October 15, 2025 • 35 mins
Most companies think connection is built in the office. Atlassian discovered the opposite.
In this episode, I’m joined by Avani Prabhakar, Chief People Officer at Atlassian. Avani takes us inside Atlassian’s Team Anywhere model, which has redefined how 13,000 people across the globe work together.
We unpack what really drives connection, how to structure your workday to avoid Zoom fatigue, and why Atlassian ditched PowerPoint altogether. If you’ve ever wondered what the future of work actually looks like in practice, this is a rare behind-the-scenes look.
Avani and I discuss:
- The difference between “remote first” and “distributed first” work
- Why connection doesn’t come from sporadic office attendance
- Atlassian’s framework for intentional togetherness (ITG)
- How to design your workday to balance meetings, deep work, and collaboration
- Why Atlassian banned PowerPoint and moved to a written-first culture
- How asynchronous communication transformed decision-making
- The role of AI agents in HR and how non-technical teams built their own tools
- The four stages of becoming a strategic AI user
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What we learned was a connection wasn't built by sporadic
office attendance.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
For years, we've been told that culture is built in
the office in coffee runs, water cooler chats, those random
corridor moments. But Alassian's Chief People Officer, Avanni pruber Car
has found the opposite. Real connection happens when you intentionally
bring people together.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
With a purpose.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
In this chat, Avanni takes us inside at Lassian's Team
Anywhere model, which is redefined how thirteen thousand people were globally.
We dig into the experiments that help them discover what
really drives connection, how to structure your day so it's
not just zoom, fatigue and repeat, and why Alassian ditched
(00:47):
PowerPoint all together. If you've ever wondered what the future
of work looks like in practice, this episode is a
rare behind the scenes look. Welcome to How I Work,
a show about habits, rituals, and strategies.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
For optimizing your day.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. One of the things
that at Lassian is most famous for is it's team
Anywhere model.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
For what I think is twelve thousand employees. Have I
got that right?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It's we're turning towards thirteen thousand plus. Now, yes, so
little over thirteen.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Thousand, thirty thousand. Okay, my numbers are slightly off.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
For those that haven't heard of the team Anywhere model,
can you just describe briefly what that is all about?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
All right? So for us Team Anywhere, we call it
team Anywhere intentionally because it's distributed work, it's not remote work.
And the highest order I would say is we have
removed their various variant of the work factor in terms
of where, how who are So we've kind of removed
where we work in completely out of the equation, which
means you can work from anywhere. And because at last
(02:05):
and stands for team, we wanted it to be team Anywhere,
what it means is you have the choice. It's more
about choice. It's not about working from home. Does this
mean working from home? Does this mean remote work? And
be like no, it's about choice. So you have the choice.
You can work from office so we have one of
the most world class, fantastic offices, or you can work
from home, so whatever works for you. So that's Team Anywhere.
(02:27):
And yeah, I can talk a lot about more you
know it, but that's their sense of team anywhere, and
so what's.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
The difference between remote first versus a distributed first model.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
So, a we believe that the future of work is
going to be distributed, and even as we speak, teams
are fairly distributed in the world. 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, a remote
(03:01):
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 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,
there are four people in a team. Three of them
are in office whatever like you know, they all decided
(03:24):
to go into office one day and the fourth person
is logging in from Melbourne. They're not in Sydney for example.
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
(03:44):
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 3 (03:50):
Yeah, that's really helpful.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I would love to know when you first moved to
the team Anywhere model, what with some of the more
unusual challenges that you had to overcome, things that you
didn't even think would be a challenge.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
So I would say this was all and maybe I'll
zoom back. Because everyone associates the ways of working model
post COVID and pre COVID, post pandemic, pre pandemic. I
think for us, as at Last and 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
(04:26):
wherever 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
(04:47):
one way door decision, 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,
(05:10):
like we need to put some policies in place, we
need to put some checks and balances. What will we
tell 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.
(05:31):
I do not know what is the tax implication. I
do not know what will happen, but hang in there.
We are working through it. So I think that approach
itself is very important to call out because it's very different. Otherwise,
most of the other companies were 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
(05:52):
lot of experimentation. 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 I
book 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
(06:12):
same thing? Right? 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
(06:32):
how do you solve for productivity? Like everyone wanted to
make sure that we 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,
(06:53):
you build connection when you're sitting next to each other
in office. So I can talk a bit about more,
but that was one of the most interesting parts.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
I would love to know more about connection because I
think it's one of the biggest challenges that leaders grapple with.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
So how have you solved the connection?
Speaker 1 (07:09):
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
a 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
(07:32):
when 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
(07:52):
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 doing
(08:14):
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 lasts for like another
two three months and then you come back again. So
(08:36):
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 at a cadence that work
for the team, and then you go back and solve it.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
So I'd love to know how you think about workday
design at Lassian.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Designing the workday around you know, work is very important,
so not sitting in meetings like three fourth of your
work day because then it's happening to you. So we
have we did a research again internally and we said
your work has to be divided into three blocks. One,
of course, there is meeting blocks, so if you want
to be in the critical mission critical meetings, you put
(09:14):
twenty to thirty percent time for that. Then you keep
thirty forty percent in doing deep work. And deep work
has to be just with yourself. That's when you are
actually writing a page or thinking about a strategy, whatever
it is. So I think have make sure that you
know thirty forty percent of your time is dedicated there.
And then you have collaboration windows. This is where you
spend another thirty percent time with your colleagues who are
(09:35):
in different time zone, so you know in your collapse
zone you will chime in with another colleague who you
need to work with. So I think being very intentional
about how you structure your day kind of really helps
you being more successful in a distributed environment. Otherwise you
don't change that, and then you keep rolling from one
meeting to another and everyone feels the zoom fatigue and
so on and so forth. So I would say, if
(09:57):
you as a company or as a team you're thinking
about moving into more distributed ways of working, you have
to really focus on how you structure your days, how
you structure your meetings. What are the asynchronous ways of
working in terms of writing, culture, doing loom. I think
all of those things needs to be thought through. And
then the fourth pillar is around connection, how often you
bring teams together and then collaboration.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Zonesvannie, I would love to know how do you personally
structure your day as a leader.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I do this without any default every single day. I
start my day with intentionality and with a lot of gratitude.
So I will step out with my dog early in
the morning, I will pay my gratitude to the universe,
to sun farizing for everything that is around me. I
do my meditation that helps me anchor for first fifteen
(10:48):
minutes of my day, and then I do sit down
and just prioritize in terms of at any given point
in time, no matter what role you're doing, I can
tell you they'll always be only top three things. Rest
there'll be a long tail. Don't make that tail. You
know a list of top five priorities, just pick top three.
