From Diversity & Inclusion to Balance & Belonging

Creating an environment where everyone is supported on their growth journey regardless of where they're at, is critical to creating an equitable company.  This includes providing employees with clear expectations of their role,  giving them actionable feedback on the impact they're having in their role and on their team, and providing them with meaningful learning experiences.  That's why our Learning & Development and Performance Development teams have partnered up - to build the foundational processes and programs needed to support all Atlassians. This year, we've launched a more structured approach to growth planning, new bias-resistant approaches to assessing both performance and Atlassians' anticipated future impact, and will be launching a new model for continuous feedback. 

We also know how important the relationship between an employee and manager is to creating a culture of growth and equitable advancement opportunities. In order to do this, we need to build strong growth partnerships between people leaders and individual Atlassians. A growth partnership between a people leader and an individual Atlassian weaves together formal learning, opportunity exposure, and experience in a coherent and layered way that helps each employee gain new skills. To assist in this journey, we've designed and curated a portfolio of online learning resources, tools and frameworks to support in-person conversations, and facilitator-led workshops to practice and embed the skills. We also help employees optimise their self-directed learning budget through Learning Fairs, connecting employees with preferred learning vendors. We're always striving to create a personalized learning experience for our employees.

We know that in order to hire a balanced team at scale, we must hold ourselves to the highest standards in how we attract and evaluate new Atlassians. Over the last few years, we've strengthened our interview process and introduced a structural behavioral interview to assess for values alignment (rather than the biased concept of culture fit) across our graduate and experienced hiring pipelines. As we've scaled, a significant portion of our new Atlassians in experienced roles are directly sourced, which has helped us direct our efforts to improve. We've implemented the diverse slate approach for hires director-level and above, and provided our team with access to a wide range of sourcing platforms and partnerships to ensure we're bringing in a balanced set of candidates. We've taken full advantage of our status as a global company, implementing cross-border recruiting techniques to reach a broader, more balanced set of candidates across a variety of axes. Over the last year, we've also made significant investments in our technology and analytical infrastructure, which will help us more proactively identify further areas for improvement. 

For a company that wants to unleash the potential in every team, depicting people is especially important. How we represent the people who make up teams should be just as important. Redefining our illustration was not only a chance to make it a more powerful and usable tool for advancing our brand message, but to step up and become a more proactive and responsible member of our community. Our illustrated characters, or "meeples" as we call them, have been through many iterations over the years, but our recent rebrand gave us an opportunity to completely change the standard we hold ourselves to. We started by widening the spectrum of skin tones, hair colors, and other features to better reflect real people. This not only allowed us to more effectively represent people of color, but helped people of all ages see themselves in our brand too. We expanded on how our meeples express gender and individuality with more hairstyles and clothing options. We added to the number of cultures and religions that can be expressed and experimented with new ways to present meeples of varying ability, starting with the addition of glasses and hearing aids. These new features served as a great foundation, but we went further to examine the actions and relationships between the characters in the narratives we create for them. The roles we give to each character matter, so we take care to be conscious of the power-dynamics we create and are careful to not solidify stereotypes by always casting certain characters into certain roles. This journey has taught us that promoting diversity and inclusion within our brand is a persistent and multi-faceted effort, and we continue to explore ways to make our brand more inclusive. Read more about the evolution of our brand, and get tips for your journey here.

The Atlassian workplace is the physical manifestation of the values and culture of belonging that we're always building at Atlassian. It goes well beyond the walls and the desks, and influences how individuals show up at work and how teams work together. We're taking the approach of balancing "good global citizenry" with the concept of "individual needs and personal efficiency". Many companies use a purely mathematical approach to building out a space: we have X amount of square footage, divided by Y number of employees, so we need Z number of desks to fill the space. We're thinking about how different people and teams work, who they are, and how to celebrate both the common and the unique needs for each type of team and individual.

We are asking our teams questions such as: Does the team have a lot of remote workers or folks who travel often? Does the team work on sensitive projects, like legal, finance, or HR? How does our choice of themes and room names help ensure everyone can see themselves reflected in our space? How do we balance the need for collaborative spaces that may be noisier with the needs of folks who can get overstimulated, like introverts or team members on the autism spectrum? How can we inclusively Design for the whole spectrum of visible and invisible disabilities? We're looking at how to make all employees feel like they belong in all our global workspaces by including a reflection room, parents' room, communal kitchen, and a number of unique spaces to allow for 1:1 conversations, 1:many meetings, and even quiet spaces to work away from your desk in each one of our offices. See how we're bringing Atlassian values to life in our behind-the-scenes videos of the Pine St. build-out!