Bay Area tech is forcing workers into offices. She’s fighting back.

A human resources executive at a rarely discussed tech giant has become a hero in the fight against return-to-office mandates. Annie Dean’s position is firm, as she told SFGATE recently: If you as a worker don’t want to go to an office, “Vote with your feet” and find a remote-friendly company. 

Dean is a vice president at San Francisco and Sydney-based Atlassian, where she is tasked with leading the roughly 10,700-worker company’s “Team Anywhere” efforts. The company has four offices in the U.S. and eight elsewhere, but still allows any employee to work remotely whenever they want. Dean herself picks which offices should grow or shrink based on employee needs and oversees the company’s research into managing its employees’ work. 

Atlassian is the company behind task tracker Jira and workspace platform Confluence. In other words, its main cash-makers are software products that enable distanced collaboration. (Atlassian also just purchased video-messenger Loom for $975 million.) As a vice president, it’s not necessarily surprising that Dean would push a work model that benefits her company’s bottom line.

Still, Dean’s become one of the remote work movement’s biggest influencers, extolling the virtues of her company’s model to a quickly growing audience of LinkedIn fans. A few months ago, she hit 18,000 total followers on the professional networking platform. It’s a large audience for her thoughts on tech’s work future. In a September post, she declared, “At Atlassian, employees choose their workplace every day,” earning comments in response including, “Such a refreshing ethos,” and “Trust above all.”

That message puts her, and Atlassian, in stark contrast with local industry powerhouses like Google, Apple and Meta, which have mostly required workers this year to commute to a physical office at least some of the time. Even pandemic darlings Roblox and Zoom have prodded employees back to their Bay Area campuses, as have Uber, Snap, Salesforce, Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter, according to Insider. In September, Meta told employees that managers would track badge data to see whether employees were actually commuting in, and threatened to fire any return-to-office holdouts. 

“Forcing people back into the office is the most expensive and least inclusive way of working,” Dean told SFGATE in a video interview recently from her home office in New York, “and doesn’t address any of the ways of working challenges that we know plague our day-to-day working experience.”

The former head of remote work at Meta, Dean said that executives feel pressure to justify high real estate expenses, and that’s the real reason they’re requiring workers to return to the office. It has nothing really to do with productivity or collaboration, she argued. “They don’t know how to deploy their real estate differently,” she told SFGATE in a follow-up email. “We’ll likely see a big shift in this when office leases expire in 6-8 years.”

Dean also said that executives default to “the office” as the solution to a litany of workplace problems, rather than turning to actual productivity data — which she says should be focused on tasks completed rather than on time workers spend at their company desks.  

The problem is that hard data has been hard to come by. The senior vice president of Amazon Video and Studios, Mike Hopkins, told his staff that he had “no data either way” to contrast in-office and remote work, Insider reported in August. Still, he demanded that his workers come in, reportedly saying, “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”

Dean argues that it would be more relevant to check for any signs of reduced productivity due to remote work, than to simply insist without evidence that business is better when workers are sitting closer together. 

“There never was a good measure of productivity in a knowledge work setting before the pandemic, and we can’t expect that there is one today,” Dean said. “But we do look kind of defensively, you know, are there any signals that there’s reduced productivity? And the answer is no.”

Dean added that Atlassian is doing its own measurements to make sure “nothing is breaking.” She has a “team of PHDs” monitoring when workers’ productivity peaks in the day and measuring which teams are completing the most tasks. (Preliminary data, Dean said, shows that the leading teams are distributed across time zones but still have some workday overlap.) The research group is also recruiting workers to experiment with how they arrange their calendars and set goals and priorities, she said, and has found that workers are actually taking longer days than they were before the pandemic but now are able to include breaks for child care and fitness.

Some workers across the tech industry have dug in their heels on remote work. Hit with return-to-office mandates, corporate Amazon workers walked out in protest, YouTube Music employees went on strike and Grindr’s nascent union said over a third of the California dating app’s employees chose to leave the company.

Dean sees the fight for talent as a key reason to stay the course. When Atlassian adopted its work-from-anywhere policy, she said, the share of the companies’ new hires who live at least two hours from an office went from 14% to 54%, according to internal data. Dean said that’s proof that Atlassian has access to a larger, more diverse talent pool than its competitors thanks to its flexible policy.

Again, Atlassian has a clear financial motive to promote remote work: The company made most of its $3.5 billion in revenue last fiscal year from Confluence and Jira, according to an August filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

On LinkedIn, Dean’s twice- to thrice-weekly posts about remote work regularly garner dozens of comments from other enthusiasts. She often repeats the idea that “everyone’s distributed,” because unless workers are in an in-person meeting or sitting directly next to each other, she said to SFGATE, they’re likely using some type of remote-work tool even if they’re in the same office.

And that tool may well have been made by Atlassian. 

Hear of anything happening at Atlassian, Meta or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.