And I do run very flat and lean in terms
of my organization. The reason I do it is my
(11:10):
team knows that I'll pick up three things and I'll
go very deep in it. So make sure that you
are one of those leaders who's t shaped. But you
have three top priorities and you can go deep in it,
which also means that you're not doing your regular one
in months. With all people on your team or all
your direct reports, they know like, if you fall into
those three priorities, you will get to work with me
in e which ways and I'll be in the trenches.
(11:31):
So that I do that, and in terms of communication
is most important. And I think as you scale, most
of the leaders struggle with like, hey, how do I
make sure I'm giving the right direction and people are
following in. For me, I feel like the biggest unlock
has been asynchronous communication. So I do my looms, I
do my voice notes, i'd write my this thing and
make sure that if I am traveling, which I do
(11:51):
a lot, I send comms and everything from my team
on looms and everything thatever I am. So that's how
I manage my day but also manage my COUNTRYMIT and.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Annie, I'd love to know how this works for you,
Like what does a typical work week look.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Like for you in terms of where you're working from?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And then with these intentional togetherness gatherings, like what's an
example of one of those that you've attended, I'll.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Give an example. Maybe it's for people team, right, and
every team does it differently, but for the people organization
that I lead, what I realized was like, so you
have regional itgs where you can bring region together. So
what I do right now is I do travel to
each of my regions and then I bring the regional
teams together. So I was in India last week. We
(12:40):
pulled together the entire India region together. I was in
Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago we built the Wholy
Media team together. So that's what it looks like for
my team. And then once every two years, you know
or whatever, this thing that I I have organized, I
bring the entire team together, like the full people team
together at one location. You know what is to everyone.
(13:01):
So that's how it looks like for people team. In
terms of talking about connection and what does it mean
for me, I would say I overemphasize on what we
call is asynchronous ways of working. So there is synchronous
ways of working, which is in a meeting, but there
is a separate works team which is asynchronous where the
work happens in its own time. And what I mean
(13:22):
by that is I don't need a meeting for every
decision that I need to make. I don't need a
meeting to communicate everything that I need to do with
my team. I do asynchronous communication, so that happens through
a confluence page that happens through Loom, which is one
of our own tools that we use, where I share
the content and then teams starts chiming in on it
(13:44):
at their own time, and then that's when the richer
conversation starts on that. So I can talk a little
bit more about the asynchronous ways of working, but I
personally kind of dwell heavily on asynchronous ways of working
in this distributed work.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
I would love to talk about that.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
When I was preparing for this, I read a statistic
that video messaging tools like LOOM has helped eliminate close
to half a million hours of meetings across at lassion,
which blew my mind. I would love to know your
work life what it looked like before Loom and after Loom,
(14:21):
Like I'd love to know an example of what is
something that you were previously doing synchronously that then you
shifted to doing asynchronously using a tool like LOLOM.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So I would say in Atlas and our tool good
looks very different. So no emails. Your meetings are the
last resorts, so we start with recording looms where possible.
So I'll give you an example my team meetings, like
there was a rhythm to say like, hey, we'll do
it every week and then we'll bring decisions from each
of my team to say like hey, we need to
approve this particular decision, and then everyone's far on it
(14:54):
and then we go from there. Right now, my frequency
of my team meetings is not a weekly cadence, right
it is based on it's once every two weeks, so
there's not even a cadence. It's always based on what
decisions we need to make. Most of the time, if
there's a decision that needs to be made. Anyone from
my team will make a loom. They'll drop it in
my slack channel team slack channel to say like, hey, team,
(15:15):
we are making these changes to our benefits policy, right
and these are the two three options. ABNI has looked
at it asynchronously already on a page, and we need
your inputs. And this is a decision meeting like decision loom,
so you need to put a tick against it, each
one of you who say yes to it. So we
drop the loom. Everyone on the team will listen it
(15:35):
to it. Because my team is fairly distributed US Emia, India, Australia,
and I would say in twenty four hours loop time,
I can go back and then see in terms of
what my team had to say, and then after that
I will go and make a decision to say, you
know what, I've heard everyone's voice, this is done, and
then we go from there. So I've kind of avoided
like a full meeting, which everyone would in my previous
(15:56):
life would have said, we need this meeting because we
need to make an important decision to using loom to
make some of those decisions.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
So I wonder with that example that you've just described
about sharing looms and making decisions and doing that all
by a combination of posting things on the Slack channel
and watching looms. I wonder, are you missing out on
something when you choose not to gather people synchronously?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I mean, you know, do you ever wonder?
Speaker 2 (16:24):
You know, is the debate that would have been had
were it not for this default to asynchronous communication.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
It's interesting you asked that. So what I have seen
on loom is the composition is actually much more rich.
So there's less posturing that's happening. There's less you know,
stakeholder management that happens in a live setting. There's less
body language, like people are trying to manage and read
the room and say, oh fine, if this person has
(16:50):
made this point, then maybe I should say it then
this way. I think it is just kind of it
removes all of that and the real conversation takes place
in loom setting because then I'm not managing any of that.
So I think, if you ask me, the conversation is
more inclusive. People usually who would have never had the
chance to speak or like give their point of view
in loom setting. It's much more like they can write
(17:11):
it well it's much more articulate. People have given it
some thought before putting some you know. So I feel
like this way of brainstorming gives me much more richer, broader,
more thoughtful, and deeper interaction, and it kind of removes
all the other variabilities of who's an introvert, who's an extrovert,
who's the louder voice, so on and so forth.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
One of the things I know about it, Lassion, is
that you have a no PowerPoint culture.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Can you tell me, like, what does this mean?
Speaker 2 (17:43):
And how do people who are maybe used to producing
slide decks, how do you adapt to that?
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Okay, I'll give my example. Maybe when I joined at Lastian,
like my entire toolkit changed. I had an Apple laptop,
I did not have, you know, my Dell. I did
not have my Microsoft tool kit in terms of PowerPoint,
Excel and everything. So it took me a while and
I'll be honest in terms of to switch gears into this.
(18:09):
But once you do that, I can tell you it's
like you can't go back to what you know, go
back to a power point culture. So what we mean
is like a there are no presentations, it doesn't matter
PowerPoint keynote so you don't come and start presenting in
a meeting. Right, we believe that the real conversation is
you write your thoughts. It's a written culture. In acyncluded world,
(18:31):
we do believe like what you write it becomes very important.
