courses

#All #How To#AI#News#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Jira#Bitbucket#Case Study#Learning Management#Collaboration#Project management#Task Management#Document management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#monday

Confluence Best Practices for HR Team

May 10, 2023
#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Learning Management
13 min

Confluence is an incredibly powerful tool that enables teams to work together and store knowledge. Many companies worldwide use it as an intranet, employee handbook, or collaboration platform. In this article we’ll cover the best tips and tricks for using Confluence by the HR team, such as organizing HR info, creating docs that people will actually want to read, and enabling interactivity by adding courses and quizzes right in Confluence. These tips are gonna help you to create amazing employee experience for your team.

Creating Clear Structure of HR information

Before adding content to Confluence, it’s essential to have a clear structure of HR docs in place. With so much information available, employees and HR team can easily get lost and waste time searching for what they need. A well-organized structure can prevent this and create intuitive navigation.

Start by thinking about what structure makes sense for your company. What materials are helpful for everyone? What’s only needed by certain departments? What information should be available to all employees, and what belongs to sensitive content – and should be accessed only by a certain group of people?

Here’s an example of how you can organize HR information:

How to organize knowledge base in Confluence

  • Organize content by the audience. Divide spaces for HR external and internal issues. Store all general policies and benefits that employees should have access to in a separate space, while internal issues like incidents, personnel file save for the HR team only in another space.
  • Consider separating information related to a department or function from content shared across the whole business. It will not only benefit search but also make permissions easier to manage.
  • Take security seriously. Restrict access to sensitive information. Refer to the guide on how to limit access to a page or a space.
  • Create a separate space to store and manage personnel files. Create a page for each employee to store personal info, as well as their performance records and achievements. Archive pages when an employee leaves the company.
  • Consider creating a separate space for onboarding to make navigation easier for newcomers.
  • Use space analytics to understand what content is popular and improve your structure accordingly.

HR Team often wonders whether it’s better to organize info by pages or spaces when dividing it up by departments or functions. Well, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to organizing your information. The best one is that meets your organization’s needs and makes it easy for people to find what they need.

Creating HR Docs that Employees Will Love to Read

Now you have a well-organized info structure, it’s time to make your HR docs engaging and informative. Having a user-friendly content view is super important.

To create visual hierarchy and break up text in Confluence, use headings, subheadings, and bullet points. Our brains like things to be organized, so it’s much easier to understand info when it’s broken up into sections and easy to navigate.

Avoid using technical jargon and complex phrases that employees may not understand. Use simple, straightforward language that’s easy to read and comprehend. Try to write like you’re telling a story to a friend.

Create Templates for Commonly Used HR Documents

One way to save time and keep staff organized when producing HR documents is to develop templates for frequently used materials. These might include performance reviews, job descriptions, how-to guides, and reports. Templates also promote uniformity and establish a standard structure for documents.

Creating a template takes only a few minutes, but it can save you a lot of time later when it comes to editing and organizing your content. Here is a short instruction on how to create a template in Confluence.

Keep in mind that Confluence offers a range of helpful ready-to-use templates for various purposes. Below is a compilation of some of the most beneficial HR templates currently available in Confluence Cloud:

HR templates in Confluence

  • 90-day plan: suitable for onboarding new employees, this template keeps goals, tasks, expectations, and important links in one place for the newbies.
  • Team homepage: designed for HR teams or any other team, this template highlights the team goal, progress, team members’ roles, the latest updates, and relevant links.
  • How-to article: a step-by-step guidance for solving problems or completing tasks.
  • Quarterly check-in: a useful framework for reflecting on progress, identifying areas for improvement, and setting goals at the end of each quarter.
  • HR knowledge base: a well-structured template for important HR information on corporate policies and practices that can be a starting point for the employees.
  • Employee handbook: similar to the HR knowledge base template – organized page for a brief understanding of company policies.

Discover all available templates here.

Use Macros to Create Visually Appealing Page Layouts

Macros are shortcuts that let you perform complex tasks in just a few clicks. They can be super handy when it comes to formatting your pages and making them more visually appealing. Some of the most useful macros are:

Use macros in Confluence to make content super easy to read

  • The Info, Tip, Note, and Warning Macro: highlight important information on your Confluence pages by creating colorful boxes around your text. It makes the info more noticeable and easier to find.
  • Divider: this macro lets you separate different sections of text with a horizontal line, making it easier to distinguish one part of the page from another.
  • Expand Macro: if you have a lot of optional or extended information that you want to include, the Expand Macro is your friend. It lets you hide the additional text behind a clickable button so that readers can choose whether to expand and read it now or come back later.
  • Table of Contents Macro: super useful for longer pages. It lets you add a clickable list of contents to the top of your page so that readers can jump directly to the information they’re looking for without having to scroll through everything.
  • User Profile Macro: saves you from the hassle of manually adding contacts and usernames. Instead, you can quickly pull up a summary of someone’s Confluence profile.

