How I Work Quick Win: The quarterly ritual that bonds teams for months
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Dec 14, 2025 
Avani Prabhakar, Chief People Officer at Atlassian, shares insights on building connections in a distributed work environment. She discusses the difference between remote and distributed work, debunking the myth that just being in an office fosters connection. Avani introduces the 'Intentional Togetherness' framework, which involves quarterly gatherings that focus on purposeful collaboration, enhancing team bonds that extend beyond these meetups. Tune in to discover how intentional interactions can redefine team dynamics!
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Design For The Remote Participant
- Distributed first means designing meetings and spaces for people who join remotely, not treating remote as an exception.
- Avani Prabhakar says optimize for the remote participant so everyone has an equitable experience.
Atlassian's Pre-COVID Remote Experiment
- Atlassian experimented with remote work before the pandemic and had ~8% of teams already working wherever they wanted.
- When COVID hit they scaled that experiment, treated the shift as a one-way decision and iterated policies as they learned.
Use Collab Zones And Overlap Windows
- Distributed work requires defining 'collab zones' and reasonable time-overlap for synchronous work.
- Avani Prabhakar highlights that overlap matters and not all locations pair well for collaboration.