And I think with AI coming and it's even more
important things write it down. Companies who have got enough
good documentation will have much richer intervention with AI. Engagement
with AIM maybe not intervention. So no powerpunk culture means
that you don't come and present in meetings. You write
down your thoughts on a page. We start a meeting
(18:53):
by sharing a page. Everyone takes goes off camera for
five or ten minutes, whatever the retime is for the page.
We read it, we comment on it. Person who has
written the page will read the comments and they know
by then okay, fine, this is where the conversation is
going to go. And then for the actual meeting that
we are in, we have a real conversation about it. Right,
(19:13):
Because when you're presenting, it's like one person is presenting,
you go slide by slide, asking question or you go
through the well. It doesn't really provide rich conversation, whereas
when you do it in this format, people have had
the time to read it, react to it, and then
for whatever twenty minutes that meeting is for is where
the real conversation starts. So that's how we do it.
We don't do any presentations, so it has kind of
(19:35):
helped us. I would say remove all the talk, if
that makes sense, because when you're trying to present, you're
trying to really present, You're trying to present yourself. You're
trying to present your ideas in a different way, whereas
when you write it down, when you talk about it,
then you're talking about the real shit, like okay, fine.
And it also helps us simplify. So you're saying this
or this, you're saying this, Okay, let's move to the
(19:56):
next point.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
So how did you adapt to that?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And I guess on that question, how do you think
about what to write in one of those papers that
people read at the start of the meeting where you're
trying to get your point of view across.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
I would say it the focus is on substance over style,
so it creates a single source of truth that everyone
can anchor and access upon. When you're writing, you are
also creating a culture of more openness because everything that
you write on a conference page is default open, so
you open and you collaborate. So I feel like with that,
the collaboration also happens much easier. How do you think
(20:33):
about writing? I think at first you'll feel like, oh
am I writing a formal document. Should I be reusing
a more strategic language here? But I think once you
get used to it, you will see that you are
just writing your thoughts down. Scrappy is good. I think
it promotes being scrappy. Hey, Amantha, I think I'm going
to speak to you about this. This is the podcast,
this is what I want to know, and then I'll
(20:55):
just type it out so then it doesn't have to
flow through in a certain way, and it's how your
brain things, is what you're writing on a page, which
is more authentic.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Also, don't go away because coming up a Vanni shares
how Atlasian's HR team, most of them non technical, built
their own AI agents from scratch. We get into what
it means to drive the AI wave rather than just
write it, how humans and AI can become true collaborators,
(21:22):
and why the richest conversations sometimes happen outside live meetings.
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter
that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com.
(21:44):
That's Amantha dot com. Something I have heard about you
is that you advocate for hr to drive the AI
wave and not just write it. Just driving the AI
wave actually look like in practice. For the people team
(22:07):
at it Lessian.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
We have certain beliefs at a company level. First of all,
we are saying AI is has to be led by
doing a culture transformation. It's not a technology transformation like
the previous waves where you just drive, implement tools, technology
and change ways of working. And here is a transformation
I think AI. We are very clear it has to
be led by culture transformation. What I mean by culture
(22:31):
is we believe organizations who will create faster learning loops
which means you learn fast, you fail fast, learn fast,
you fail fast that loop are the ones who will
move in a very different direction than others. So we
are kind of really overemphasizing on creating a culture of experimentation.
Second key focus area for us is that the upskilling
(22:51):
loop has to be built really fast. In that process,
so you know, you learn by actually tinkering with it,
not by you know, saying hey, here's tool and you
start using it. The third belief we also have is
like we are not leading AI with a cost and
efficiency as the end goal. I think the organization who
will lead with efficiency, cost and all of that with
(23:14):
the end goal, they're going to miss out because where
they will stop the moment AI gives you X number
of hours of saving, they will stop and they will
start celebrating. Whereas we feel the organization who will get
the real benefit out of it, who will unlock those
extra many hours in a week to do something more innovating,
going after a new business opportunity. I think that's where
the real magic of AI happens, the creativity and innovation part.
(23:36):
So I think that's our second belief. Third one is
we do believe that you need to do all of
this responsibily. So we have a responsible tech framework. We
create sandbox kind of environment for our employees to play
with it. So there's a studio where non tech person
can build their own agent, and I can share more
examples of how my team has built their own agents
in HR with no supporter of tech and that's when
(24:00):
you drive the real benefits of AI at the real
adoption rather than saying, hey, use Copilot, CHATCHI or whatever
you have rolled out in your organization and start tracking
that adoption.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I would love to hear more about the agents that
your HR team, your non technical team.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Take me through a couple of examples.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
So Nora is, I'll probably start with our first use case,
which was onboarding. I told my talent team, what is
the most number one important problem you're trying to solve,
and they said, be optimizing for employee experience and number
one employe experience has to be onboarding. So they created
this onboarding agent. It's called Nora, a new hire onboarding,
a robo agent, er a lassan. My talent team they
(24:42):
built it out in the studio all by themselves. They
didn't need any support from anyone from tech, so which
there was a sense of fright that non tech folks
are creating building their own agent. They knew the pain points,
so the way they designed it, the way they created it,
agent had a lot more personality because it was almost
like somebody from here h was addressing on new hires. Currently,
(25:03):
Norah has got the highest use it so seventy percent
of our new hires they have Nora day one and
it is a personalized version for each one of them,
so they interact with Nora. Nora has got its personality
based on whatever team you're joining. It's marketing, HR finance.
You can ask anything to Norah and it will give
you a response in terms of helping you in your
on boarding. So that's one use case. We had another
(25:24):
one it's called Coco. It's basically for helping managers doing
conversation with the team in terms of when you're delivering
the comp outcomes. Those are the most sensitive ones. So
we have something that we created where managers can ask like, hey,
based on what you know, how do you think I
should position this conversation. It's just you know. So we
have quite a few use cases, and the good part
(25:45):
in all of this is our teams have created it
and so hence there's a lot of cride. Adoption is
not an issue. It's some more bottom step motion.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
And so given your HR teams are non technical, what
tools did they use and how did they learn how
to use those tools to create these agents?
Speaker 1 (26:04):
It depends so based on whatever is the AI stack
you're using, so for us, we use our own homegrown
Drovo studio. So it's a agent studio. You go in
and you can start building. It's fairly interitive. So you
tell Rovero to say like, hey, I want to create
an agent, and then you give some prompts there and
then you start refining and keep working on it, keep
working on it, and then you start playing with the
(26:26):
agent and it becomes much smarter. It is fairly easy
and simple as you think, like anyone else listening, they'll
be like, oh my god, I need to learn whipe coding.
I need to do that now, like we didn't do
any of that. I think the best way is to
just start command writing commands, see what comes out of it,
keep it aating, give second command and then that's how
you learn. And once you put that agent into motion
(26:47):
is when you learn. Oh my god, I asked this
person to So, for example, I created an agent for myself.