Adding Courses and Quizzes in Confluence to Learn Easily

When employees need to read and learn a lot of documents, it can be exhausting and inefficient. HR and learning experts are trying to create the best learning experience using interactive courses and quizzes. The good news is that you can also do this right in Confluence.

Although the basic functionality of Confluence does not offer creating courses and tests, one of the main advantages of Confluence is its flexibility. You can use hundreds of apps to expand its functionality and customize the system to your needs. One of the most useful apps for HR teams and learning is izi LMS for Confluence.

This app allows you to create courses and quizzes, enroll users or entire groups, and receive reports without leaving Confluence. After installing, it appears in Confluence header and natively fits its interface. Here is an article on quickly explaining how to create courses with izi LMS.

Now let’s go to practice. Here are a few cases when adding courses and quizzes in Confluence can not only help employees learn better but also save time and make life easier for the HR team:

Employee Onboarding

Instead of sending new hires a stack of policy links to read through and then hoping they’ve actually done it, you can create a course with all the necessary information and enroll them. The newbie gets a notification to take the course, and you’ll get a notification when they finish, along with a report.

Internal Learning

Your Confluence may already have tons of info – policies, product documentation, and best practices. Now it’s time to get your employees trained. Instead of moving employees from one working system to another for training or transferring content and documentation to a third-party LMS, you can create training courses and quizzes right inside Confluence.

Compliance and Assessments

Some positions require mandatory tests to confirm qualifications. You can create tests with different types of questions, set deadlines, and view reports right in Confluence. You can download reports for an auditor if needed.

Change Management

When significant changes happen in the organization, it’s not enough for the HR department to inform employees; they need to be sure that everyone understands and retains the information. You can create a course with the relevant information, enroll the users, and see which employees have passed it. The report, in that case, is verifiable proof that the employee has read the information.

Quick note

izi LMS is a Confluence app, which means you don’t need to learn a new system or go through any sign-up processes. Simply install it and open Confluence to access all the features. For installation send the app link to Confluence admin in your company. The app has a 30-day free trial period.

And last but not least…

Once your company uses Confluence, it’s important to train your team on how to use it. Teach them how to create and edit content, how to use templates, and how to collaborate with others. By providing training, you can ensure that your team uses Confluence to its fullest potential and your efforts have paid off.

Related posts
    #All #How To#AI#News#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Jira#Bitbucket#Case Study#Learning Management#Collaboration#Project management#Task Management#Document management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#monday

    How to Ace Employee Certification in Atlassian Confluence

    April 14, 2023
    #Learning Management#How To#Confluence
    10 min

    Today companies that invest in employee training open the door to new business opportunities and are more attractive to their potential workforce. These organizations need a way to check the level of skills, experience and expertise of their employees on a continuous basis. Some choose professional certification for that. While it is required for certain professions (doctors, pilots, emergency medical technicians, for example), many employers turn to professional certification voluntary. Why? Here are some of the reasons:

    1. Certified employees prove that they have what it takes to be effective making their employer feel more confident
    2. Personal sense of achievement fuels individual’s drive to work even better and harder
    3. Improved skills enable staff to undertake a greater variety of work
    4. Credibility boost in the eyes of company’s clients when its workers stay up-to-date on the hottest trends in their industry
    5. Successful certification may result in income and/or status increase both for the employee and the organization
    6. Companies need a way to identify knowledge gaps reducing potential risks, especially in critical areas such as safety
    7. We all love being rewarded, after all

    There are plenty professional certifications provided by professional societies and associations, as well as companies (such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Salesforce, etc.) interested in raising industry standards. In addition to going with third-party certifications, you can create your own internal ones. They are likely to have less credibility for clients compared to third-part certifications, but will be most relevant covering your unique processes, requirements and best practices.

    In this blog, we will tell you more about internal certification with and without training and will also highlight a way to check if your employees are ready to take a third-party certification.

    Employee certification in Confluence

    To prepare for internal or third-party certification you can:

    1. use a separate learning management system (LMS) to help employees engage with training content
    2. encourage your team to get ready on their own
    3. create training courses in Confluence

    If your company uses Atlassian Confluence, you can organize internal certification or set up preparation to a third-party professional certification using izi – LMS for Confluence – create certification training courses and/or certification quizzes (tests). You can make training and certification more appealing for your team because they will use the platform they already know. All you need to do is to populate your Confluence with the proper materials to train and educate your team.

    The izi LMS app offers various options to choose from when it comes to certification.

    Internal Certification with Prior Training

    Having all of the required information to get certified on hand in Confluence LMS will make everyone’s life a lot easier. This means that you can provide your employees with training and education right in Confluence.

