager about, it’s one of their most used AI tools at Atlassian. I think it was almost over 70% of employees had used it so that they could ask questions about, “How do I reimburse my work from home setup? How do I travel to the nearest office? What’s going to happen when I get there?” So that was one piece of it. And another piece of it was a very structured training program. So, part of what you want a new employee to feel is some accountability.
BRIAN KENNY: Of course.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: So the CEO comes on the screen and asks them what their contribution to the company is going to be, and it lights that fire under you to, Oh, my boss is going to watch me even if we’re not in the same office, sort of what your example was, the car counting, but in virtual. They do cases together on small project teams, and they start to use all the tools and the technology at Atlassian from day one. So that’s something they started to implement later, because they did feel like, we have a bit of a culture here, we make asynchronous Loom videos instead of have meetings, where you put emoticons onto your boss’s video. They said that the senior executives who came into the company struggled the most.
BRIAN KENNY: I’m not surprised.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: One person said, “I feel like an infant here,” some person who had two decades of experience in a similar company just said, “There’s all these AIs and agents and tools and a Confluence page, they make all their decisions without PowerPoints, you write down your decision—”
BRIAN KENNY: No PowerPoint?!
ASHLEY WHILLANS: “…in a two-page Google- like document, and then we just comment on that?” It was giving them a lot of anxiety. And so, this onboarding is meant to walk people through the ecosystem of Atlassian and what it means to work there.
BRIAN KENNY: There are actually some really cool ideas that me, as somebody who’s been managing for a long time… You said the term before, but I don’t want to gloss over it, the page-led meeting. Can you just describe what that is? Because I actually think I need to do this.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: I think it’s my favorite work practice that gets talked about in the case. So, there’s a few. There’s the calendar redesign, where you make sure you’re not just overwhelming your calendar to have meetings just for the sake of hearing yourself talking. That’s why they do asynchronous videos, trying to remove meetings from the calendar and create more focused blocks of time. And then, yes, so these page-led meetings, when I teach this case, I ask students, “Which practice that you read about in the Atlassian case would you really want to do in your next job?” And page-led meetings are the one that everyone wants to do and feels terrified to do it.
So it is that Atlassian’s documents—they’re not the only company that does this—but for every meeting, doesn’t matter what it’s about, could be a $100 million real estate meeting, you make a two-pager that can be read in five minutes with all of the most important information in it. Now, it can link to analysis to support your argument, but it takes… Even the case, I laugh, is kind of a long case. It would take something like the Atlassian case and distill it into the three bullet points that anyone in that meeting would need to know in order to make a decision. And then, what happens at the end of the meeting is that the decision gets recorded on that same document. So that means that every decision in the entire organization, every meeting is uploaded and can be searched by AI, so you don’t have to tap that person on the shoulder to figure out what was said in a meeting three days ago or before you joined, and it forces you to think so hard about what the key information is and the key question. That’s where a lot of my students get anxious. You have to know what the value is that you’re going to contribute, and a lot of our meetings maybe don’t necessarily have three bullet points that would result in a decision that would change a product.
BRIAN KENNY: I think if we mandated that, meetings would drop by half, because it does make you think and prepare for a meeting in a way that you don’t have to right now.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: And they have to be able to be read.
BRIAN KENNY: Yes, yeah.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: And so, they were even giving me comments on my academic writing. Again, Annie used to be a lawyer, and some of their team used to be in PhD land, and they’re like, “Ashley, none of your writing would work here.” They’re like, “Also, we don’t really do emails, so can you just text me when you want to set up a case interview?”
BRIAN KENNY: Oh, man. Well, brave new world. One of the things that the case focuses on is the culture of Atlassian and the importance of transparency, and I’m wondering, how do you create and sustain transparency when people just aren’t together all that much?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: They have an open company no BS value, which is one of their core organizational values that translates into these distributed work practices. So again, every meeting page is accessible company-wide by default. This decision register—even about the decision to go to distributed work—is available, and you can look at it. Even failed experiments are available, and you can search it and look for it and understand all of the thinking and the poor thinking or the bad decisions that resulted in a choice that maybe they wouldn’t have made again if they had the opportunity.
This transparency and openness gets reinforced in every practice that they engage in, and I think this is the key here and why I really like Atlassian’s approach is they focus on the daily work practices and reinforcing at every email, or every email that doesn’t happen, every document, every work product, every conversation is tied to being transparent, efficient, and be able to be communicated to anyone and be read at any time. And so, when I think about how they do this transparency and openness in a distributed environment, it’s because everything lives in the digital world, anyone can search all this information at any time, connect to anyone at any time, leave a voice memo to the CEO about their recent Loom video at any time, and so the transparency is baked in to the way that they work.
