Quick Win: The quarterly ritual that bonds teams for months

What if your team could feel more connected without ever mandating office days? 

In this Quick Win episode, I’m joined by Avani Prabhakar, Chief People Officer at Atlassian. With over 13,000 employees scattered around the globe, Atlassian has learned that connection doesn’t come from casual coffee chats or watercooler moments. Instead, they’ve built a framework called Intentional Togetherness – bringing teams together once a quarter with a clear purpose. It’s a practice that creates bonds lasting far beyond a handful of office days. 

Avani and I discuss: 

• Why “remote” and “distributed” work are not the same thing 

• The myth that office attendance automatically creates connection 

• How Atlassian’s “Intentional Togetherness” framework works 

• The quarterly gatherings that build bonds that last for months 

• Why purposeful collaboration beats sporadic in-office days 

Key Quotes 

“Connection wasn’t built by sporadic office attendance – it was built when you bring people intentionally together with a purpose.”  

Connect with Avani on LinkedIn. 

Listen to the full interview with Avani here. 

 

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/ 

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) 

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) 

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe 

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. 

Get in touch at [e-mail] 

Credits: 
Host: Amantha Imber 
Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What if just sitting in the same office as someone
wasn't the key to connection at all. On today's quick
Win episode, we dive into how you can actually keep
people connected when they're scattered around the world, or at
least not in the same office every day. You'll hear
from Avani Prugophar, who is the chief people officer for

(00:21):
a Lassian, the global tech company with more than thirteen
thousand employees. She's been experimenting with distributed ways of working
long before COVID forced the rest of us to catch up,
and by the end of this episode, you will have
a concrete framework you can borrow to help your own
team feel more connected, even if you're thousands of kilometers apart.

(00:47):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor
Amantha Imber. So what's the difference between remote first versus
a distributed first model?

Speaker 2 (01:06):
So, A, we believe that the future of work is
going to be distributed, and even as we speak, teams
are fairly distributed.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
In the world.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
How the work is coming together, It's no longer the
office concept. Same people working in the same office, working
on the same thing. It's fairly distributed, So that's the
difference remote. Often people associate remote means work from home,
you know, or remote means like you're not coming into office,
and distributed means you can come into office or you
can work from home, so it can actually be wherever

(01:36):
you want it to be. That's the clear differentiation. What
we mean by distributed first though, means I'll make it
real with an example. So for example, the four people
in a team, three of them are in office whatever,
like you know, they all decided to go into office
one day and the fourth person is logging in from Melbourne.

(01:56):
They're not in Sydney, for example. Are the three people
who are sitting in office will have to go in
three different pods or meeting rooms to make sure they
optimize for distributed first experience, which is the person who's
logging in from home. You optimize for that. So you know,
where you have one person on zoom and three people
sitting in a meeting room, you're not optimizing for a
remote distributed first mindset, that's what we mean by that.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, that's really helpful. I would love to know when
you first moved to the team anywhere model, What were
some of the more unusual challenges that you had to overcome,
things that you didn't even think would be a challenge.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
So I would say this was all and maybe I'll
zoom back, because everyone associates there's ways of working model
post COVID and pre COVID, post pandemic, pre pandemic. I
think for us as at Lasan as a company, we
were experimenting heavily in the future of work being remote
at that point in time with small teams, so we
had about eight percent of our teams already working wherever

(02:54):
they wanted to work that time you used to call
it remote. When pandemic happened, for us, it was like
we had enough data points to say like this in
this works at scale, it works for everyone, so we
are going ahead and doing it. So I think for us,
the approach was like we put our stakes in the ground,
this is what we believe, and we just go from there.
So it was pretty much a one way door decision,

(03:16):
and we knew we are taking a one way door decision.
What it means is like once you make it, there's
no coming back from it. So when you make decisions
like that with that premise, I think it's much easier
to solve for it what we learned. And I can
tell you being a HR person like it was, it
wasn't part of my DNA to say like, hey, let's
just roll with it and then we'll figure it out.
I'm like, we're talking about people like we need to

