{"id":39882,"date":"2023-10-20T15:05:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/what-atlassian-did-when-they-realised-theyd-hired-an-arsehole-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:05:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:05:00","slug":"what-atlassian-did-when-they-realised-theyd-hired-an-arsehole-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/what-atlassian-did-when-they-realised-theyd-hired-an-arsehole-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"What Atlassian did when they realised they\u2019d hired an \u201carsehole\u201d – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
At Atlassian<\/a> nothing is more important than culture.<\/p>\n So when Scott Farquhar learned that the company had hired somebody who was difficult the company co-founder had a simple response.<\/p>\n \u201cA little while ago there was somebody that everyone thought was an arsehole basically, and I asked people \u2018well why are they still here?\u2019\u201dhe says.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we made the choice that they were not really right for Atlassian.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was instructive that even as you get larger you need to spend more time explaining to people that culture is more important than job performance, and I will support you at making sure we hire the right people. Or let people leave the company if they don\u2019t fit that culture.\u201d<\/p>\n At Atlassian Summit in San Francisco overnight, Farquhar and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes spoke of the importance culture at Atlassian.<\/p>\n The company has been named Australia\u2019s best place to work for two years running<\/a>, and the second best medium-sized workplace<\/a> in the United States.<\/p>\n Farquhar says while values are a part of the company that never changes, culture is the environment in which work gets done, and naturally evolves as a company grows.<\/p>\n \u201cHow work gets done in a 20-person organisation is very different to how work gets done in a 200 or 2000-person organisation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n And the most important ingredient of a company\u2019s culture are its employees, Cannon-Brookes adds, that\u2019s why it\u2019s important to manage hiring practices as a startup grows, something Farquhar admits the duo didn\u2019t get right initially.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first 50 people we hired, Mike and I interviewed and hired personally, and then the next 50 people, we were less involved in the interview process,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe hadn\u2019t put any values in place, or really structured the types of people we were looking for.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then one day we looked at the types of people that were coming to join Atlassian because we had free food and a pool table and ping pong and all these perks. People were joining Atlassisan because of the perks, not because we built amazing software that helps teams change the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Realising they were attracting the wrong type of employee, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar took a bunch of their first employees on a company retreat, and asked them \u201cif you were going to rebuild Atlassian, what would be the properties you would look for in employees\u201d.<\/p>\n The duo then did the same thing with Atlassian\u2019s executive team.<\/p>\n The results were pretty similar, about 80% Farquhar says, and it was those attributes that became and remain Atlassian\u2019s values:<\/p>\n Those goals aren\u2019t aspirational, they aren\u2019t attributes Atlassian expects its employees to grow into.<\/p>\n They\u2019re attributes Atlassian makes sure its potential employees fit into, before hiring them.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a lot of customers from a lot of different types of companies and often we get (asked) \u2018It\u2019s great that you have these values but I can\u2019t change my X\u2019 and I always say, you can change the people around you,\u201d Cannon-Brookes says.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t have to have values for a company. They can be a team, department, office, anything right. I think the act of getting a group of people together and sitting down and saying \u2018 what do we stand for\u2019 and \u2018what do we not want to lose\u2019 is more important than \u2018what do we want to be?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThe other thing we that we didn\u2019t write down that we were very clear on at the start is that we didn\u2019t want to have basic human values [on the list], like honesty, integrity, those sorts of things, those should be inherent or assumed. Otherwise you end up with a set of platitudes that aren\u2019t useful or instructive to people in any way shape or form.\u201d<\/p>\n Follow StartupSmart on<\/em> Facebook<\/a>,<\/em> Twitter<\/a>,<\/em> LinkedIn<\/a><\/em> and<\/em> SoundCloud<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At Atlassian nothing is more important than culture. So when Scott Farquhar learned that the company had hired somebody who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39882"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}But what is \u201cculture\u201d?<\/h3>\n
\n