During the COVID-19 pandemic, employees were worried most about their ability to collaborate effectively— in one study, 75% cited their inability to collaborate as a top concern associated with working from home.
Part of the reason why collaboration suffered in the transition to remote work (and the recent move towards hybrid work) is because the typical avenues for teamwork were removed. The spontaneous, in-person brainstorming and strategizing sessions were no longer an option and, without these interactions, employee productivity, creativity and other aspects of the workplace have suffered.
With 65% of employees planning on continuing to work remotely all of the time after the pandemic—and 33% of employees plan on only going back to the office some of the time, according to the same study—organizations should prepare by equipping themselves with collaborative solutions that will help disparately located teams.
Atlassian’s Confluence solution offers the capabilities and customization necessary to build workplaces that are just as collaborative post-pandemic as they were before remote work became the norm.
Many teams are struggling to collaborate in remote work environments because, in part, it’s harder for employees to share information with one another or ask questions than it would be in an in-office setting. It’s also easier for employees to become distracted: 37% of remote workers reported that constant notifications from collaboration tools actually disrupted their ability to be creative, according to one study.
The highly customizable Confluence solution makes sure that teams can avoid these distractions. Teams can use Confluence to create workspaces where employees can share information with one another easily, and also install permissions that keep specific, applicable employees informed. In effect, this feature makes sure that only certain members receive notifications about certain updates to ongoing projects so that other employees aren’t distracted by the changes.
In fully remote or hybrid work environments, employees can’t always travel over to a colleague’s desk to ask a quick question or get some advice. Already, the average employee spends about 20% of their week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues to help with specific tasks. And while solutions like Slack or G Suite can help with the latter—communicating with other team members to get answers on different projects—they aren’t as effective at helping individuals search for and locate specific resources or information (since Slack deletes messages after a certain amount are sent, and it’s harder to organize documents by team or project in an all-encompassing platform like G Suite).
Confluence was specially designed to help companies organize all of their internal knowledge, documents and resources into one digital, shared location so that they’re accessible anywhere, for anyone. Confluence’s ‘spaces’ feature groups related pages and resources together so that they’re easy for individual employees to find and use. Or, teams can create specific ‘spaces’ for certain teams so that employees working on the same project can easily access the documents or resources they need from an accessible location.
And to ensure that employees can easily access these spaces, Atlassian designed Confluence’s search engines to be highly intuitive. If an employee is looking for a certain document in a space, all they have to do is enter a few relevant keywords or contributors in the search feature and then receive a variety of options to choose from for the answers they need.
To encourage wider collaboration—or foster a kind of collaboration that can exist across many teams or departments—it’s important that companies first break down any information silos. They should aim to create a culture that encourages open information sharing, one where multiple teams can ideate decisions and deadlines.
And in our increasingly digital landscape, it’s becoming all the more important that companies maintain infrastructure that supports virtual modes of collaboration and open information sharing.
With Confluence, companies can ensure that every employee has access to a company’s collective knowledge (or as much of it as they need to do their job effectively). They can do this by integrating other solutions into the knowledge sharing tool. Integrating a messaging application like Slack allows employees to engage in quick back-and-forth discussions, but any of the details or feedback that emerge from those conversations can be saved and contextualized in Confluence for future reference. Slack and Confluence together allow for instant information knowledge sharing, and deliver companies the assurance that their information is shared but never lost.
While Confluence can give companies the capabilities necessary to remain collaborative in fully or hybrid remote work environments, it can be time-consuming to install and configure the solution into an organization’s existing infrastructure. An Atlassian Platinum partner like Contegix offers the expertise and resources necessary to set-up Confluence easily and quickly so that a company’s IT teams can stay focused on other strategic work and avoid any maintenance or upkeep.
With a solution like Confluence—and the extra help of a support partner—companies can maintain the same, if not higher, levels of efficiency, creativity and collaboration they had before the pandemic.
To learn more about Atlassian’s Confluence tool and Contegix can help its users integrate the solution to boost collaboration, click here.