Coronavirus & The Atlassian Summit

The Atlassian Summit in Las Vegas was canceled this week due to Coronavirus fears. In its place, the Atlassian Remote Summit was created.

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook were all abuzz with people upset online. We get it – conferences are fun, but some of these individuals were going so far as to complain that remote conferences were completely useless. These people couldn’t be more incorrect if they tried.

Let us be very direct – If you’re a software company who thinks that remote work can’t achieve high-quality results, then we don’t think you’re using Atlassian correctly in the first place.

Besides, Atlassian isn’t the only organization that has taken bold steps to help reduce the spread of infection. Microsoft asked all Seattle employees to work from home for three weeks. The University of Washington (> 50,000 students) has closed their classrooms and will be utilizing remote learning, instead. Even the world’s largest rave, Tomorrowland, was closed according to a freelancer who works for us.

If Jack Dorsey can hold a virtual all-hands meeting for Twitter using Slack in between his Vipassana retreats in Myanmar, then your company can handle remote meetings, too.

The coronavirus will create disruption. It already has. However, this disruption will likely introduce many companies to a way of approaching business differently. How many companies will experiment with remote work during the next few months and never look back? How many of those companies will recognize the benefits that remote work can bring? How many employees who live in an expensive city like Seattle commute +1 hour to/from work?

Is living in San Francisco as an entry-level employee a model that is reaching its upper limits? Maybe. Can remote work effectively make their lives easier while simultaneously saving your business money? Absolutely.

For employees of software companies, side hustle entrepreneurs, and international companies alike – remote work isn’t new. For the rest of y’all – it is.

If your management team meticulously creates and schedules a work from home setup, then it will likely succeed. However, emergency remote work setups inspired by a global pandemic are likely to be pretty unproductive. Why? They don’t have rigid remote work processes in place.

Burnout, isolation, work-related anxiety, lackluster cultures – they’re all very real remote risks. Companies will prop up remote workflows that just barely work because they don’t yet know a better way.

But we know the better way.

Remote work likely won’t be productive when your company decides to get their toes wet unless you follow these general rules from Gitlab’s Remote Manifesto:

Work from home or coworking space > one central location

Writing down and recording knowledge > on-the-job explanations

Asynchronous communication > synchronous communication

Formal communication channels > informal communication channels

Flexible working hours > set working hours

Results > # of hours worked

Follow these simple rules and remote work suddenly becomes more manageable. For the naysayers, if you can’t trust an employee to work for you from home, why would you trust them to work at your company in any capacity?

At Nextup.ai, we create solutions that make remote work seamless inside of Slack.

Jira Integration+

Easily track Jira issues and receive updates

Morgan

Ensures that employees will come prepared for your remote meetings.

HelpDesk+

Offers written communication that is accessible to employees even if support is not around

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If your employees do great work in an office, they can do great work anywhere. Let them.

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