BRIAN KENNY: That creates a whole new set of, I guess, responsibilities for managers too. You have to remember and be thoughtful about that and point people to this information. So, they do a lot of experiments. You’ve talked about that. Experimenting is how they’ve gotten as far as they have. At what point do they say, Okay, enough experiments, we need to actually start to scale some of the things that we’re doing that we know work, because their goal is to be able to share this and extend it to clients and other people, right?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: So they have a motto that you pay for the products and the practices are free, but they’re getting to a place where if they want people to be using all knowledge workers to be using their products, and this is like a key tension in the case, should the practices really be free and up to the customer to use it if they want to? And this is where I think Atlassian is starting to spin its wheels, at least where we end in the case, they start to hire a sales lead. They’re starting to think about, Well, if we were going to really help every professor, every staff member at the Harvard Business School use Loom to do asynchronous videos or make Confluence the language of HBS, can you really just sell Confluence and just hope that HBS adopts the practices? Or is this a change management kind of strategy or…
So, this is one of the key points in the case: Should the products and the practices still remain free, should they still remain agnostic on how people use their technology if they really want to change and be the leader in the future of work conversation? This central tension that Dean faces, so scaling proven practices like ITGs and page-led meetings can create consistency and efficiency just even thinking within the organization. But as she herself notes in the case too, this isn’t just about their go-to-market strategy; it’s about their internal workplace strategy. She says, “What worked six months ago might not work today.” So, the risk is calcifying practices that become outdated or didn’t work for certain employees and certain client facing functions like sales. And so they’re kind of doing a bit of both. They’re formalizing successful experiments like the intentional team gatherings into formal workplace policy. You have to do those things now while maintaining the team anywhere lab that Annie runs for continued experimentation. And they also have communities of practice where employees can pilot new ways of working and see if they’re worth adapting into policies or throwing away in the next quarter. And I think that’s how they think about these decisions. There’s always a set of actions that become policy. These are things now based on the data tells us we have to get teams together in person. It’s an imperative.
BRIAN KENNY: Do you think Atlassian sees themselves as the thought leader in this space? Are they trying to be known as the people who are moving the working world in this direction?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. I think they definitely want to be thought of as architects of the future of work and thought leaders and system designers. And they really do emphasize over and over again, every person I talked to in that case interview talked about, thinking like a designer as opposed to an analyst. Again, thinking high level about this conversation, we often are thinking about number of days in the office, number of badge swipes, not what do we want the future of work to look like? They’re always trying to do this delicate dance of looking at the data and solving immediate challenges and then looking up and asking ourselves, Is this a direction we want the future of work to look like?
BRIAN KENNY: Very interesting. You’ve studied this a lot. You’ve looked at how people use their time and how people can make better use of their time. As you think about distributed work and all the conversations and debates that are playing out about it now, what do you think is the thing that people misunderstand most about distributed work?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: So, I think there’s a couple of points. All teams are mostly in knowledge work are distributed because we have globally distributed offices. So, I think one misconception is the extent to which our workplace, even if we come to the office every day, is a distributed workplace. I think another misconception or place of confusion is something I already mentioned, that the office is synonymous with collaboration. Those are not one and the same. And this debate often conflates that conversation. What we really need to be talking about is how to make collaboration better in knowledge work, because this is like Jeff Polzer’s work, collaboration overload. We’re drowning in emails. We don’t know where to go find data. We never have the information we need. So, we’re struggling in knowledge work to organize this vast amount of information that right now sits within people who sometimes bump into each other. And so I like the direction that Atlassian is pushing this conversation: Let’s stop fighting about where people should be working and start fighting and desperately seeking out a solution to how we can get knowledge work to be more efficient, less stressful, and more productive.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Do you think AI helps in that cause?
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yes, AI is as helpful as you give it the data by which to be helpful. And so a key part of that is training people on these different AI agents, empowering people to try out vibe coding. I mean, the head of HR was like, “I’ve never coded before, but don’t tell anyone. And also, I vibe coded this in three days, and now it’s like the company’s most used app.”
BRIAN KENNY: There you go.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: But empowering teams, especially in HR and people functions that are going to compete with product for this technology, empower them to vibe code and to figure out how to use AI to manage their people systems. But then everything has to be searchable and shareable as a research. You walk into companies, and none of the data sets talk to each other, and no one knows where this repository is or that one, or it would take a programmer five weeks to make these databases talk to each other. And so I think for AI to be useful in this efficiency and workplace wellbeing conversation, we also need to be thinking about the system of work and making sure that everything we’re doing, every decision and email and chat, not in a punitive way, but in a positive way, is living in a space that we can all share it and access it so that we have virtual corridors and a virtual office.
BRIAN KENNY: I love that. That’s a great metaphor. That’s a great way to end our conversation. Ashley, this has been really interesting. Thank you for joining me on Cold Call.
ASHLEY WHILLANS: Thank you for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us, I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
