Uitspraken

“Why are we doing this?

We've tried to be incredibly thoughtful in how we balance the impact this will have on our people, and the responsibility we have to set Atlassian up for success.

A month back we reorganised our company to better reflect operating in a changing and difficult macroeconomic environment. We made tough calls to prioritise the most critical work for our current and future customers. While it helped us streamline work, we need to go further in rebalancing the skills we require to run faster at our company priorities.

To be clear, this decision is not a reflection of Atlassian's own financial performance, as we will be reinvesting in roles that better support our priorities. As a company, we have massive growth opportunities in front of us, particularly across cloud migrations, ITSM, and serving our enterprise arrows.

How are we rebalancing?

We've made hard calls to reduce our investment in specific areas, in order to reinvest in others. This is different to a financially-driven reduction, where you would look to make 'broad-based cuts' – for example, a 10% cut equally distributed across every org within the company. This is not what is happening here.

While many teams across Atlassian are impacted, some of our most impacted teams include Talent Acquisition, Program Management, and Research & Insights. We want to be clear these decisions are not a reflection of our teammates' work. Every single person has made contributions that have changed our company for the better and will leave a lasting impact on their peers and teams. This is about rebalancing the roles we need across Atlassian first and foremost.

How are we doing this?

As we said in our last blog, our value of Build with Heart and Balance is about making the hard, right decisions with passion, empathy, and care. To assist those leaving us in their employment transition, we will be offering:

• Global separation package - 15 weeks + 1 week for each year of service. Sign-on bonus provisions will be waived, and any accrued and unused Paid Time Off (PTO) will be paid out.

• Accelerating vesting - We will accelerate vesting for the next quarterly vesting event (May 2023). These who have been here for less than a year (usually not eligible for vesting), will receive vesting for the number of quarters they have worked at Atlassian.

• Providing healthcare - Employer-sponsored plans will provide six months of healthcare benefits for employees and their families, and continued access to our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and Modern Health through this time.

• Visa support - We will provide individual consults with Atlassian's mobility team, and meetings with external immigration counsel to review visa status and options.

• Laptops - Once remotely erased, all employees will be able to keep their laptops.

• Internal mobility - We will provide the opportunity to apply for open roles internally through our Internal Mobility process. Our team will work with impacted Atlassians over the next four weeks to explore suitable opportunities. This will be the case for everyone regardless of where they live and what the labour laws specify.

• Outplacement services - We're partnering with a third party to provide coaching, resume-building and guidance, and job-seeking support.

Allowing teams to say goodbye:

We know the industry standard is to block access to communication tools immediately. This approach didn't feel right to us. Our default to trust is an incredibly important part of our culture. Most people leaving will have the option to interact with their teams until the end of the day Friday, Mar 10, 2023 local time. For people who have access to sensitive data, laptops will be locked, however, they wilt still be able to use Confluence, Slack, Zoom, and Gmail on other enrolled devices. We encourage you to take the time for farewells, including writing goodbye blogs and sharing any handovers. Some of those leaving may not want to do any of this - and that's okay too.

We will also host live Founder webinar sessions today for these leaving us. This is completely optional. We will answer every question we can.”

“Atlassian will be reducing its investment in specific areas of the business and reinvesting in others, in order to deliver against strategic priorities. The consequence of this exercise is that the decision was made to reduce headcount and that some roles are no longer necessary and are being made redundant. The reductions in headcount are primarily in the R&D, Go-to-Market and G&A organizations.

No significant reduction in force

As announced in the Founder blog, the total impact of the global reorganization is a reduction in force of more than 500 employees.

The impact in the Netherlands is very small and the impact of the global reorganization is very limited for the Dutch workforce. The number of redundancies in the Netherlands is only 17.

 This number of redundancies doesn't constitute a collective redundancy. Therefore there is no collective dismissal notification to the UWV required.

 The redundancies are spread out over several teams and therefore the decision of redundancies in the Netherlands do not cause a significant change in the day to day operations.

 The percentage of the reductions in force is only 3% when looking at the total number of employees in the Netherlands and also 3% when looking at the total of the global reductions.”

“We would also like to highlight some of the points that the current WoCo [Works Council – OK] team discussed and wanted to convey to the management:

• The notification to the WOCO of this big impact announcement was not good, too short notice, and not in line with a collaborative spirit that the WOCO and Atlassian should strive to uphold. It is clear that Atlassian BV management was aware of this change much earlier than announced, and should have considered working together with the Works Council on it.

• The package is nice to see but we would still like to have outside legal counsel take a look for a second opinion on this whole offer being made to employees who are impacted.

• The tone of the message comes across as very distant and not in the spirit of the Atlassian Values. It comes across as a "by the way" letter, on which you expect no response because certain minimums were met.

• The use of the phrase "the number of redundancies in the Netherlands is only 17" is unnecessarily trivializing the impact of what is devastating news to 17 people.

• Justifications for the terminations were listed as if to vindicate the actions and to point out that nothing can be done.

• Also, some statements simply are not true; the termination of the PgM [program management – OK] team on Marketplace constitutes a major change and disruption of day to day operations of not only that team but also their direct colleagues who depended on them for program management.

• Finally, putting a deadline to agreement to terms with the threat of losing the severance package is quite a stressful thing to do to someone.”