When Atlassian gave every employee the freedom to choose where they worked every day, it faced a question most companies are only now being forced to ask: if no one has to come in, why would they? Alyssa Yu, Distributed Work Intervention Lead at Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab, shared the answer at WorkSpaces — and it has less to do with perks than with fundamentally rethinking what an office is for.
Most companies treat the office as a given. Atlassian decided to treat it like a product. That meant understanding what employees actually needed — and designing around those needs rather than around tradition.
Two things surfaced immediately. People working from home had developed a taste for quiet focus and call privacy that open-plan offices couldn’t match. So Atlassian built what Yu calls collaboration studios: work-from-home-quality setups inside the office, purpose-built for high-stakes calls. Alongside these, they kept phone booths for quick, spontaneous conversations — intentionally non-bookable — and created dedicated “virtual call zones,” open spaces where employees could take calls without feeling like they were breaking an unwritten rule.
“We had no idea what the norms were,” Yu said of the open-office call dilemma. The solution wasn’t a policy. It was a space that made the right behavior obvious.
The second shift was moving away from organizing the office by team — marketing on one floor, product on another — toward organizing it by type of work. Yu calls it “design by etiquette”: each space has one primary work mode, one set of expectations.
Sprint rooms for fast-moving project work. A library floor for deep focus. A collaboration floor with coffee, tables, and soft seating for when teams need to think out loud together. People move around more, but they move with intention.
The data backs it up. An experiment called “Redesign Your Work Week” — where employees proactively blocked time for focus and collaboration — produced a 32% boost in focused work and a 31% improvement in progress toward top priorities. The office design is built to support that same rhythm.
The third shift was perhaps the most surprising: replacing the expectation of everyday connection with a commitment to intentional connection.
In 2022, Atlassian launched Intentional Team Gatherings (ITGs) — giving teams dedicated budget and time to self-organize on-site events every few months. The results reframed how Atlassian thinks about face-to-face time entirely.
After digging into ITG agendas, the Teamwork Lab found something unexpected: the activities that had the biggest impact on team performance weren’t the escape rooms or the group dinners. What actually moved the needle was structured team building — getting on the same page about how you work together — and planning. Having fun matters, but building shared understanding is what drives results. The order of events mattered too: teams that started with team building, then moved into planning, then got to work, came out consistently stronger.
Atlassian now dedicates entire floors exclusively to ITGs. “Our offices turned into full-on event spaces overnight,” Yu noted.
Yu’s closing point deserves attention from anyone thinking about what comes next. The same design principles that guided Atlassian through this remote-first experiment are now shaping how the company thinks about AI in the office.
As AI takes over more individual tasks, the need for rows of solo workstations shrinks. The office becomes even more about what AI simply can’t replace: culture, energy, and human connection. New kinds of spaces will emerge too — rooms built for working alongside AI, whether through voice, text, or formats we haven’t fully imagined yet. Nobody has the blueprint for this yet, which means the organizations experimenting now will be the ones setting the standard.
Atlassian’s numbers tell their own story: 95% of employees visited an office in 2025, satisfaction sits at 93%, and cost per visit dropped 11% year over year. That’s what happens when the office stops being a mandate and starts being worth showing up to.
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