Company-wide projects involving stakeholders from multiple groups, functions, and time zones can really test your teamwork skills. Should you unleash thousands of emails and schedule hundreds of meetings? Or is there a better way to collaborate?
At Atlassian, we know firsthand how strong async collaboration can enable growth. With over 10,000 employees across multiple continents and a work-from-anywhere policy since 2020, our company was growing fast. In fact, we were growing so fast that it created data overload issues. Our People Team wanted to fix this and keep employees engaged and connected to all of our resources and company news – no matter where they are.
An internal solution for managing data and resources
“G’day” is an internal knowledge base for all things Atlassian for employees, including IT, procurement, HR, finance, and internal communications. It’s inviting and helpful – but best of all, it allows you to cut down on emails and notifications in favor of company-wide feeds. Anyone can contribute their voice to G’Day content, and all popular blogs are highlighted and shown to everyone in the company.
Vannya Vallejo is one employee in our video who saw G’day’s potential from the start.
Imagine an employee platform that you would typically find by the water cooler, but virtual. The employee platform is a central hub where Atlassians can find the latest announcements, important information, and support they need to be successful in their role.
Vannya Vallejo, Internal Communications Content Manager at Atlassian
How Confluence can help your company with big projects
Because building G’day was such a large undertaking, the People Team turned to Confluence for global async collaboration. Using the collaborative knowledge hub united different teams effectively, so they could solve any complex problems.
Confluence solidifies everyone’s roles
Confluence’s structure also ensures that each team member understands the role they play in the bigger picture. By clearly defining roles and responsibilities and displaying them on the page for everybody to see, no one is lost and no task gets overlooked in the world of async collaboration.
“It was great having people challenge the thinking, and make people understand what their role was in solving this problem,” Breslin recalls. “That’s really important to getting such a complex project off to a good start.”
Confluence is your single source of truth
Product manager Sam Knight can attest to the difficulty of multiple cooks in the kitchen – cooking at different times.
“From internal communications to IT, from product to the People team, it was a real collective effort to bring all these groups together,” he says. “It’s not something you can do in isolation, especially when new people from across the globe joined the project downstream. Confluence really helped us to have one source of truth.”
Bringing teams together on the same page for collective success is Confluence’s specialty, which was critical to shipping the project fast.
“This entire process was quite overwhelming in terms of logistics and how we were going to collaborate,” says Andi Breslin, Head of People Operations. “That’s when the power of Confluence came through – being able to build a project poster that created a shared understanding around what, why, when and who, and how we were going to measure success.”
Confluence eliminates unnecessary meetings and emails
Confluence enabled powerful cross-functional alignment that proved essential to the successful launch of G’day.
“Without Confluence, there would’ve been many more meetings, many more emails, many more conversations, many more misalignments, and it would have taken much longer,” insists Breslin. “And there would’ve been a lot more frustration.”
Because it allows everyone and anyone in the company to contribute to a single page, there’s better visibility across departments. Tagging individuals to get their input also eliminates unnecessary meetings and emails. Not to mention, they don’t absolutely need to read the entire document if you’re able to pinpoint exactly where you need their input – which is a huge time-saver.
Tips to get you started
Check out these tips for frustration-free team collaboration for your next big project:
- Create a project space, then invite team members so that they can stay on schedule, communicate, and move key tasks forward. Each employee can view the project’s “TLDR” section, points of contact, and OKRs. Plus, get notifications to stay in the loop.
- Use a project plan template as the main source of truth across functions and educate contributors who are joining late. It’ll be easily accessible and outline the scope, key timelines, approvers, and other important information.
- Add labels to make pages easily searchable throughout the company. And use action items and @ mentions so that the right people know what needs to be done next. If it’s not meant for edits from others, add a “WIP” to the title to denote it’s a “work in progress” and consider changing permissions. Analytics and “last updated” info let you and viewers know how current a page is with a quick glance.
Click the link below for more information on how Confluence enables better async collaboration for teams of every size.