How Atlassian redesigned meetings and culture for distributed work

Executive overview

Virtual meetings default to transactional. Without deliberate design, distributed teams lose the interpersonal connection that drives trust and effective collaboration.

Dom Price, work futurist at Atlassian, shares how his team rebuilt meeting rituals, decision-making, and team cohesion from scratch during COVID — and what they learned from Trello's remote-first culture.

Caring for each other must become an explicit agenda item, not an incidental one.

Rebuilding interpersonal connection in virtual meetings

• Leadership meetings now open with 30 minutes of unstructured personal check-ins — not work updates
• Participants nominate the next person to speak; no rigid structure, just invitation to share
• Making vulnerability a transaction: if the medium is transactional, make connection one of the transactions
• Painting sessions (Pinot and Picasso) replaced strategy meetings for team cohesion — no work talk, partners and kids welcome
• Opening a broadcast with personal struggle ("I'm not loving remote work") sets a tone of honesty that invites real conversation

Meeting structure and facilitation

• Anything over eight people is a broadcast, not a meeting — structure accordingly
• Assign a dedicated facilitator (e.g., an operations person) to keep meetings on track and surface decisions
• In large broadcasts: use chat for live questions, then carve out a second half for Q&A — keeps introverts engaged
• After Q&A, stop sharing screen so everyone appears on video; shift from broadcast to conversation mode
• Pull quieter voices in explicitly: name them, reference their context, invite their view
• One-way door vs two-way door decisions: deliberate deeply on irreversible ones; delegate reversible ones to the sub-expert with a one-page brief
• Save synchronous time for complex debate; move everything else to async

Daily rituals for work-from-home boundaries

• Convert one Zoom call per day to a phone call and walk outside for an hour
• Create a deliberate end-of-work ritual: make a drink, sit away from the desk with music, no laptop
• Return to the living space later for evening — trains the brain that work is finished
• Buffering information from struggling colleagues backfires (ruinous empathy); stay open but clarify accountability

What Atlassian learned from Trello

• "If one person dials in, everyone dials in" — the single rule that creates a level playing field
• Trello used dedicated Slack channels (Water Cooler, Vitamin D) to replicate incidental office conversation
• Annual in-person all-hands for the moments that require physical presence — relationships built in person are easier to maintain online
• 30-60-90 day onboarding boards: first 30 days prescribed, days 31–60 guided, days 60–90 left blank for the new hire to fill in based on what they've learned
• Tools enable the culture, but the cultural rituals are the differentiator — "a fool with the tools, still a fool"

Scaling personal support across 5,000 people

• Regular pulse surveys surface lead indicators (loneliness spiking was detected weeks early)
• Atlassian's response: Resiliency Week with external speakers, which triggered organic internal blogging and story-sharing
• 80/20 model: 80% of support is standardised (HR policies, $500 home office budget, working condition flexibility); the final 20% is left to frontline managers to personalise
• Trying to do 100% top-down creates one-size-fits-all that fails edge cases; leaving 100% to managers means they never get work done
• New starters are grouped into cohorts by start date, not team — shared experience builds connection across the organisation
• Founders announced no mandatory office return before 1 January — not a real milestone, but a certainty anchor that let people make plans

The future of work

• Lifelong learning and re-skilling will become a first-class business priority, accelerated by automation displacing roles
• Risk: access to re-skilling is inequitable — those already educated get amplified, manual workers get displaced
• Cognitive load is rising as complex work increases; mental health needs the same preventive status as physical health
• Productivity as a metric was built for factory work — ideas, creativity, and curiosity need different measures
• Better alternatives: team effectiveness, impact (social, financial, environmental), purpose, outcomes
• The future is not predetermined — it is built by the decisions and actions taken daily