    Your learning administrator can create a course with multiple modules divided by topics, time period, and more. The app also allows you to build self-check tests after each learning section to evaluate students’ knowledge. Or you can add only the final test every participant must take to complete the course and get certified. This way you can easily assess competences and skills of employees.

    Your employees can train online at their own pace learning the information in each module.

    The course administrator can easily check the results of all the participants.

    Internal Certification Test

    Regular internal certification tests help you confirm that the individual possesses the experience and skills to perform a specific job or uncovers the lack of knowledge about an organization’s products, services, policies, safety practices etc.

    For internal certification tests that don’t require prior training, you can create quizzes (tests) using various types of questions. Moreover, you can reuse questions from other Confluence quizzes on related topics.

    The izi LMS app allows you to easily enroll both Confluence users and people outside your system. This might be helpful when you need to certify people who are not working in your company.

    You can track the certification progress of your employees checking how each participant did and the score each person got.

    This way you can see the status of all their certifications and training requirements in one place.

    Readiness Check for Third-Party Certification

    As a manager, you need to keep an eye on anything that might impact the process of employee certification. So in case another company certifies your team members, it is better to check onsite if your employees are ready to get certified. This way you can save company’s time and money and certify only well-trained personnel.

    You can create quizzes to assess knowledge, competences and skills of the people who are going to obtain certification off-site. So all quiz participants must complete the quiz successfully to get a certification permit. Just set the pass target, the number of attempts and the time limit and then track the results.

    Take your employee certification to the next level

    Certifications act as benchmarks for employee competency and performance. Whether you’re assessing knowledge of your team or aiming to increase their skills, staying on top of certifications is a key part of running an effective workplace.

    Use izi – LMS for Confluence to make sure all of your employees are meeting industry standards. Constant certification in Confluence can help your team increase available skills, achieve their goals and tackle everyday challenges.

    You can check the sample training courses and try them either as a participant or as an administrator. You can also use our demo site to try out this app and discover its features with no need to install it.

    If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post.

    Try izi – LMS for Confluence for free

    Related posts
      #All #How To#AI#News#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Jira#Bitbucket#Case Study#Learning Management#Collaboration#Project management#Task Management#Document management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#monday

      Unlocking the Power of an LMS in Confluence for Efficient Employee Training

      March 14, 2023
      #Confluence#Learning Management
      9 min

      Employee training is an essential part of any business. It helps employees understand their roles, increase productivity, and stay current with industry trends.

      To maximize the effectiveness of employee education, many companies turn to modern solutions for learning management. Of course, choosing the right solution for top-notch training can be challenging.

      We think that one of the best ways to do this is to provide training tailored to each employee’s needs. As such, you can use the software that your team is familiar with, like Confluence. By adopting this approach, companies can reduce the time and resources they spend on training while also providing their staff with the tools they need to succeed.

      Let’s see how to elevate employee education by leveraging a learning management system in Confluence.

      Why use LMS in Confluence for employee training

      Confluence is a remote-friendly team workspace that allows users to create and share content, collaborate, and access various learning resources. You get a centralized platform for managing content, reducing the need for multiple third-party tools. Furthermore, Confluence allows users to easily structure content in a cohesive way, which helps accelerate the learning process.

      We bet that you already have a lot of information in your Confluence that training administrators can use for employee education. So turning your Confluence into a fully-fledged learning management system is a great idea. And it is possible with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence. This app requires minimal setup and makes Confluence more powerful and user-friendly, allowing companies to quickly get their courses up and running. And employees, in turn, get an interactive environment to engage in.

      Create courses in Confluence

      Setting up an LMS in Confluence is quick and easy. After installation of the app, creators and learners get immediate access to the Learning portal in Confluence.

      lms-in-confluence

      Learning administrators can create courses from the portal view or from anywhere in Confluence by clicking the Create button and using the Course template.

      One of the main advantages is that izi LMS allows reusing the existing content and separate Confluence pages as training blocks of the course. Administrators can edit content if required to ensure each training module has a clear objective and the course is well-structured and easy to follow.

      Populating training modules with images, videos, PDF files, and quizzes helps create engaging and interactive training materials. Moreover, administrators can update content for already enrolled course participants. In this case, employees receive the most up-to-date information when something has changed in the process covered in the course, or there is a new training module.

      Check for content updates

      To notify course participants about the necessity to finish the course, creators can set up automatic reminders for course participants.

      Course reminders

      Enjoy a smooth learning process

      Confluence users can browse the Learning catalog of available courses and self-enroll in the ones they find interesting. Also, they see their progress in the courses they are taking.

