As part of their research for the report, Atlassian surveyed 200 Fortune 1000 executives and 12,000 knowledge workers. Jira ticket data is quoted in the report and makes for some compelling insights into how people collaborate within modern teams.
We know that, as knowledge workers, our pace of work has shifted over the last few years. Expectations have changed from clients, executives, and other organisations about their need for answers. Information is expected now, as opposed to longer timeframes of the past.
Atlassian calls out that information is in abundance, yet teams are less informed than ever before. This is an important problem to note and we see this happening in different ways.
Some might describe it as ‘having meetings for meetings’ sake’, or feeling tired of ‘busy work’, or recognising that they need to use five different systems to complete their work each day because information is stored in such a scattered way. This way of working causes pressure. It causes breakdowns in communication and a lack of transparency.
Another challenge highlighted in the report is the co-location of modern teams with collaborators spread across timezones. According to Atlassian, “Jira ticket data shows that as work becomes more complex, it also starts to span more and more timezones”.
This reminds me of my conversation with Mollie Tregillis, and her insight that “the bigger the problem, the more perspectives you need to solve it”.
Where collaborators are spread across timezones, this challenge is no doubt exacerbated where the team is multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary. In fact:
“93% of executives [surveyed] say cross-functional collaboration is more crucial than ever.”
It’s important then for leaders to consider other diverse factors that are at play in distributed multidisciplinary teams such as cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic factors, educational backgrounds, discipline expertise, communication styles, and team rituals.
In addition to some burgeoning challenges, the Atlassian report highlights three secrets to exceptional teamwork. Unsurprisingly, these ‘secrets’ feel more like ways of working for high performing teams.
Leaders who understand these secrets already are well ahead in their industries.
The report notes that exceptional, high-performance teams will increasingly:
In my research on multidisciplinary teams within the legal profession, aligning work to goals or purpose-driven work comes up frequently. It’s a way to focus different perspectives and disciplines around a common goal. It’s also one of the best ways to ensure a team stays motivated and focused on the outcome. This is because the best leaders spend time helping their team understand the ‘why’ and how their work helps the organisation’s goals before jumping into doing the work.
In my conversations with knowledge workers operating in multi- and interdisciplinary environments, they often observe the gradual increase for this type of collaboration as work evolves. It was no surprise to read in Atlassian’s report then, that “Jira ticket data shows that 40% of knowledge workers’ direct collaborators sit in a different job function.” Boom! This is only going to become more commonplace for teams.
What that means for leaders, however, is that their teams need to understand the critical elements of the work they are taking on. The who, what, when, and why.
Atlassian’s report emphasises the need for centralising knowledge to ensure visibility and transparency of shared context.
The report’s third secret to exceptional teamwork looks at ways to help teams re-focus their attention and speed up access of information. Atlassian call it ‘unleashing collective knowledge’—in particular, using artificial intelligence (AI) to help with this. The report notes that meetings don’t scale, but when information is stored in a shared system, AI can assist with surfacing that information quickly and in a helpful way.
This point in the report is probably the most dubious for me. A utopian situation of AI helping teams to work smarter and faster is great in theory.
However, I do think a large proportion of teams are still learning how best to prompt AI, and how best to narrow down the vast potential uses of AI to make it helpful for them. It’s not a matter of just installing Microsoft’s Copilot, for example, or a custom GPT and starting searching. There are experts carefully considering how AI can be programmed and trained to make teams more effective through the surfacing, searching, and sharing of information. This work takes time and expertise. Professional services, broadly, still has a long way to go in this space.
If you’re keen to check out The State of Teams by Atlassian, you’ll find it here.
I’m continuing my research on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams, so if this article has sparked some interest for you, make sure you add your email address below.
You’ll hear from me once a fortnight where I’ll share different resources (usually from unlikely sources!), an update on the work I’m doing, and a few anecdotes along the way.