It's called Angel. It takes after my dog's name. And
because the agent is called Angel, and it helped me
prior to my week because it knows what work is
happening in my space. I say, hey, can you help
me tell me what are my top three priorities, What
should I be focusing on? What trade offs do I
(27:08):
need to make? And then it gives me I would
say sixty seventy percent, you know, good information and then
I can build on it. Yeah, and this is something
I created myself in the studio.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
How did you create that? What inputs are you giving it?
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Like?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Is it accessing your calendar, your inbox? Have you given
it like a briefing document around your role and the company?
What actually went into producing that agent?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
So, because it has got connectors built. So if you're
using Jobo, which is our AI tool that we use
our AI agent, it has connector built to my calendar,
to my emails, not to my Slack, but it can
see what confluence pass am I reading, so based on
you know, it knows my workspace really well in my ecosystem,
so it kind of pulls all this information out to say,
(27:54):
like these other five things you've been working on or
you've been engaging on. So that's how it pulls that information.
The connectors are in build. To answer your question, I
don't need to build any connection.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
And I would love to know your views on you know,
we've got human workmates, but we've now got these AI workmates.
How do you see that relationship between the humans and
the AI, whether they be agents or some other form
of AI, Like, how do you see that that collaboration
evolving over the next couple of years.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
So we surveyed close to about five thousand knowledge workers
when we were working on an AI Collaboration report, because
we always want to learn in terms of how others
are doing it. What we found out was that there
are different stages of you know, your AI journey. So
I'll probably give you a quick snapshot. Stage one is
you're sending an email to a stakeholder and you asked
(28:47):
AI to summarize it or chain the tone to be
more business ing and so on and so forth. I
think that's a lot of people are tinkering and working
with AI and that and they're super happy. They're like, wow,
like AIS made my life easy. Stage two is when
you use AI to search for information within your company
to add relevant context to your email. So you go
and you do an enterprise search and AI to say like, hey,
(29:09):
I'm writing this update, can you give me more data points?
So that's I would say, and then you move to
stage two right. Stage three and four is where you
actually move into being a more strategic user. Right, So
I think stage one into a you're a basic user.
Stage three is when you are working on a project
and so you're a market researcher. You need to pull
a research, you go into deep research and you pull
(29:31):
out you ask AI to give that information to you. Right,
I would say that's stage three where you are asking
AI to analyze data, identify patterns, provide recommendation to help
you make some decision making. I would say the fourth
one to your point in terms of when do you
think the human AI collaboration becomes really real is at
stage four when you are working with AI as your
(29:53):
teammate and you are building hypothesis. So you've got a
work product in front of you, half done by AI
with your inputs. Now you start running hypothesis to say, like,
so what if I do this? Like what makes you
think that this market is? You know, if I pull
these two variables, what is going to happen? Why do
you think this product research will be successful?
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Like?
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Once you start sparring like you would spa with any
other human is when I feel like you moved to
the more strategic user of AI. At stage four and
that's where the real collaboration begins. I think until then
you are asking question, its responding to you, it's fixing
some basic things for you. But I think until you
do not move to be a strategic user. That's what
we gathered in our report is when you start building
(30:35):
real collaboration. What we also found out people who are
study users the amount of time they are saving, so
they say close about one hundred and five minutes, you know,
per week if you want to become a strategic user.
So we did some analysis also in terms of what
is that amount of time they're saving when they're using
AI in that space. We also saw in terms of
(30:58):
their creative output and innovative output is ten x more
than some of the other teammates because they're able to
use the headspace very differently. So if you ask me,
I think at this point, I'm how I see human
AI collaboration. I feel like everyone will be going through
these phases the sooner you get to that top, you know,
the strategic user phase is where you start unlocking the
real benefits of AI.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
And how does that work at it Lassian? Do you
grade people on where they're at in.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Terms of those four stages or do you measure that
so that you're looking at what AI adoption looks like?
Speaker 3 (31:30):
What does that look like?
Speaker 1 (31:32):
So at this point in time, I think we are
focusing more in terms of driving the culture of experimentation.
You're not starting from measuring because right now we're like, okay, fine,
let's just have an AI community. We have AAR champions
assigned to each and every team. Sixty percent of our
workforce is fairly tech, so we don't have an AI
adoption challenge because they anyways are breathing and working in
(31:54):
the AI space day and in dr It is for
our non tech folks and they're We're doing all these
things in terms of driving the AI culture, creating the
sandbox environment like I said, we did for the HR
team to create their own agents. I'm giving examples of onboarding,
helping managers have conversations during performance cycle. So we're building
some of those grounds up. How are we measuring it
(32:17):
at this point in time? Like I said, we're still
tinkering with it. If I'm being absolutely honest, and we
don't give any badges, we're not giving any this thing
to the employees as yet, but yes, we are thinking
about it. In terms of how do you create That
we I'd love.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
To finish is thinking about the future of work, because
you're obviously someone that thinks very deeply about this space,
and I would love to know what are two or
three things that you are predicting to really change about
the world of work Over the next couple of.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Years, I believe more leaders will start to focus on
how we work and not where we work. I know
people are still figuring out the journey, but I feel
like though where we work variable will completely go off.
You know, it won't be a thing. That's my belief.
That's the future of work. Asynchronous communication will become foundation
(33:08):
of modern team work. That's my second belief, which means
that the traditionally in person businesses that already work in
a distributed way spread out across office floor building or cities,
will rely more and more on asynchronous communication. So it's
not going to be about zoom meetings or having a
live meeting. I think the world will move to more
(33:29):
asynchronous ways of working because the work needs to happen
in its own time, and AI will help us make
that too faster. Third one is the human AI collaboration
will become the is I should say future of work.
It is the presence, but it will become the future
of work. Companies who can really nail the human AI
collaboration AI will move from being a tool we use
(33:50):
occasionally to an integral part of our daily workflow. So
I think those are my three core belief system in
terms of when I look at what will hold true
in for future of work.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Those predictions for the future of work of Arnie and
I got to say, I am so grateful that we
finally got to get this scheduled in the diary. It
has been just so brilliant just diving into a Lassian's
really interesting and unique ways of working.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
And thank you for sharing so generously with me today.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Thank you so much for having me, Amanda.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Here's the thought that I keep coming back to after
this conversation with Avarne. Connection doesn't just happen, it is designed.
Avarni joke that when you bring people together intentionally, even
just once a quarter, the bonds last far longer than
a handful of.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Offers catchups ever could.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
So the next time you're tempted to cram your calendar
with more meetings, try instead asking what's one purposeful gathering
that I could organize that could strengthen my team for months.
