TED Talks Daily - How distributed work can unlock your potential | Avani Prabhakar

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

The option to work from home means that work truly works for everyone, says Avani Prabhakar, chief people officer of a large tech company. She explains how flexibility and asynchronous collaboration in a distributed workplace can unlock diverse global talent, level the playing field for introverts and actually increase productivity — without damaging company culture. (Made in partnership with Atlassian) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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fit to my lifestyle. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hough. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Avani Prabhakar says it's being an introvert that led her to a top position at her company. In her 2024 talk, Atlassian's chief people officer reflects on how the big shift to distributed work during the pandemic led introverts like her to shine

and how going to distributed formats with intentional togetherness led everyone to do better work. And stick around after the talk for a Q&A with Ted's head of HR, Rachel Morris. Like many of you, I am an introvert. And I know it sounds ironic, because I'm the chief people officer of a large tech company. But I've never been the loudest in the room.

In fact, I've never been the first, second or even third to offer my opinion. I've always listened more than I speak. And in a world where most dominant voices are often seen as leaders, I've had an uphill battle at work, until distributed work changed my life and many others. I've always had what I call as Grindr's mentality, and it was shaped early on in my life. I was born in a tier-two city called Indore in India,

a country that still favors boys. I was the youngest of three sisters. But my parents were very progressive, and they expected me to excel both at sports and academics. Hindi is my first language, not English. And for those where English is not your first language, you may understand that it's one thing to be fluent at English,

and it's another to argue your point in it. Well, with all of that prep, when I joined the workforce, it got further amplified, because corporate environments expect you to show up in a certain way. For you to be successful, you have to be articulate, you have to be the first one to speak, you should be able to hold the space in the room,

and the list goes on. Well, I was putting a lot of energy in showing up in a certain way. And it was really affecting my life outside of work. I would come home exhausted, and all I could think of was how quickly can I retreat to my room for the night. Well, 2020, fast forward. As we all know, we became remote workers overnight. And the future of work was here.

Since that day, my company went fully distributed, meaning every single employee could choose every single day where they work from. We have over 12,000 employees working across 3,000 cities and locations in 14 countries. But we are not a remote company. We are distributed. We have over 12 physical offices, which many of our employees choose to work from.

But there is no return to office mandate, no compulsory days, just choice. We move to team anywhere, and then we are doing that. We have to really get focused in terms of how we work. Because where we work. Because where we work is one variable of the equation, but how we work is the most important variable. And there is a spoiler alert for all of you that we had to get really, really good at collaborating.

First, we had to move to asynchronous ways of working, meaning work happens in its own time. First, we had to move to asynchronous ways of working, meaning work happens in its own time. So meetings are not the default. Meetings are the last resort. We use tools such as Loom, which allows you to create shareable videos and content which your teams can listen to, look at it and react

to in their own time. By using Loom, we have saved one of the dreaded thoughts which I'm sure some of us might have experienced sitting in a meeting, which is, oh my god, this could have been an email. Why we're here? By using Loom, we have saved close to about half a million meetings. Second thing we had to focus on was we got really deliberate about how we design our workday. Today, 65% of knowledge workers think that it's more important

to respond to a notification rather than moving actual work forward. So we get our teams to really design their day, which is divided in three halves. One, designated time for meeting. There is designated work block to only do deep work and focus work. And then there is allocated time to do project work with your teams. We've also realized that working across time zones can be a real challenge for global companies. So we make sure that the work is not divided beyond two time zones to make sure there is four hours of collaboration time between teams. The third most important aspect is how do you build real connection in a distributed

world? And let me tell you, there is a myth that you build connection by sporadic office attendance. Like you sitting with your mate next to each other staring at your laptop, you're not building any connection. What we found out, that you build real connection when you bring teams together to work on a problem or on a strategy, ideate new things, but bring them together for a reason. That's when you build intentional togetherness.

I also get asked, so have you seen any drop in productivity? And my answer is no. Ninety-two percent of our employees say that they are doing best work of their lives, and one-third of them have seen improvement in focus. of them have seen improvement in focus. Well, working this way, for me personally, it really unlocked my potential almost immediately.

We often argue that smart people think on their feet, and of course, many do. But there are lots of super smart introverts who show their intelligence differently. That has been my experience. I fundamentally believe that I've been able to accelerate my career faster in a distributed world. It has leveled the playing field for me

and created an environment where career growth was location-agnostic. Today, the talent is not defined by whether you live close to an office or a city. You can be living in Atlanta or Albuquerque, and you can find the best talent in any of those locations. So there are lots of benefits I can go on about distributed work. Other thing I would like to say is, you know, when we reduce the future of work to a conversation or an argument between working from office

and working from a home, we are thinking too small. Sweeping mandates of return to work is a very easy and a safe option. And a lot of organizations use it for whatever various reasons. But having worked in the people space, I can tell you, when you give people the choice of when and where they work, you're giving them the key to accelerate their full potential. For me, that is the future of work, where we stop focusing on when and where the work gets done and start focusing on the how.

A world where work works for everyone. Thank you so much for that Avni. Stay with me for a minute. Before you leave us, I just want to ask a question. You make a compelling case for distributed first teams. How do you approach mentorship in a distributed workforce? So like I said, when you make the choice, you have to build a lot of enablement in the organizations in order to do that. Which means starting from entire life cycle of onboarding. So what we experienced based on where you are in your career and your journey, if you're

a new grad or if you're a new hire, you need more curated in-person experience to build that enablement upfront. When it comes to the leaders, it's a very different skill to have a performance conversation in person versus having it remote. So you have to really switch your entire L&D muscle to build around that. We also have seen that having bite-sized learning is much better. You absorb better in a distributed fashion rather than sitting against online training and going through it.

So there are various ways, but yeah. Fantastic. Well, if we've got people in organizations that may be considering a move to a distributed first working model, if they're concerned about the impacts on culture, what advice would you give those folks? I would say when you're thinking about culture, because based on how distributed and how global

your organization is, you have to get really nuanced about it. So one size will not fit all. You have to cater to different cultures where probably coming together for a different reason makes more sense to build some connection. So it has to be very very nuanced when you're thinking about culture and you also have to anchor yourself to two or three values which you believe in as a company because that will help you make some decisions. Those will be your guiding principles on this journey.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. Another round of applause for Avani Prabhakar. Thank you. That was Avani Prabhakar at TED Next 2024. This talk was made in partnership with Atlassian. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.

This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. From fleet management to flexible truck rentals to technology solutions,

at Enterprise Mobility, we help businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities. Because if your business is on the road, we want to make sure it's on the road to success. Enterprise Mobility, moving you moves the world. Mayday, Mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

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