Whether you are remote, co-located, or hybrid, every business needs a virtual office.
In fact, every business already has a virtual office. Some just don’t know it yet. Usually, their virtual office resides in endless streams of emails, messages, and Zoom calls.
Businesses can benefit heavily from organizing operations and consolidating knowledge in one place — an intranet. This encourages asynchronous collaboration and prevents the “always-on” culture.
Here’s the story of how Modus Create, a leading digital consulting firm and an Atlassian Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner, transformed its Confluence instance into a vibrant virtual office.
The Problem
Modus Create was getting a growing number of requests from enterprises to customize their Confluence instances. Organizations wanted to transform Confluence from a wiki into a virtual workspace that reflected their brand personality. This would improve the overall user experience and encourage Confluence adoption.
Modus also realized the need for a similar intranet for its team. Therefore its team of CX and Atlassian experts kicked off a project to create a custom, intuitive intranet using Confluence.
Going Beyond Wiki
Modus Create set the following four goals for their intranet:
- Transparency — Give access to important company information to every single employee.
- Documentation — Create lasting repositories of knowledge that are easily referenceable
- Collaboration — Encourage cross-functional asynchronous collaboration
- Adoption — Optimize overall UX to encourage intranet use
Confluence provides a robust platform to achieve all four, as teams can extend its functionality with Atlassian marketplace apps.
Using a combination of marketplace apps and Confluence’s native features, the Modus team created a new information hierarchy in Confluence, complete with interactive touches. For example, they used Aura to create beautiful and engaging elements without a single line of code.
The team encouraged all departments to create their own content while adhering to the overall brand and style guidelines. As a result, each department created a Confluence space that best suited their needs, increasing the odds of intranet adoption.
Forging a Custom Path
Atlassian’s Forge is an end-to-end cloud platform consisting of functions backed by AWS Lambda, flexible UI components, and a DevOps toolchain in the form of the Forge Command Line Interface (CLI). It lets you go even further than marketplace apps and create your own Atlassian apps.
Modus Create felt the need for custom dashboards in Confluence that could integrate with some of its other commonly used apps (such as Harvest for time tracking). It also wanted the ability to create widgets that elevate user profiles (for example, weather information, world clock, Jira reminders, etc.) This is exactly the sort of customization Forge thrives on.
Additionally, Forge offers the following benefits:
- Security: No data transmitting between sites
- Scalability: As you grow, the forge application grows with you
- Hands-Free Maintenance: No servers or services to manage or worry about.
Modus Create’s Atlassian experts and engineers worked hand-in-hand to create user-centric dashboards on Confluence.
No matter how great your intranet implementation is, it will fall apart without governance. Therefore, the intranet can’t be the sole responsibility of the IT team. Department leaders need to step up and own their resources on Confluence. This is especially important in the first few weeks of intranet rollout as it sets the pace of process transformation.
Modus Create’s Atlassian experts along with CX professionals trained all department leads on the best practices of adding to and maintaining the intranet. They designed and implemented custom templates site-wide. Each department has established ownership along with one or more people responsible for overseeing the content in their space. In addition, any changes like adding or removing spaces, updating permissions, or changes to plug-ins are managed centrally.
Impact
The customized intranet on Confluence was a success and led to the following benefits:
- Single Source of Truth
The intranet consolidated all important documents, policies, and information in one place. Whether it’s looking at the org chart, leave policy, or simply the location of a fellow teammate, employees can find it all in one place.
- Improved Employee Experience
The new intranet is not just about accessibility but also improvement in overall user experience. Rather than scanning through wiki-like pages, the team accesses information in interactive, branded interfaces. This encourages adoption.
- Asynchronous Collaboration
Modus Create is a remote organization with employees in over 50 countries. The intranet encourages asynchronous collaboration as employees don’t rely on real-time responses to get important information.
Additionally, the intranet also helped Modus Create introduce OKRs in the organization, creating alignment between operations and strategy.
Think your organization could benefit from a virtual office too? Get started today with a free trial in Confluence and see how you can enable better async team collaboration.