And if you want to keep exploring new ways of working,
check u my conversation with Tim Dukan, the ex CEO
who works three days a week and lives on a beach.
(35:07):
And if you found this episode useful, share it with
someone else who might be wrestling how to make hybrid
or distributed work actually work. If you like today's show,
make sure you get follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
How I Work was recorded on
Speaker 2 (35:24):
The traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the
cool And Nation.
What we learned was a connection wasn't built by sporadic
office attendance.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
For years, we've been told that culture is built in
the office in coffee runs, water cooler chats, those random
corridor moments. But Alassian's Chief People Officer, Avanni pruber Car
has found the opposite. Real connection happens when you intentionally
bring people together.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
With a purpose.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
In this chat, Avanni takes us inside at Lassian's Team
Anywhere model, which is redefined how thirteen thousand people were globally.
We dig into the experiments that help them discover what
really drives connection, how to structure your day so it's
not just zoom, fatigue and repeat, and why Alassian ditched
(00:47):
PowerPoint all together. If you've ever wondered what the future
of work looks like in practice, this episode is a
rare behind the scenes look. Welcome to How I Work,
a show about habits, rituals, and strategies.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
For optimizing your day.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. One of the things
that at Lassian is most famous for is it's team
Anywhere model.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
For what I think is twelve thousand employees. Have I
got that right?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It's we're turning towards thirteen thousand plus. Now, yes, so
little over thirteen.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Thousand, thirty thousand. Okay, my numbers are slightly off.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
For those that haven't heard of the team Anywhere model,
can you just describe briefly what that is all about?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
All right? So for us Team Anywhere, we call it
team Anywhere intentionally because it's distributed work, it's not remote work.
And the highest order I would say is we have
removed their various variant of the work factor in terms
of where, how who are So we've kind of removed
where we work in completely out of the equation, which
means you can work from anywhere. And because at last
(02:05):
and stands for team, we wanted it to be team Anywhere,
what it means is you have the choice. It's more
about choice. It's not about working from home. Does this
mean working from home? Does this mean remote work? And
be like no, it's about choice. So you have the choice.
You can work from office so we have one of
the most world class, fantastic offices, or you can work
from home, so whatever works for you. So that's Team Anywhere.
(02:27):
And yeah, I can talk a lot about more you
know it, but that's their sense of team anywhere, and
so what's.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
The difference between remote first versus a distributed first model.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
So, a we believe that the future of work is
going to be distributed, and even as we speak, teams
are fairly distributed in the world. 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, a remote
(03:01):
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 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,
there are four people in a team. Three of them
are in office whatever like you know, they all decided
(03:24):
to go into office one day and the fourth person
is logging in from Melbourne. They're not in Sydney for example.
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
(03:44):
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 3 (03:50):
Yeah, that's really helpful.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I would love to know when you first moved to
the team Anywhere model, what with some of the more
unusual challenges that you had to overcome, things that you
didn't even think would be a challenge.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
So I would say this was all and maybe I'll
zoom back. Because everyone associates the ways of working model
post COVID and pre COVID, post pandemic, pre pandemic. I
think for us, as at Last and 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
(04:26):
wherever 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
(04:47):
one way door decision, 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,
(05:10):
like we need to put some policies in place, we
need to put some checks and balances. What will we
tell 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.
(05:31):
I do not know what is the tax implication. I
do not know what will happen, but hang in there.
We are working through it. So I think that approach
itself is very important to call out because it's very different. Otherwise,
most of the other companies were 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
(05:52):
lot of experimentation. 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 I
book 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
(06:12):
same thing? Right? 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
(06:32):
how do you solve for productivity? Like everyone wanted to
make sure that we 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,
(06:53):
you build connection when you're sitting next to each other
in office. So I can talk a bit about more,
but that was one of the most interesting parts.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
I would love to know more about connection because I
think it's one of the biggest challenges that leaders grapple with.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
So how have you solved the connection?
Speaker 1 (07:09):
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
a 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
(07:32):
when 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
(07:52):
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 doing
(08:14):
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 lasts for like another
two three months and then you come back again. So
(08:36):
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 at a cadence that work
for the team, and then you go back and solve it.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
So I'd love to know how you think about workday
design at Lassian.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Designing the workday around you know, work is very important,
so not sitting in meetings like three fourth of your
work day because then it's happening to you. So we
have we did a research again internally and we said
your work has to be divided into three blocks. One,
of course, there is meeting blocks, so if you want
to be in the critical mission critical meetings, you put
(09:14):
twenty to thirty percent time for that. Then you keep
thirty forty percent in doing deep work. And deep work
has to be just with yourself. That's when you are
actually writing a page or thinking about a strategy, whatever
it is. So I think have make sure that you
know thirty forty percent of your time is dedicated there.
And then you have collaboration windows. This is where you
spend another thirty percent time with your colleagues who are
(09:35):
in different time zone, so you know in your collapse
zone you will chime in with another colleague who you
need to work with. So I think being very intentional
about how you structure your day kind of really helps
you being more successful in a distributed environment. Otherwise you
don't change that, and then you keep rolling from one
meeting to another and everyone feels the zoom fatigue and
so on and so forth. So I would say, if
(09:57):
you as a company or as a team you're thinking
about moving into more distributed ways of working, you have
to really focus on how you structure your days, how
you structure your meetings. What are the asynchronous ways of
working in terms of writing, culture, doing loom. I think
all of those things needs to be thought through. And
then the fourth pillar is around connection, how often you
bring teams together and then collaboration.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Zonesvannie, I would love to know how do you personally
structure your day as a leader.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I do this without any default every single day. I
start my day with intentionality and with a lot of gratitude.
So I will step out with my dog early in
the morning, I will pay my gratitude to the universe,
to sun farizing for everything that is around me. I
do my meditation that helps me anchor for first fifteen
(10:48):
minutes of my day, and then I do sit down
and just prioritize in terms of at any given point
in time, no matter what role you're doing, I can
tell you they'll always be only top three things. Rest
there'll be a long tail. Don't make that tail. You
know a list of top five priorities, just pick top three.
And I do run very flat and lean in terms
of my organization. The reason I do it is my
(11:10):
team knows that I'll pick up three things and I'll
go very deep in it. So make sure that you
are one of those leaders who's t shaped. But you
have three top priorities and you can go deep in it,
which also means that you're not doing your regular one
in months. With all people on your team or all
your direct reports, they know like, if you fall into
those three priorities, you will get to work with me
in e which ways and I'll be in the trenches.
