The firm that's putting an end to 'brilliant jerks'

One of Australia's biggest companies says it will no longer tolerate "brilliant jerks" who deliver results for the company but make life hell for their co-workers as part of a complete overhaul of how the firm conducts performance reviews.

The $47 billion Australian software company Atlassian, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.

Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change will "more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work".

"Basically over the last 18 to 24 months we have totally changed the way we do performance reviews at the company globally," Atlassian global head of talent Bek Chee said.

"We recognise things are not the way they used to be, yet companies haven't evolved (from) 30 years ago when they were primarily made up often of white men. Tech standards have evolved, we have new ways of working, new demographics and generational change."

Ms Chee said most companies "haven't looked at their performance systems in a new innovative way". "We wanted to make sure we were rewarding the right behaviours," she said.

"One of the things we wanted to make sure we accounted for was the 'brilliant jerk' — people who are extremely bright and talented with respect to the way they execute their role but aren't necessarily concerned with the impact they have on others. We want to make sure our system prevented that."

Ms Chee said it was "not about people being shuffled out" of the company, but "what it has allowed us to do is really de-bias the performance system" by taking into account an employee's entire contribution.

Asked if it would be possible for someone who did well in their role to be outscored by someone who did poorly but was more likeable, she said, "Not really, because in order to get the highest level rating you have to meet the highest bar on all three factors. Those people would get the same rating."

Atlassian employees can receive one of three grading levels on each element, based on "growth mindset language" — rather than a score, they either get an "exceptional year", a "great year" or an "off year".

"We crowdsourced from within the organisation, that was one of the suggestions that came from our employees," Ms Chee said. "The reason that language is really important is it does not mean you are a certain type of person or a certain type of performer, it means you had a great year or an exceptional year."

Atlassian also encourages peer feedback. "Your teammate can say, 'This person really did support the work I was trying to do or went above and beyond to help me'," Ms Chee said.

"Or on the flip side you may have a colleague where (you think), 'My gosh just working with them takes time away from me to make up for their work.'"

Ms Chee said appealing to the millennial and gen Y and Z crowd was "a huge part of this". "We know the next generation are very socially conscious, they have a different set of expectations. They're kind of no-bullshit. They don't want to hear a company say, 'You can bring your whole self to work, we're diverse, we're socially conscious', and not have that backed up."

But she stressed that it was not about coddling millennials with a participation-trophy mentality. "Fundamentally this does not change the way we think about high performers. Our top performers we know nail it in terms of living values and being part of the team and delivering in their role," she said.

"I don't think this is a peanut butter approach by any means. I definitely think some people could look at a system that has values and team and culture tied into it and get concerned, but we know from our own experience and research that these behaviours encourage collaboration and lead to high performance, it's not just, 'Oh they're friendly and they smile.'"