{"id":18659,"date":"2023-10-25T10:41:48","date_gmt":"2023-10-25T10:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/leadership\/with-loom-deal-atlassian-anticipates-the-future-of-remote-work\/"},"modified":"2023-10-25T10:41:50","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T10:41:50","slug":"with-loom-deal-atlassian-anticipates-the-future-of-remote-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=18659","title":{"rendered":"With Loom Deal, Atlassian Anticipates the Future of Remote Work"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For those preaching the end of investment in remote collaboration tools, Atlassian has a rebuttal. The software giant known for its productivity tools announced this month that it will pay $975 million to acquire Loom, a video sharing tool used to give asynchronous presentations and updates.<\/p>\n

As part of Atlassian, Loom will be integrated into a formidable suite of collaboration software, including tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello. (Full disclosure: the author of this piece is an enterprise customer of Loom.) Together, these tools represent a considerable swath of the collaboration marketplace: back in 2019, Atlassian estimated that 83% of the Fortune 500 used at least one of their products. Now, post-pandemic, post-remote work revolution, it\u2019s easy to imagine that number has grown.<\/p>\n

As Loom joins the fold, bringing in an additional 25 million registered users, Atlassian isn\u2019t just expanding the scope of its offerings and its presence in the tools marketplace; it\u2019s making manifest its opinionated and well-argued vision for the next chapter in the evolution of work: global, distributed, and highly attuned to culture, norms, and communication.<\/p>\n

A Playbook for \u2018Team Anywhere\u2019<\/h2>\n

Atlassian is not new to rethinking the future of work; it\u2019s been a fully distributed company since 2005. With 11, soon to be 12, offices worldwide, Atlassian is specific about describing its workforce as \u201cdistributed,\u201d not remote or hybrid. Distributed, it explains on its website, is inclusive, providing office space to those who need or prefer it and avoiding hybrid mandates around time spent onsite: \u201cAtlassians can choose to work from one of our offices, or not, on any given day.\u201d<\/p>\n

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They call their approach Team Anywhere, nearly twenty years in the making but crystallized early in the pandemic when the leadership team realized they were uniquely equipped to close all offices as a safety measure without hurting collaboration or productivity. It\u2019s an approach that has weathered the many workplace transitions of the pandemic well, and has become a central philosophical pillar of what the company is and does: help teams work better together.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a philosophy Atlassian is eager to share. There are, of course, many, many customers (83% of the Fortune 500, even) using Atlassian\u2019s offerings to enable distributed collaboration. Atlassian also has a research arm that emerged from the Team Anywhere initiative dedicated to sharing their insights and evidence-based approaches. But the team isn\u2019t just focused on paying customers: they also have a popular Team Playbook, centered around different approaches to collaboration, that is publicly available under a creative commons license, free to anyone who wants it.<\/p>\n

Leading a Distributed Movement<\/h2>\n

As many other peers in the tech space pull workers back to the office, Atlassian is renewing its commitment to a distributed future. Annie Dean, once the head of remote work at Meta, joined the Atlassian team 18 months ago, as the VP of Team Anywhere. A longtime champion of flexible work, Dean started a research and jobs listing company focused on remote and flexible jobs, Werk.com, back in 2016. In a new interview with FastCompany, Dean describes the impossible bind of her own experience of early motherhood. At 27, she was a corporate attorney with a newborn. \u201cDays would go by,\u201d she says, \u201cthat I wouldn\u2019t see my young son awake.\u201d She quickly realized that her personal experience was part of a widespread problem; one that required a holistic transformation of how teams work.<\/p>\n

Today, overseeing all of Atlassian\u2019s office spaces and its research team, she sees a future for the workplace that is more than the sum of any of the parts of return-to-office, hybrid, or remote. Some insights emerging from the Team Anywhere research shed new light on the complexity of contemporary office work:<\/p>\n