The “balancing act” of the new age of work was the issue at hand during a panel at Dropbox’s Work In Progress conference—focused on AI, product announcements, and expert keynotes—in New York last week. But the panelists explained it isn’t nearly as fraught or complicated as some bosses make it seem.
For Annie Dean, a panelist and the global head of Team Anywhere at software firm Atlassian, the most important thing is being realistic and affording people reasonable choices.
“The idea that if you bring everyone into this mandatory [office] environment, working shoulder to shoulder, magical outcomes will come—that’s a silly thing,” Dean said. “It feels like magical thinking.” Dean spoke alongside Dropbox’s vice president of design Alastair Simpson, GitLab’s former head of remote work Darren Murph, and Monica Ballesteros, a senior manager at research firm Economist Impact.
Dean, who once led remote work efforts at Meta, is one of the most ardent supporters of flexible work—and she isn’t a bandwagon fan. Five years prior to the pandemic, she founded a SaaS platform called Werk aimed at predicting a company’s flexibility needs and helping its leaders strategically invest to meet them (it was acquired in 2020).
Atlassian has 11, soon to be 12, global offices that Dean says are “well-attended” and “bustling” specifically because people aren’t required to visit them. Every day, Atlassian employees choose their own workplace, Dean said. Pre-pandemic, 14% of the company’s workforce was remote, living more than two hours from the office. Today, that figure has jumped to 40%.
And don’t mention a hybrid arrangement, which Dean previously told Fortune is “an illusion of choice” and the worst of all worlds. Required in-office days, which she called “the crux” of most hybrid plans, actually removes many potential benefits for the employee—like living farther away or picking a kid up from school each afternoon—and much of the benefits for the company. Indeed, trying to split the difference does nothing but saddle a company with “all the costs of the old model [and none of the] efficiencies of the new model.”
Narrowing in on the how, not where
When Dean arrived at Atlassian a year and a half ago, “the focus was on setting up the where, but what’s really interesting in today’s environment is the how,” she said onstage last week.
A Ph.D. behavior scientist and research team carry out experiments on the best practices for optimized distributed work and report back to Dean. Their findings have been consistently clear, she said: Choice is irreplaceable.
Dropbox’s CEO said as much. At the conference, Drew Houston told Fortune that allowing employees to spend 90% of the year working remotely has been vital for retention and workplace satisfaction. “You need a different social contract, and to let go of control,” Houston said. “But if you trust people and treat them like adults, they’ll behave like adults. Trust over surveillance.”
A main reason some bosses have gone full-throttle on a return-to-office push is because they believe bringing workers back will make them more productive, innovative, and connected. “But those things aren’t what the research is saying,” Dean said.
One high-level point is that most teams aren’t co-located, or sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, even when they are together. Earlier this year, Dean explained the “co-location” concept to Fortune, saying, “The idea that office attendance will drive creativity is predicated on the idea that the right people are in the office at the right time. But if people are more than 30 feet away from you, it’s like they’re not in the same building.” Just 19% of teams are co-located globally, she said on the panel last week.
While forced returns can lead to resentment, presenteeism, and—most of all—churn, distributed work has a long list of benefits, Dean’s research has found. For one thing, distributed teams better capture the input of more introverted workers who otherwise might have more difficulty sharing thoughts in a live meeting. “Now they can write things down in a way that gets consumed more broadly,” she said.
It’s also good for managers. Dean herself runs a distributed team of 100, and with virtual meetings and calendars, she can see all the day’s activities in one place, “whereas, in the past, I might’ve been able to jump into a synchronous meeting here or there.” If, for instance, a project is underway five levels of management below where she sits, with all-virtual calls, “I can drop in and substantively participate.”
Granted, Atlassian’s work pattern data shows that workers on hybrid plans often have a longer workday—many remote workers admit to working more nights and weekends—but the core work is more interactive, with different peaks and lulls in productivity as workers turn to nonwork tasks like picking kids up from school or taking a midday run.
None of those activities come at the expense of productivity. At Atlassian, the only metric is whether workers are meeting their goals, and they have structural tools—identical for employees in every place—to ensure that happens.
At least since 2020, almost everyone has been working in a distributed way, which Dean said is her bottom line. Now the onus is on companies to move from reacting to designing. “Design your calendar and your time to meet your priorities as opposed to letting your calendar dictate your time, and design your network so you can be around the people you need, when you need to, to get work done,” she advised. “Those are the biggest shifts we can make to unlock focus.”
