Why You Need to Onboard New Team Members into Confluence Quickly

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One of the most attractive parts about Confluence is that it can be used by everyone. You shouldn't just have your tech writers write documentation in Confluence. Confluence should be used for marketing, project management, human resources, company news, and announcements within your organization. That’s when it’s the most powerful.

This is part of why it’s so important to onboard new team members into Confluence, but that’s only scratching the surface. This article will cover:

• why onboarding into Confluence is crucial

• the best way to onboard new team members.

The Need for Speed: Why You Need to Onboard Quickly

Whenever a new team member joins, onboarding them in Confluence should be a priority. They likely won’t pick it up directly after reading through a Confluence intro. It’s even less likely that they’ll immediately start creating content with no onboarding process.

According to the teams that K15t works with, people who end up creating pages in Confluence either do so within the first few weeks, or never do so. This is a case we see repeatedly, so we have a new guideline for teams:

“If a user isn’t guided into creating pages and being a contributor within 21 days of using Confluence, they will never create content in Confluence by themselves.”

Prior to new members joining Confluence, you need an onboarding plan. Let's put together that plan now!

Put Your Onboarding Material in Confluence

If your new team member has never used Confluence before, the best way to ensure they'll use it from day one is to put their onboarding material on Confluence. Sending them a link to an employee handbook or legal document that they’ll just skim over isn't the way to go here.😉

We're talking about setting up a checklist for their onboarding. From the get-go, they will be in Confluence.

A good element to use here is the action item macro. Your new member can check off each item on their onboarding list, so they know what they still need to do. You can also see how far along a new member is in their onboarding process. From an onboarding perspective, it shows that Confluence is a living page, not a static document. It gets them thinking early about how they can make a difference to the page.

Directing New Members to Great Confluence Guides

Despite its ease of use, Confluence can still be overwhelming to someone who has never used it before. As part of your onboarding process, direct them towards guides and tutorials so that they don't think of it as just an online Word editor.

• Atlassian Confluence Support Center: If you're looking for specific information, Atlassian's support center is the best place to go. If you don’t know how to do something in Confluence, chances are your answer is in Atlassian’s support center.

• K15t’s Confluence YouTube Videos: The videos we share over on YouTube are fantastic introductions to Confluence that help you get the most out of it. If your user is completely new to Confluence, the Confluence Tutorial playlist is a great starting point.

• Atlassian University: The Atlassian University is a great resource for learning how to use Confluence and other Atlassian products in depth. You can do paid courses, but there is also the free online Confluence Fundamentals course for any new user.

• Your Own Internal Guide: Every company does things with Confluence differently. There is a chance that tutorial content may not be helpful in your organization's specific use case, or it may be written for a Confluence site that looks nothing like yours. As part of onboarding, create your own Confluence use case documentation.

One thing to watch out for is whether any tutorial you read or watch is written for Confluence Cloud, Confluence Data Center, or Confluence Server. They all have slight differences, especially in how they look, which could confuse a new user.

Creating an Introductory Page as Part of Onboarding

As your new teammate learns about Confluence, they haven't yet created a page in Confluence, which is the most important step. Onboarding may (and should) have recommended updating their Confluence profile with a photo and their job title, but that's not the same as creating a page on their own.

A good way to do this is to have new teammates write an introductory blog post.

Apart from being a great way for a new face to introduce themselves to their colleagues – especially in an era of remote working environments – it’s a great way to get them creating a Confluence page where they are writing about a subject they know about, namely their own life.

Fantastic! Your new colleague has been brought up to speed on how everything operates in your organization, thanks to your onboarding page. They have a grasp on how to use Confluence thanks to the helpful tutorials you’ve show them. They’ve introduced themselves to everyone with their introductory blog post. And most importantly of all, they’ve created a page in Confluence within the first three weeks, and are well on their way to being a regular contributor!

Read the full article

If you want to get out of the last bit of onboarding team members into Confluence checkout the full article about Why You Need to Onboard Team Members into Confluence Quickly and learn more tips and tricks to quickly onboard your team into Confluence.
Or read another best practice about Confluence on our Confluence Collaboration Hub.

Over to You...

Now, we'd like to hear from you:

• How do you onboard new team members into Confluence?

• Which best practices from this article have you already embraced?

• Have we missed a best practice your team uses to onboard team members better?

I'm happy to read every comment and discuss!

Cheers,
Steffen