(11:31):
So that I do that, and in terms of communication
is most important. And I think as you scale, most
of the leaders struggle with like, hey, how do I
make sure I'm giving the right direction and people are
following in. For me, I feel like the biggest unlock
has been asynchronous communication. So I do my looms, I
do my voice notes, i'd write my this thing and
make sure that if I am traveling, which I do
(11:51):
a lot, I send comms and everything from my team
on looms and everything thatever I am. So that's how
I manage my day but also manage my COUNTRYMIT and.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Annie, I'd love to know how this works for you,
Like what does a typical work week look.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Like for you in terms of where you're working from?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And then with these intentional togetherness gatherings, like what's an
example of one of those that you've attended, I'll.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Give an example. Maybe it's for people team, right, and
every team does it differently, but for the people organization
that I lead, what I realized was like, so you
have regional itgs where you can bring region together. So
what I do right now is I do travel to
each of my regions and then I bring the regional
teams together. So I was in India last week. We
(12:40):
pulled together the entire India region together. I was in
Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago we built the Wholy
Media team together. So that's what it looks like for
my team. And then once every two years, you know
or whatever, this thing that I I have organized, I
bring the entire team together, like the full people team
together at one location. You know what is to everyone.
(13:01):
So that's how it looks like for people team. In
terms of talking about connection and what does it mean
for me, I would say I overemphasize on what we
call is asynchronous ways of working. So there is synchronous
ways of working, which is in a meeting, but there
is a separate works team which is asynchronous where the
work happens in its own time. And what I mean
(13:22):
by that is I don't need a meeting for every
decision that I need to make. I don't need a
meeting to communicate everything that I need to do with
my team. I do asynchronous communication, so that happens through
a confluence page that happens through Loom, which is one
of our own tools that we use, where I share
the content and then teams starts chiming in on it
(13:44):
at their own time, and then that's when the richer
conversation starts on that. So I can talk a little
bit more about the asynchronous ways of working, but I
personally kind of dwell heavily on asynchronous ways of working
in this distributed work.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
I would love to talk about that.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
When I was preparing for this, I read a statistic
that video messaging tools like LOOM has helped eliminate close
to half a million hours of meetings across at lassion,
which blew my mind. I would love to know your
work life what it looked like before Loom and after Loom,
(14:21):
Like I'd love to know an example of what is
something that you were previously doing synchronously that then you
shifted to doing asynchronously using a tool like LOLOM.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So I would say in Atlas and our tool good
looks very different. So no emails. Your meetings are the
last resorts, so we start with recording looms where possible.
So I'll give you an example my team meetings, like
there was a rhythm to say like, hey, we'll do
it every week and then we'll bring decisions from each
of my team to say like hey, we need to
approve this particular decision, and then everyone's far on it
(14:54):
and then we go from there. Right now, my frequency
of my team meetings is not a weekly cadence, right
it is based on it's once every two weeks, so
there's not even a cadence. It's always based on what
decisions we need to make. Most of the time, if
there's a decision that needs to be made. Anyone from
my team will make a loom. They'll drop it in
my slack channel team slack channel to say like, hey, team,
(15:15):
we are making these changes to our benefits policy, right
and these are the two three options. ABNI has looked
at it asynchronously already on a page, and we need
your inputs. And this is a decision meeting like decision loom,
so you need to put a tick against it, each
one of you who say yes to it. So we
drop the loom. Everyone on the team will listen it
(15:35):
to it. Because my team is fairly distributed US Emia, India, Australia,
and I would say in twenty four hours loop time,
I can go back and then see in terms of
what my team had to say, and then after that
I will go and make a decision to say, you
know what, I've heard everyone's voice, this is done, and
then we go from there. So I've kind of avoided
like a full meeting, which everyone would in my previous
(15:56):
life would have said, we need this meeting because we
need to make an important decision to using loom to
make some of those decisions.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
So I wonder with that example that you've just described
about sharing looms and making decisions and doing that all
by a combination of posting things on the Slack channel
and watching looms. I wonder, are you missing out on
something when you choose not to gather people synchronously?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I mean, you know, do you ever wonder?
Speaker 2 (16:24):
You know, is the debate that would have been had
were it not for this default to asynchronous communication.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
It's interesting you asked that. So what I have seen
on loom is the composition is actually much more rich.
So there's less posturing that's happening. There's less you know,
stakeholder management that happens in a live setting. There's less
body language, like people are trying to manage and read
the room and say, oh fine, if this person has
(16:50):
made this point, then maybe I should say it then
this way. I think it is just kind of it
removes all of that and the real conversation takes place
in loom setting because then I'm not managing any of that.
So I think, if you ask me, the conversation is
more inclusive. People usually who would have never had the
chance to speak or like give their point of view
in loom setting. It's much more like they can write
(17:11):
it well it's much more articulate. People have given it
some thought before putting some you know. So I feel
like this way of brainstorming gives me much more richer, broader,
more thoughtful, and deeper interaction, and it kind of removes
all the other variabilities of who's an introvert, who's an extrovert,
who's the louder voice, so on and so forth.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
One of the things I know about it, Lassion, is
that you have a no PowerPoint culture.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Can you tell me, like, what does this mean?
Speaker 2 (17:43):
And how do people who are maybe used to producing
slide decks, how do you adapt to that?
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Okay, I'll give my example. Maybe when I joined at Lastian,
like my entire toolkit changed. I had an Apple laptop,
I did not have, you know, my Dell. I did
not have my Microsoft tool kit in terms of PowerPoint,
Excel and everything. So it took me a while and
I'll be honest in terms of to switch gears into this.
(18:09):
But once you do that, I can tell you it's
like you can't go back to what you know, go
back to a power point culture. So what we mean
is like a there are no presentations, it doesn't matter
PowerPoint keynote so you don't come and start presenting in
a meeting. Right, we believe that the real conversation is
you write your thoughts. It's a written culture. In acyncluded world,
(18:31):
we do believe like what you write it becomes very important.
And I think with AI coming and it's even more
important things write it down. Companies who have got enough
good documentation will have much richer intervention with AI. Engagement
with AIM maybe not intervention. So no powerpunk culture means
that you don't come and present in meetings. You write
down your thoughts on a page. We start a meeting
(18:53):
by sharing a page. Everyone takes goes off camera for
five or ten minutes, whatever the retime is for the page.
We read it, we comment on it. Person who has
written the page will read the comments and they know
by then okay, fine, this is where the conversation is
going to go. And then for the actual meeting that
we are in, we have a real conversation about it. Right,
(19:13):
Because when you're presenting, it's like one person is presenting,
you go slide by slide, asking question or you go
through the well. It doesn't really provide rich conversation, whereas
when you do it in this format, people have had
the time to read it, react to it, and then
for whatever twenty minutes that meeting is for is where
the real conversation starts. So that's how we do it.
