With far less frequent face-to-face, verbal connection, written collaboration has become the key to successfully navigating a virtual workforce. From slide decks to project pages to meeting notes, more than ever before, employees are creating pages upon pages to keep their teammates in the loop and move work forward. And it’s not just about connecting work; it’s also about staying connected with the people behind it.
Confluence is at the center of workplace information sharing, where content creation and timely distribution are vital. It’s a workspace for teams to share knowledge and collaborate. Today, our 60k customers use Confluence for project collaboration, from long-form content to meeting notes, and utilize knowledge documentation to create a single source of truth.
Confluence is the only product on the market that provides this at scale, and we’re rolling out new features to help you and your team to collaborate. But first, let’s look at how written communication and content creation as it’s used today can be upgraded for the next era of work.
3 ways to optimize written communication
Ensure your content is seen by colleagues
How do you increase engagement on your work and guarantee an important announcement or project catches the right eyes? Key readers are scattered across timezones, sometimes an entire workday behind or ahead. With each siloed teammate producing more content and adding to the pile, invaluable ideas can be buried or even lost.
Foster social connections
How do teammates who have never met in person build relationships that transcend day-to-day work? When work is the main focus of your interactions with a colleague, it can be difficult to see the creator behind the Confluence page. Teammates separated by time and space must assign themselves the extra task of forging off-topic friendships.
Create more modes of expression
How are teams utilizing other forms of content creation and expression? Even before remote work became poised as the norm for some companies, Atlassian has been laying the groundwork to propel teams beyond simply the written word. As teams become more comfortable with working separately, we’re continuing to look ahead to diversify what work looks like.
Each of these areas is equally important in the success of virtually working well together. It’s not just creating content; it’s also about seeing the writer behind it to keep us all connected.
New Confluence features to enhance written communication
Here’s how Confluence is helping teams collaborate in new and better ways in the age of distributed work:
More visuals add color (literally) to your content
You know that old saying, “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar?” The same is true of eyes and visuals, as more than 65 percent of the population are visual learners. Break up walls of black-and-white text and elevate your Confluence pages with a page cover image or an emoji in your title. By mixing in images, you have more flexibility to express your ideas and showcase the person behind the screen. With a customizable space avatar, you can quite literally put yourself into everything that you do on Confluence. These delightful features are especially helpful for teammates who onboarded remotely and have never met the team in person.
Smart Links make content even easier to design
Now, when you paste a link from another tool like YouTube or Trello into Confluence, that work will display in its native format. Add informative visuals to your pages and provide more value to your readers in one easily digestible package.
Scheduled publish surfaces your content to the right people at the right time
When you’re working in a remote world, the height of traffic in your timezone might be the middle of the night for other vital readers. Guarantee your piece gets the engagement it deserves with the ability to schedule when your page or blog goes live. Let us take care of the primetime launch so you can focus on your next great project.
Convert pages to blogs for more engagement
While a regular Confluence page is the best place to write out your thoughts, it’s not the ideal vehicle for sharing your content with a wider audience all at once – think of it like texting a photo to several individuals as opposed to posting it to social media. Quickly transform a page in your personal space into a blog post for instant distribution to the team, department, or company level. Blogs yield a whopping 59 percent more interaction from readers, including liking, commenting, and sharing of the content.
This new era of work isn’t written in stone, but we know it will require more than content creation alone to get things done and keep teams feeling the same connection they did in the office. In the next year, we’ll be supporting more types of content to continue making work more visual and further place Confluence at the center of organizations like yours. Click below to learn how Confluence can help your team.