Hear more from Annie Dean on tools for teamwork in a distributed world in her on-demand Team ’24 session!
Rethinking teamwork and collaboration
The traditional workday is not working anymore. Today’s workers are plagued by back-to-back meetings, overflowing inboxes, and minimal clarity on how to drive projects forward.
With 78% of people struggling to juggle meetings and tasks, it’s clear that work methods and the way teams collaborate need an update. As work becomes more complex and teams more distributed, the ability to navigate through distractions is harder than ever. The world is changing but the way people collaborate hasn’t caught up yet. It’s time to reconfigure and redefine our collaboration methods.
Make knowledge accessible and actionable
Great teams make information easy to self-serve. By making sure that information is easily accessible and well-documented in Confluence, users will automatically create a centralized knowledge base where team members can eliminate the need for less-useful meetings that can often result in wasted time.
That’s when AI can do the heavy lifting by finding the right information for you. Powered by Atlassian Intelligence, Rovo accelerates the process of finding, learning, and acting on information scattered across various internal tools. With Rovo, you can ask natural language questions, and it will summarize the information along with relevant supporting documents.
Stop trying to manage the overwhelming volume of documentation yourself—it’s simply not feasible. Instead, let AI streamline the process and make information accessible to your team.
Focus on a few, clear priorities
To ensure your team is focused on what truly matters, you must set clear and visible goals. Many teams struggle with contradictory goals that aren’t well-tracked or understood. At Atlassian, we streamline our focus with only three company-wide objectives, and all key results align with these. Through our goal platform, Atlassian makes every team’s goals and progress visible to everyone.
Once the goals are clear, build rituals that remind your team to always focus on what matters. Instead of endless to-do lists, start by asking yourself: “What is my top work priority for tomorrow?” Clearly identifying your focus will instantly improve the quality of your workday. Additionally, managers can further enhance team connection and clarity by sending brief written and video check-ins each week, boosting team outcomes by 25%.
Make time to do the work, together and independently
Great teams design their workday to deliver results. The most valuable asset teams have is their time, yet it often feels like there’s never enough of it. To be more intentional with our time, we need to intentionally design our weeks. Top teams don’t let their calendars control them; they know how to make progress and collaborate effectively.
At Atlassian, we ran an experiment encouraging people to redesign their work week. Participants were asked to ensure no more than 50% of their day was reserved for meetings. This approach had both immediate and lasting impacts—68% of those who adopted these new norms felt they made more progress on their most important work.
One way to improve meeting efficiency is by using Confluence for page-led collaboration. This method allows team members to understand the full context of discussed topics and lets you quickly share information with those who couldn’t attend.
Loom enables asynchronous communication for global teams across time zones and for delivering thorough feedback when meetings aren’t possible. From all-hands updates to sharing monthly priorities and wins to making major announcements and allowing team members to engage with the content at their convenience, Loom enables communication to be more flexible and accessible. Teammates can change playback speed, pause when needed, and add comments at specific points, making communication more flexible and accessible. This approach fosters connection within the team, allowing for more meaningful interactions without the need for constant synchronous time.
Have a workday that is sane and manageable
Atlassian’s Work Management tools can help your teams increase efficiency, quality, and speed of collaboration. By adopting modern solutions like AI-driven information management and intentionally designing our work weeks, we can create a more productive and connected work environment for everyone.
These tools empower teams to focus on what truly matters, streamline workflows, and reduce the noise that clutters the workday. With clear goals, better meeting practices, and innovative communication methods, we can navigate the complexities of the modern workplace with ease.
Better workdays are here. Even though the world is getting more complex, we don’t need to rely on the outdated tools and practices of yesterday to drive our teams forward today.