We don't do any presentations, so it has kind of
(19:35):
helped us. I would say remove all the talk, if
that makes sense, because when you're trying to present, you're
trying to really present, You're trying to present yourself. You're
trying to present your ideas in a different way, whereas
when you write it down, when you talk about it,
then you're talking about the real shit, like okay, fine.
And it also helps us simplify. So you're saying this
or this, you're saying this, Okay, let's move to the
(19:56):
next point.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
So how did you adapt to that?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And I guess on that question, how do you think
about what to write in one of those papers that
people read at the start of the meeting where you're
trying to get your point of view across.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
I would say it the focus is on substance over style,
so it creates a single source of truth that everyone
can anchor and access upon. When you're writing, you are
also creating a culture of more openness because everything that
you write on a conference page is default open, so
you open and you collaborate. So I feel like with that,
the collaboration also happens much easier. How do you think
(20:33):
about writing? I think at first you'll feel like, oh
am I writing a formal document. Should I be reusing
a more strategic language here? But I think once you
get used to it, you will see that you are
just writing your thoughts down. Scrappy is good. I think
it promotes being scrappy. Hey, Amantha, I think I'm going
to speak to you about this. This is the podcast,
this is what I want to know, and then I'll
(20:55):
just type it out so then it doesn't have to
flow through in a certain way, and it's how your
brain things, is what you're writing on a page, which
is more authentic.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Also, don't go away because coming up a Vanni shares
how Atlasian's HR team, most of them non technical, built
their own AI agents from scratch. We get into what
it means to drive the AI wave rather than just
write it, how humans and AI can become true collaborators,
(21:22):
and why the richest conversations sometimes happen outside live meetings.
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter
that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com.
(21:44):
That's Amantha dot com. Something I have heard about you
is that you advocate for hr to drive the AI
wave and not just write it. Just driving the AI
wave actually look like in practice. For the people team
(22:07):
at it Lessian.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
We have certain beliefs at a company level. First of all,
we are saying AI is has to be led by
doing a culture transformation. It's not a technology transformation like
the previous waves where you just drive, implement tools, technology
and change ways of working. And here is a transformation
I think AI. We are very clear it has to
be led by culture transformation. What I mean by culture
(22:31):
is we believe organizations who will create faster learning loops
which means you learn fast, you fail fast, learn fast,
you fail fast that loop are the ones who will
move in a very different direction than others. So we
are kind of really overemphasizing on creating a culture of experimentation.
Second key focus area for us is that the upskilling
(22:51):
loop has to be built really fast. In that process,
so you know, you learn by actually tinkering with it,
not by you know, saying hey, here's tool and you
start using it. The third belief we also have is
like we are not leading AI with a cost and
efficiency as the end goal. I think the organization who
will lead with efficiency, cost and all of that with
(23:14):
the end goal, they're going to miss out because where
they will stop the moment AI gives you X number
of hours of saving, they will stop and they will
start celebrating. Whereas we feel the organization who will get
the real benefit out of it, who will unlock those
extra many hours in a week to do something more innovating,
going after a new business opportunity. I think that's where
the real magic of AI happens, the creativity and innovation part.
(23:36):
So I think that's our second belief. Third one is
we do believe that you need to do all of
this responsibily. So we have a responsible tech framework. We
create sandbox kind of environment for our employees to play
with it. So there's a studio where non tech person
can build their own agent, and I can share more
examples of how my team has built their own agents
in HR with no supporter of tech and that's when
(24:00):
you drive the real benefits of AI at the real
adoption rather than saying, hey, use Copilot, CHATCHI or whatever
you have rolled out in your organization and start tracking
that adoption.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I would love to hear more about the agents that
your HR team, your non technical team.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Take me through a couple of examples.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
So Nora is, I'll probably start with our first use case,
which was onboarding. I told my talent team, what is
the most number one important problem you're trying to solve,
and they said, be optimizing for employee experience and number
one employe experience has to be onboarding. So they created
this onboarding agent. It's called Nora, a new hire onboarding,
a robo agent, er a lassan. My talent team they
(24:42):
built it out in the studio all by themselves. They
didn't need any support from anyone from tech, so which
there was a sense of fright that non tech folks
are creating building their own agent. They knew the pain points,
so the way they designed it, the way they created it,
agent had a lot more personality because it was almost
like somebody from here h was addressing on new hires. Currently,
(25:03):
Norah has got the highest use it so seventy percent
of our new hires they have Nora day one and
it is a personalized version for each one of them,
so they interact with Nora. Nora has got its personality
based on whatever team you're joining. It's marketing, HR finance.
You can ask anything to Norah and it will give
you a response in terms of helping you in your
on boarding. So that's one use case. We had another
(25:24):
one it's called Coco. It's basically for helping managers doing
conversation with the team in terms of when you're delivering
the comp outcomes. Those are the most sensitive ones. So
we have something that we created where managers can ask like, hey,
based on what you know, how do you think I
should position this conversation. It's just you know. So we
have quite a few use cases, and the good part
(25:45):
in all of this is our teams have created it
and so hence there's a lot of cride. Adoption is
not an issue. It's some more bottom step motion.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
And so given your HR teams are non technical, what
tools did they use and how did they learn how
to use those tools to create these agents?
Speaker 1 (26:04):
It depends so based on whatever is the AI stack
you're using, so for us, we use our own homegrown
Drovo studio. So it's a agent studio. You go in
and you can start building. It's fairly interitive. So you
tell Rovero to say like, hey, I want to create
an agent, and then you give some prompts there and
then you start refining and keep working on it, keep
working on it, and then you start playing with the
(26:26):
agent and it becomes much smarter. It is fairly easy
and simple as you think, like anyone else listening, they'll
be like, oh my god, I need to learn whipe coding.
I need to do that now, like we didn't do
any of that. I think the best way is to
just start command writing commands, see what comes out of it,
keep it aating, give second command and then that's how
you learn. And once you put that agent into motion
(26:47):
is when you learn. Oh my god, I asked this
person to So, for example, I created an agent for myself.
It's called Angel. It takes after my dog's name. And
because the agent is called Angel, and it helped me
prior to my week because it knows what work is
happening in my space. I say, hey, can you help
me tell me what are my top three priorities, What
should I be focusing on? What trade offs do I
(27:08):
need to make? And then it gives me I would
say sixty seventy percent, you know, good information and then
I can build on it. Yeah, and this is something
I created myself in the studio.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
How did you create that? What inputs are you giving it?
