“My job here at Atlassian is to commit crimes and then write very, very detailed confession letters – metaphorically speaking.” Meet Alex: an engineer on our security intelligence team with a wry wit and a penchant for pop-color hair. Less metaphorically speaking, the team’s job (our red team, in particular) is to hack Atlassian’s systems exactly as real attackers would.

As a researcher interested in teamwork and team effectiveness, March 2020 was a fascinating moment for me. Around the world, knowledge workers at organisations large and small were suddenly forced to work from their homes. As we scrambled to get a read on the effect this was having inside Atlassian, we also commissioned an international, multimodal study to capture and make sense of the impact on individuals and teams across a range of industries as they grappled with these extraordinary changes.