Async Collaboration with the Atlassian Teamwork Collection
Takeaways
- The Atlassian Teamwork Collection makes async collaboration the default, not the workaround.
- Loom moves the conversation off the calendar. Decisions, walkthroughs, and updates get recorded once and watched whenever.
- Every Loom recording stays connected to the work it's about, embedded in Confluence pages, and linked to Jira projects.
- Recordings include automatic transcripts, summaries, and chapters. Loom captures live meetings into Confluence with action items in Jira.
- Jira and Confluence keep the foundation visible across time zones, and Rovo and agents close the gaps in between.
It’s 3 p.m., and the person whose input you need is heads-down, in another time zone, or simply offline. You could send a Slack thread, schedule for later, or move ahead without them. None of those get you the answer.
The Atlassian Teamwork Collection is built so async collaboration is the default, not the workaround. Jira and Confluence keep the work and decisions visible regardless of who’s online. Loom bridges the rest, replacing the meetings that didn't need to be live with video your team watches on their own time. Together, they let your team move forward without waiting on each other.
How to make async collaboration work for your team
With Loom, the things that used to demand a calendar invite get recorded once and watched whenever: decisions, walkthroughs, status updates. And because it's a video, the tone, the gestures, and the reasoning all carry over.
Step 1: When to record, when to schedule
Meetings earn their place when interaction is the point: brainstorms, sensitive feedback, or decisions that require real debate. Everything else can be a Loom. When the goal is to share or explain rather than discuss, a recording does it faster, reaches more people, and leaves a permanent record. Status updates reach people who couldn’t attend. Walkthroughs are still there for the new hire six months later. Onboarding recordings that would otherwise require a live session get watched on demand, over and over. The reasoning behind a decision doesn’t disappear when the meeting ends.
Tip: Before scheduling a meeting, ask: "Could this be a Loom?" If the answer is yes (and it often is for status updates, walkthroughs, and FYIs), record instead.
Step 2: What Loom replaces well
The biggest wins aren't replacing meetings that should have been emails. They're replacing communication that wasn't working in any format. Where Loom does the job better:
- Bug reports: instead of writing reproduction steps and hoping someone can follow them, record your screen showing the issue. The Loom creates a Jira work item directly with the full visual context attached. One recording replaces a thread of back-and-forth.
- Design and code reviews: walking through a Figma file or a pull request on screen, narrating what changed and why, catches what comments alone miss. Reviewers respond on their own time with their own annotations, and the original walkthrough stays attached to the work for anyone who needs it later.
- Status updates with nuance: when the update is more than one sentence, when there’s a reason behind a delay or a tradeoff worth explaining, a Loom delivers it all in a few minutes. Your team gets the substance, not just the headline.
- Project kick-offs: record the kick-off once and share it with the full team. Everyone gets the same context regardless of when they watch it, and Loom pushes action items straight to Jira so the project starts moving before the first reply.
- Decision explanations: a recap that captures not just what was decided but why, what alternatives were considered, and what's still open. The reasoning stays attached to the decision instead of getting lost in someone's notes.
- Complex explanations: the kinds of things you'd otherwise demo five times to five people. A workflow walkthrough, a feature spec, a setup guide for a new tool. Record once, share with everyone who needs it now, and keep it findable for everyone who joins later.
Tip: Record your next status update as a 3-minute Loom instead of scheduling a 30-minute meeting. Embed it in your Confluence project page. See how your team responds.
Step 3: Make Loom part of the permanent record
A Loom that lives only in someone's inbox is the async equivalent of a meeting nobody recorded. The whole point of going async is that the conversation persists, so the recording has to land somewhere it can be found, referenced, and acted on later.
Embed the Loom directly in the Confluence page it relates to, attach it to the Jira work item it’s about, or both. From inside the Loom, link out to the related Confluence pages and Jira work items so a viewer can jump to the source. The recording becomes part of the artifact it’s discussing and a way into the rest of the related work.
Loom extends the record further. Recordings include automatic transcripts, summaries, and chapters by default, so a teammate short on time can read instead of watch, and Rovo can search across the transcript like any other knowledge source. Looms can also be turned into Confluence pages or Jira work items directly, so a 5-minute recording becomes a documented decision or a tracked action without anyone retyping it.
And when a meeting does need to happen live, Loom captures that too. The AI Notetaker joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams call, records it, and turns it into a Confluence page with notes, summary, and action items automatically pushed to Jira. The conversation that had to be live still ends up in the same async record as everything else.
Loom recordings can also become instructions for Rovo agents. Walk through a requirement or a design change on screen, and Loom turns it into Jira work items that can be delegated to agents for execution. The recording serves as both the brief and the starting point for the work, no retyping, no separate write-up.
Step 4: Build the team practices that make it stick
Agreeing to go async is the easy part. Staying async takes discipline, especially when calendars get busy and the temptation to "just hop on a call" creeps back in. The teams that get this right treat async like an operating model, not an individual habit, and agree on a few things up front so the practice holds.
- Where things live: decide where each kind of communication goes. Project decisions in Confluence, work updates in Jira, and Looms embedded in both. When everyone knows where to find what, async stops requiring a search.
- Response expectations: async doesn't mean instant, but it can't mean indefinite either. Set a default response window for non-urgent messages so the team knows what to expect.
- Recording standards: aim for 3 to 5 minutes, lead with the takeaway, and use chapters for anything longer. Short and structured Looms get watched. Long ones get queued and forgotten.
Up next
Explore more guides in the series