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Like?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Is it accessing your calendar, your inbox? Have you given
it like a briefing document around your role and the company?
What actually went into producing that agent?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
So, because it has got connectors built. So if you're
using Jobo, which is our AI tool that we use
our AI agent, it has connector built to my calendar,
to my emails, not to my Slack, but it can
see what confluence pass am I reading, so based on
you know, it knows my workspace really well in my ecosystem,
so it kind of pulls all this information out to say,
(27:54):
like these other five things you've been working on or
you've been engaging on. So that's how it pulls that information.
The connectors are in build. To answer your question, I
don't need to build any connection.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
And I would love to know your views on you know,
we've got human workmates, but we've now got these AI workmates.
How do you see that relationship between the humans and
the AI, whether they be agents or some other form
of AI, Like, how do you see that that collaboration
evolving over the next couple of years.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
So we surveyed close to about five thousand knowledge workers
when we were working on an AI Collaboration report, because
we always want to learn in terms of how others
are doing it. What we found out was that there
are different stages of you know, your AI journey. So
I'll probably give you a quick snapshot. Stage one is
you're sending an email to a stakeholder and you asked
(28:47):
AI to summarize it or chain the tone to be
more business ing and so on and so forth. I
think that's a lot of people are tinkering and working
with AI and that and they're super happy. They're like, wow,
like AIS made my life easy. Stage two is when
you use AI to search for information within your company
to add relevant context to your email. So you go
and you do an enterprise search and AI to say like, hey,
(29:09):
I'm writing this update, can you give me more data points?
So that's I would say, and then you move to
stage two right. Stage three and four is where you
actually move into being a more strategic user. Right, So
I think stage one into a you're a basic user.
Stage three is when you are working on a project
and so you're a market researcher. You need to pull
a research, you go into deep research and you pull
(29:31):
out you ask AI to give that information to you. Right,
I would say that's stage three where you are asking
AI to analyze data, identify patterns, provide recommendation to help
you make some decision making. I would say the fourth
one to your point in terms of when do you
think the human AI collaboration becomes really real is at
stage four when you are working with AI as your
(29:53):
teammate and you are building hypothesis. So you've got a
work product in front of you, half done by AI
with your inputs. Now you start running hypothesis to say, like,
so what if I do this? Like what makes you
think that this market is? You know, if I pull
these two variables, what is going to happen? Why do
you think this product research will be successful?
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Like?
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Once you start sparring like you would spa with any
other human is when I feel like you moved to
the more strategic user of AI. At stage four and
that's where the real collaboration begins. I think until then
you are asking question, its responding to you, it's fixing
some basic things for you. But I think until you
do not move to be a strategic user. That's what
we gathered in our report is when you start building
(30:35):
real collaboration. What we also found out people who are
study users the amount of time they are saving, so
they say close about one hundred and five minutes, you know,
per week if you want to become a strategic user.
So we did some analysis also in terms of what
is that amount of time they're saving when they're using
AI in that space. We also saw in terms of
(30:58):
their creative output and innovative output is ten x more
than some of the other teammates because they're able to
use the headspace very differently. So if you ask me,
I think at this point, I'm how I see human
AI collaboration. I feel like everyone will be going through
these phases the sooner you get to that top, you know,
the strategic user phase is where you start unlocking the
real benefits of AI.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
And how does that work at it Lassian? Do you
grade people on where they're at in.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Terms of those four stages or do you measure that
so that you're looking at what AI adoption looks like?
Speaker 3 (31:30):
What does that look like?
Speaker 1 (31:32):
So at this point in time, I think we are
focusing more in terms of driving the culture of experimentation.
You're not starting from measuring because right now we're like, okay, fine,
let's just have an AI community. We have AAR champions
assigned to each and every team. Sixty percent of our
workforce is fairly tech, so we don't have an AI
adoption challenge because they anyways are breathing and working in
(31:54):
the AI space day and in dr It is for
our non tech folks and they're We're doing all these
things in terms of driving the AI culture, creating the
sandbox environment like I said, we did for the HR
team to create their own agents. I'm giving examples of onboarding,
helping managers have conversations during performance cycle. So we're building
some of those grounds up. How are we measuring it
(32:17):
at this point in time? Like I said, we're still
tinkering with it. If I'm being absolutely honest, and we
don't give any badges, we're not giving any this thing
to the employees as yet, but yes, we are thinking
about it. In terms of how do you create That
we I'd love.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
To finish is thinking about the future of work, because
you're obviously someone that thinks very deeply about this space,
and I would love to know what are two or
three things that you are predicting to really change about
the world of work Over the next couple of.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Years, I believe more leaders will start to focus on
how we work and not where we work. I know
people are still figuring out the journey, but I feel
like though where we work variable will completely go off.
You know, it won't be a thing. That's my belief.
That's the future of work. Asynchronous communication will become foundation
(33:08):
of modern team work. That's my second belief, which means
that the traditionally in person businesses that already work in
a distributed way spread out across office floor building or cities,
will rely more and more on asynchronous communication. So it's
not going to be about zoom meetings or having a
live meeting. I think the world will move to more
(33:29):
asynchronous ways of working because the work needs to happen
in its own time, and AI will help us make
that too faster. Third one is the human AI collaboration
will become the is I should say future of work.
It is the presence, but it will become the future
of work. Companies who can really nail the human AI
collaboration AI will move from being a tool we use
(33:50):
occasionally to an integral part of our daily workflow. So
I think those are my three core belief system in
terms of when I look at what will hold true
in for future of work.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Those predictions for the future of work of Arnie and
I got to say, I am so grateful that we
finally got to get this scheduled in the diary. It
has been just so brilliant just diving into a Lassian's
really interesting and unique ways of working.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
And thank you for sharing so generously with me today.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Thank you so much for having me, Amanda.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Here's the thought that I keep coming back to after
this conversation with Avarne. Connection doesn't just happen, it is designed.
Avarni joke that when you bring people together intentionally, even
just once a quarter, the bonds last far longer than
a handful of.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Offers catchups ever could.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
So the next time you're tempted to cram your calendar
with more meetings, try instead asking what's one purposeful gathering
that I could organize that could strengthen my team for months.
And if you want to keep exploring new ways of working,
check u my conversation with Tim Dukan, the ex CEO
who works three days a week and lives on a beach.
(35:07):
And if you found this episode useful, share it with
someone else who might be wrestling how to make hybrid
or distributed work actually work. If you like today's show,
make sure you get follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
How I Work was recorded on
Speaker 2 (35:24):
The traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the
cool And Nation.
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