Confluence Syncs with Remote Teams
If your entire team suddenly finds themselves working from home, a collaborative workspace can make a significant difference.
We all live in a new reality, and for many teams around the world, this reality has manifested as a sudden shift to remote work. If you're new to working from home, you’re likely beginning to appreciate some of its benefits. But, like many remote teams, whether you've been doing this for a week or for years, you might also be facing some new challenges.
The good news is that you can make this work, and having a centralized workspace like Confluence for all the information your team needs can help. You can keep everything—plans, goals, announcements, and more—organized and accessible for everyone, anytime, anywhere.
Here are some of the key benefits of Confluence and how they can help keep your team connected and on track.
A Single Source of Truth Makes It Easy to Find What You Need
You may have recently realized how much you valued being able to stop by a colleague’s desk to ask where you could find the agenda for next week’s comprehensive meeting.
Most teams use Confluence to organize all their internal information and documents online, making them easily accessible from anywhere and by anyone. Confluence offers "spaces" that group related pages together, allowing each team to create their own space to store and organize their work. Each space comes with an overview page that provides a snapshot of your team’s activities, making it easy for everyone to understand what the team is working on and find the documents they need from anywhere.
For example, a marketing team’s overview page might display the group’s pictures, state their mission, and provide links to their most important work, such as marketing plans, goals, or personas. If someone is searching for a specific document, they can use the search feature by clicking the search icon in the sidebar, typing in keywords related to the page, and selecting the contributor or space to find what they’re looking for.
A Collaborative Workspace Makes Cross-Functional Projects Smoother
When everyone is working side by side, you gain visibility into what’s happening company-wide, like the overall vision of a campaign or the goals another team is focusing on.
Now, you might feel like you’re working in a vacuum. You have no idea what everyone else is doing, and your big, complex projects that involve multiple teams (like the website redesign you’re in the middle of) seem uncertain.
While Confluence spaces are great for teams within your organization, you can also set them up for large projects with many moving parts and cross-functional collaboration. This way, you can create a space to hold the goals, timelines, mockups, copy, and more for your website redesign.
You can assign tasks, @mention team members, and set deadlines to clearly manage expectations and keep projects moving forward. Need to collaborate with your team in real-time? Use collaborative editing to jump into the same document with your team and work together on the page.
Open Pages Support a Transparent Culture
When there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future, it’s crucial to keep employees informed about how plans are changing day by day. In fact, this transparency should be a two-way street, empowering everyone in the workplace to ask tough questions and voice their concerns.
Confluence pages are open by default and function like a website. This makes it easy to distribute information and for anyone to search for and discover it. Leaders or teams typically sharing policy changes (like HR, corporate communications, and operations) can do so quickly in Confluence. Employees can instantly receive important updates, ask questions, or express concerns directly on the page.
Integrations Simplify Your Workflows
Understandably, remote work means relying on a suite of technologies. While all these different tools can be helpful, you might worry about things slipping through the cracks. What if an important status update gets buried in your messaging platform and is completely forgotten?
Confluence integrates with other virtual collaboration tools you might already be using, like Slack, Trello, Jira, InVision, and more.
You can drop links from these tools into Confluence pages to provide deeper context, so interested parties don’t just read about progress on your website redesign—they can click on the wireframe and see it.
A Social Intranet Combats Feelings of Isolation
This is one of the biggest downsides of remote work: it can sometimes feel downright lonely. Staying connected with your team (not just for work but for fun things too) is more important than ever to keep spirits high and morale up. A social intranet can be a remedy for feelings of isolation when working remotely.
With a social intranet, anyone in the company can start a discussion. The ability to leave comments and likes on pages ensures that people feel heard, valued, and connected no matter how far apart they are.
Confluence also offers Popular and Activity feeds that show the most commented-on and liked pages across your organization, helping you stay easily informed about important information and announcements.
When it comes to fun stuff, Confluence has you covered there too. You can easily create internal blogs where team members share lighter content, like Netflix recommendations or favorite at-home workout routines.
