How Atlassian grew to become one of Australia's best employers

Atlassian Work Futurist, Dominic Price, reveals how Atlassian grew to become one of Australia's best employers.

Video transcript

DOMINIC PRICE: Every single day the Atlassian environment changes, right. From day one, when it's just the two of them, to now is, like, 8,000 people, right. From one location to now, in theory, 8,000 locations because we've got so many people working, you know, in a fully distributed fashion. Every single day our world changes, therefore our approach to solving that world has to change.

Our biggest asset in Atlassian is our people. Full stop, right. It's our biggest, sort of, cost item on our balance sheet, but it's our biggest investment, right. We invest in our people. All the IP that we create, all the products we create it mi-- our chosen vehicle is technology, but our asset is our people. And we've got to put that asset first. We've got to genuinely care for our people and not pretend to care like some companies do. We actually have to follow through and care.

And so when we came up with the special leave policies around saying people are struggling, we can't decipher why each individual is struggling, and there's no need to. Let's assume one thing-- we've hired fully formed adults who we can trust, right. And we have. Which any-- whichever country in the world, they're fully formed adults. We trust them. So here's some special leave. And if you need to take some time off, take the time out. You have it. And we followed up with a conversation with our front line leaders to say here's why this is important and here's how this is going to get implemented.

I can't tell them how to work as a team, but our job is to say how do we enable you to find a way of working as a team so that you as a team thrive. And every team's unique and so I can't pick one way of solving it, right, and roll it out across the board because it won't work for anyone. The idea is solve for the team, get them working effectively. And so that team level effort that we've made seemed a little bit exhausting at first, but I think is paying huge dividends for us right now because as a team we feel more cohesive. We've got more psychological safety, we feel more engaged, and so I think that's why you're seeing those scores you're seeing.

You know what, we look after our people in a way that I think is very human, right, whether it be special leave, how we think about supporting them with mental health, how we support people when they have babies and have a growing family, like, there's this huge amount of genuine support we give people. We have these perks, but they are genuinely the cherry on the icing on the cake right. If the cake tasted of absolute crap, the cherry is not going to be any good right. So it's all around how we create an environment where people genuinely feel a sense of belonging and genuinely feel like they're free to do the best work of their life. And when we do that, people can do amazing things.