🙄 🤩 From Meh to Wow: Team Collaboration Without Borders

[#1]

Part of the series about Creating a Killer Confluence Space for your Team:

• 📚 Scaling Success in Confluence: Empowering Teams to Thrive with Centralized Knowledge

In the ever-connected world of business, there are a few hidden clauses nobody talks about. The diminishing return on forced productivity, destroyed work-life balance, and burned-out brains impact more and more of the digital workers. The hive is buzzing 24/7, as are the meeting invites, Slack notifications, and email threads. We can adapt to it, but it’s kind of … Meh.

The seamless collaboration came in as a very trendy term (that has its own dark secrets), but what’s really behind the dream that teams of any scale want to possess? Every team member wants to:

• stay in the loop

• have a productive workday

• be efficient and achieve more with less

Sounds simple. But the bigger the company the more complex for team members to stay fast and efficient. And sooner or later you need to put these people in a physical or digital room and set the ground rules for your future productive environment.

I present to you: The Confluence room.

There is nothing I love more than a blank Confluence space. It allows you and your team to develop their best workspace. Maybe you are a Marketing or a Business team and need areas dedicated to centralized campaign planning, content creation, and performance tracking. Or the Development team that aims to streamline the development process, document code, or track project progress.

In the previous article, we discussed how a centralized knowledge base encourages collaboration among team members. Here I will describe the basic approach to structuring your spaces in a way that makes sense and helps your team work faster instead of wandering around searching for a particular piece of information.

Setting up a new space

The smartest thing to do when creating a new space is to start from scratch from a pre-built template.

 

Like I did with Project Cheesecake here. If you consider yourself a Confluence guru, go ahead and start from ground zero. But I assure you, there are fragments in the pre-built templates you may never think about. Like a simple Meet the Team section. Oftentimes, we praise our team members for being the best but forget about them when building their future (work)home.

This pre-built set of tables, statuses, and prompts dramatically reduces your time building and thinking about the page. After all, you aim to spend more time working with your Team and not working on your Space.

A nicely structured and visually appealing page tends to gain more attention from your fellow co-workers. Transform your content blob into a Lego game! Paragraphs, headers, images, and tables exist for a reason. Engage people in collaborative editing or give every team member a minor task.

⚡️ But remember:

Allow people to contribute at their best time and pace. Fostering successful collaborative culture is giving freedom and creativity, so make sure your pilot project is not the “important major release that’s coming in 3…2…”

So here you are. You made a remarkable new Space using both Confluence pre-built templates and your project-specific additions. How to know if you structured it well enough for your team?

Ask a team member who is the complete opposite of you, to find something in your space. If they can do it without any hints, you did great!

⚡️ Another important reminder:

How you search and find information is 100% different than how someone else does. Your Space structure should follow basic and sensible rules applicable to everyone. Never make suggestions or speculations on how people have to search.

How do you structure your spaces and pages? Do you have any ideas or inventions? I love to hear all of your Confluence stories 💙

[Peter Preston]

Have to admit that I've never used the templates as more than inspiration for what to include in new Confluence spaces. I'm going to reconsider that approach next time. 

Also love the callout that everyone searches and hunts for info differently. So true. And so important to remember when building spaces (and products in general). 

[Andy Gladstone]

Alas, so many of the new templates came out AFTER we created many of our spaces. I can attest that starting with a template is always going to lead to a better user and navigation experience.

[Matt Schroyer]

Does anyone know of a way to create a custom space template ? I know you can do page templates but I want to basically create a custom setup for a whole new space like a new product. After I setup my space using a series of templates and then want that same list/ hierarchy to be available whenever someone creates a new space. 

[Andy Gladstone]

@Matt Schroyer custom space templates has long been a requested feature (you can find a few tickets related to this in JAC - jira.atlassian.com) but is currently not available as an option. You can search for "space template" in JAC and upvote some of the requests, but many have been there for years and likely won't see any movement soon as it is not a highly requested feature.

[Frederike Häusel_resolution_]

Another great article. Thanks for sharing @Teodora V 

I have to admit. I barely use templates and normally start from scratch. But looks like I should actually look into the possibilities with templates. Thanks for bringing that up :)