(03:38):
put some policies in place, we need to put some
checks and balance, says what will retell employees? And this
was the first time where I think it tested my
I would say DNA as well as HI to say no,
we're doing it now, we'll figure it out, which meant
at every stage had to go back and tell people
we don't know about this. So I don't have an
answer for what happens to your internal mobility if you
move from here to here. I do not know what

(04:00):
is the tax implication. I do not know what will happen,
but hang in there. We are working through it, right.
So I think that approach itself is very important to
call out because it's very different. Otherwise most of the
other companies we like, let's write down all of that,
put it to tea and then we take it versus
this was like we're doing it. So I think what
it helped us was we did a lot of experimentation.

(04:21):
So I'll give you an example in terms of we
are figuring it out, things like collabse zones. We call
them collaboration zones in terms of what type of work
can happen across different time zones. What is a good
amount of overlap? Is four hours overlap between Sydney and
West Coast California. Is that a good amount of collaboration
time zone for people to work on the same thing? Right?

(04:41):
Does it make sense for somebody in Sydney to work
with somebody in London? Maybe not? The overlap is not there.
So I think when we were kind of listing it down,
it gave us a clear framework in terms of the
what are the real pillars that we'll have to really
establish as we think through it. So one was that
how distributed the work can be, how do you solve
for productivity? Like everyone wanted to make sure that we

(05:04):
are not burning people out and we are making sure
that we are doing the right thing. Third thing was
about connection and I think connection was the most interesting
I would say part that we unpacked during this learning
in terms of there's so much, so many myths around connection,
starting from the fact that, hey, you build connection when
you're sitting next to each other in office. So I

(05:24):
can talk a bit about more. But that was one
of the most interesting part.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
I would love to know more about connection because I
think it's one of the biggest challenges that leaders grapple with.
So how have you solved for connection?

Speaker 2 (05:37):
So what we learned, and again I will always emphasize
that this is our learning and our journey and probably
each organization has their own experiences. What we learned was
connection wasn't built by sporadic office attendants where people just
show up and you know, you assume like the water
cooler chat and like going out for a coffee is
when you build connection. What we found out was when

(05:59):
you you bring people intentionally together. We call them intentional togetherness.
That's our framework. It's called ITG So we every once
every quarter. If you bring teams together, and it can
be cross functional teams, not like your hierarchical teams. You
bring the teams that are trying to solve a particular problem.
So you bring them together, give them a strategic problem

(06:20):
to solve. It could be an ideation, sprint, it could
be a strategic brainstorm, whatever it is. But you bring
together teams for a purpose to solve something, and that's
when you build real connection. Most of the time people
remember like you know each other, like hey, remember we
were doing that project together and it was socialty, but
they build the most amount of connection with each other.
So the way we have solved for connection is really

(06:42):
doing once every quarter. Itgs and every team can decide
what framework works for them once every quarter, once every
three months based on the nature of the work the
cross functional team is working on. They come together, they
spend two three days together on doing a particular thing,
doing some connection, you know, team building stuff, and then
they go back and then that connection last for like
another two three months and then you come back again.

(07:03):
So you don't need an in office attendance to build connection.
It is more in terms of you bring people together
for purpose to solve something, ad a cadence that work
for the team, and then you go back and solve it.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
What struck me most with my chat with a Varni
is how connection didn't come from random office days. It
came from intentionally bringing people together once a quarter to
solve a real problem, and that is what created bonds.
That lasted far beyond a few days. So next time
you're worrying about how to keep your team close, try this.

(07:37):
Forget about mandating office attendance. Instead, design purposeful moments where
people come together to work on something that matters. And
of course, if you would like to hear the full
conversation with a Varnie, you will find a link to
that in the show notes. If you like today's show,
make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was

(08:00):
recorded on the traditional land of the Warringery people, part
of the Kulin nation.