Creating a healthy work environment for team collaboration is a top priority for businesses. Many organizations rely on strategies and tools to streamline communication and foster collaboration.
As you are reading this, chances are you are a Confluence user or at least heard about it somewhere. Confluence is a great first step towards creating communities (be it work or non-work related). It’s content management, customization, and marketplace make it the ultimate workplace communication tool.
In this blog post, we are going to shed light on one of Vectors leading communication apps: Discussion for Confluence. First we are going to discover the app along with its main use cases. Then, we will walkthrough its benefits.
1. What is discussion for Confluence?
The Discussion app is designed to help you build and engage communities inside Confluence. The app gives your teams the ability to initiate and contribute to discussions directly within Confluence thanks to its content rich discussion pages and advanced social features.
The app is available on the three hosting options: Cloud, Server and Data Center.
2. Who is it for?
As is the case with any communications app, Discussion targets HR and internal communications specialists along with team managers looking to spark discussions within their teams. When developing the app, our product team thoroughly studied common challenges faced by com specialists using Confluence ranging from the absence of dedicated forums to the ability to track engagement with regards to discussions.
Although the app is designed with communications specialists’ needs in mind, the Discussion app can be used by just about anyone in your organization (provided they have the rights to participate).
3. Why Discussion for Confluence?
Thanks to its large array of features, the discussion app helps you and your teams:
Promote and facilitate company wide discussions
One of the common mistakes organizations make when dealing with communications is their overreliance on one type: Top-down. Top-down communication, as the oldest form of internal communication, remains vital and irreplaceable. However, the changing dynamics in the workplace coupled with the emergence of remote working meant that employees progressively had to take part in company-wide discussions.
A study by the The Workforce Institute at UKG found that 86% out of the 4.000 surveyed employees claimed that their peers are not heard fairly or equally with a further 47% expressing that their voice is often overlooked by high management. These stats demonstrate a high need for employees to feel heard in the workplace. And a failure to put in place the strategies and tools to promote open participation in company discussions can lead to disengagement, high turnover rates, and an overall bad business performance.
The discussion app deals with all types of communication in the workplace (be it top-down, bottom-up or peer-to-peer).
For example, internal communications specialists can create dedicated discussion pages and share them with everyone or targeted groups. Discussions can be classified into categories making them easier to locate, access and digest for everyone.
Leveraging a combination of content management and social features, both discussion contributors and participants can interact directly within Discussion pages, add feedback and mark the most useful replies. This eventually provides your employees with a platform within which they can express themselves and feel part of a wide community.
Foster team collaboration
Following the rapid transition to remote working in the last couple of years, team collaboration started to take place mainly through digital channels.
The discussion app provides your teams with a holistic discussions hub where they can collaborate, exchange on an ongoing basis and brainstorm on ideas.
Each team space in Confluence can host an unlimited number of discussions accessible within one holistic dashboard. There, discussions can be classified by categories, status, creators, among a host of other filtering options.
Track engagement with regards to forums and discussions
As the saying goes “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Tracking the state of discussions along with key engagement metrics will help you grasp the bigger picture and make imporvmenets accordingly.
Whether within a specific discission page or the dashboard, you can access a host of metrics including the discussion state, views, questions, likes, comments, contributors, etc. This way you can learn which discussions are gaining traction within your communities and which ones that are not relevant to your teams. Additionally, the list of most frequent contributors be it through posting questions or interracting within the community can help you identify your band ambassadors and start a brand advocacy program on the right foot.
4. Get Started with Discussion for Confluence
Discussion for Confluence’s latest release is currently available. To try the app, make sure to visit Atlassian marketplace and start your free trial now. Once you install the app, you can find all the detailed steps to get started within our dedicated Youtube Playlist.
If you are already a customer, you can upgrade to the latest version directly from your Confluence instance.
To learn more about Discussion for Confluence, please refer to the documentation. As always if you have any questions or feature requests, don’t hesitate to contact our support team.
