Onboarding Team Members to Confluence

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Recently I did a live session on building an Atlassian Enablement program, and realized that there’s even more we can explore - onboarding individuals. The Enablement session was geared more towards org-wide adoption, but most of the time teams need help getting a small group (or even single person) sped up. 

One of my just was basically to do this - manage an HR team’s Atlassian stack and ensure new joiners to the team knew how to use Jira and Confluence. This was actually a lot of fun - not only did I get to build out an onboarding process and training, I got to meet every new hire to the HR team. This exposed me to a lot of great folks and helped me learn a LOT about both Atlassian and HR.

So here I’ll share some of what I learned! Definitely think of this as general advice - not an exact roadmap - and adjust it to your own needs.

Start with Why

The “why” for every team will be different, but before you start building out slide decks or anything else consider WHY your team uses Jira and Confluence. This is incredibly important as it will drive a lot of discussions with the new hires. For example, if they ask you “Why do I have to file a request for XYZ thing” you can tie it back to the “why”. 

(I’ve also seen a lot of groups fail to do this, the reason is “no clue, but we’ve been told to do it this way”. At best this is a downer, at worst it causes processes to fail spectacularly).

The “Why” can be hard to pin down, so take time to talk to your team about it. You may go on a bit of a journey to figure it out, but having this core concept nailed down is worth it.

Personas

Once you know the “why”, take a moment to identify the roles your team fills. In my example I had HR experts who would step in after a Tier 1 support team tried to help. We could expect some work had already been done and some questions were already answered. This meant I could focus on higher-level things (like understanding routing, or how to perform more advanced searches).

Understanding what the new joiner is expected to do is really important to our next step (building content) since it will help you choose what to include (or exclude). Sometimes this takes the form of brainstorming, but frequently I found myself asking folks who have the same role what they do (or I dig through Jira to see how they use it).

Depending on your team you might end up with a few, or more, of these, but they serve as the roadmap to building content. For example, many folks will likely never create a space, so you can skip that. Basically everyone, however, should learn about the hierarchy and search.

Build!

All that planning was honestly the hard part - now that it’s done you’re on easy mode. The persona provides guidance on what you’ll have to build out. Typically I create a short slide deck that goes over what folks need. This doesn’t have to be very polished, but should include things like:

1. What your team does
2. Why they use Jira/Confluence/whatever
3. How they use it
4. A guided tour

Including those four things will help your new joiner understand how their role fits into the team, and how Jira/Confluence/etc. Fits into their role. This context is important (arguably MORE important than the “here’s what buttons to push”) since it will guide them when they’re unsure what to do (it’s also a LOT easier to figure out the button to push than why it should be pushed or when!).

Wrap

Keep in mind this is a living process - I constantly revisit and update my materials. I ask every new joiner what else would help them succeed and constantly challenge myself to better support them. This has a number of positive impacts

1. Better training = happier folks. No one wants to fight with a system, especially when they’re new to the job!
2. You’ll learn. Folks will challenge your knowledge and force you to get better too.

Check out the links below to some more information, but even a 5 minute walkthrough for new joiners is beneficial! 

I am curious to hear what YOUR experience was like though… drop a comment below and share your experience, or how you onboard folks.

Resources

1. Live session on Enablement

2. More info on the enablement session, including slide deck and templates

[Robert Hean]

@Anahit Sukiasyan  - flagging this for you as you had requested it over in the "new to confluence" post!

[Anahit Sukiasyan]

Thanks so much for the tag, @Robert Hean this is a great breakdown! 👏

I especially liked the focus on the “why” before tools or features, I’ve found that this helps new joiners understand the bigger picture and make better decisions later on.

I’ve seen similar success when onboarding small groups or individuals, where even a short, role-focused walkthrough makes a big difference compared to generic org-wide training.

Thanks for sharing this!