      My courses in Learning

      Learners see every course as a set of training modules they need to study carefully and complete one by one. Courses can contain quizzes that help assess user knowledge and understanding. This allows course administrators to rapidly identify gaps in knowledge to pay attention to and adjust courses accordingly. Questions can be of four different types:

      • single choice
      • multiple choice
      • true/false
      • free text

      Free text questions let participants share their thoughts on the question with the course creator, who then needs to review answers and mark them as correct or wrong.

      Free text review page

      Participants can self-enroll in quizzes with a link. This facilitates the task of inviting multiple users to a quiz without typing their names individually.

      Quiz self-enrollment link

      After course completion, participants get certificates they can download and share with their colleagues or on social media. It helps increase employees’ engagement and productivity.

      Course certificates for participants

      Read more about how to ace employee certification in Confluence with the help of courses.

      Track participants’ progress with reporting

      One of the most common challenges is ensuring employees are motivated to complete courses. To overcome this challenge, it’s crucial to track their progress and guarantee they are meeting the necessary objectives, as well as gain insights into where additional training may be needed.

      izi – LMS for Confluence lets course administrators track participants’ activity, assess their performance and generate reports both for courses and quizzes they take.

      For example, every course report shows statuses such as Not started, Started, and Completed. Moreover, hovering over the status, you can see the status change history. This feature provides course administrators with a birds-eye view of course progress among all the participants.

      Course history of status changes

      When it comes to quizzes, course creators can view answers participants gave while taking a quiz vs. correct answers.

      Take advantage of an LMS in Confluence

      With a suitable learning management system, businesses can ensure their employees receive the education and training they need to succeed. This approach benefits for both the company and its employees, as it allows them to manage their learning and development effectively.

      Whether you’re looking for a way to master employee onboarding, level up compliance training, or improve self-directed employee education, izi – LMS for Confluence has got you covered. It allows you to set up courses, track employee progress, and measure their performance on the fly right in Confluence, the software you already know and enjoy using.

      Try izi LMS for free and check how it can power up your training processes. The app is available for Confluence Cloud and Data Center.

      Related posts
        #All #How To#AI#News#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Jira#Bitbucket#Case Study#Learning Management#Collaboration#Project management#Task Management#Document management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#monday

        How to Create Education Courses Right in Confluence

        December 20, 2022
        #How To#Confluence#Learning Management
        7 min

        In this blog post, you will discover how to create training courses in a jiffy using the izi – LMS for Confluence app, extending your favorite team collaboration platform to create training courses in Confluence.

        Employee training helps you provide your new hires with a clear path to the goals you want them to achieve, improve the skill level and competency of your employees, and support them in advancing their careers. Regardless of the industry, effective onboarding and training processes are vital to remain successful in today’s market.

        Moreover, learners can take courses in Confluence at their own pace from the comfort of their own desk using the UI they are familiar with. Just think of the time and effort course administrators and participants would spend to understand the basics of how to handle a third-party Learning Management System (LMS).

        Build training courses with rich content

        Today people have higher expectations of employee training programs. That is why they want learning materials that are easily accessible, up-to-date, and engaging.

        If you are already using Confluence, you know that this powerful wiki software helps you create easy-to-access rich content pages. And with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence this team collaboration tool becomes a platform where you can create and store any content to train or educate your team members or participants who are not Confluence users.

        create courses in Atlassian Confluence

        To get the best results from your employee training, you need to engage your employees and make them want to learn more. Having LMS in Confluence, you can enrich your courses with YouTube videos, images, PDF files, and more to keep it interesting and hold everybody’s attention.

        engaging content in Atlassian Confluence

        Let employees learn at their own pace

        Unlike traditional learning with a teacher or instructor, with the izi – LMS for Confluence app your employees can learn at their own pace taking their time to thoroughly study all the materials before they jump to the next module.

        You can break the program of your course down into smaller pieces with no need to produce huge modules. And this way, your staff will have a chance to recall the required information.

        training material in Atlassian Confluence

        The best thing is that you can use the existing Confluence pages and quizzes to create training modules for your courses. This app makes creating new courses and making use of old training material a simple and smooth process.

        reuse Confluence pages and quizzes for employee training

        The izi LMS app allows you to customize your training content based on learner needs.

        Your employees see an education course as a series of modules with training materials and quizzes. A course administrator can check participants’ progress to see the completed modules and find the ones where employees got stuck.

        training modules from employee training

        Gain сontrol over employees’ learning

        Content creators should no longer wonder whether the staff actually read and comprehended the documents they write. They can gain control over employees’ learning activities and obtain verifiable proof of mandatory training or assessments. A course administrator can generate reports on course completion and quiz results, as well as track completed modules and identify areas where employees encountered difficulties

        Try it for free

        The more skills your employees have, the more efficient the workforce becomes, getting more things done for your business. So to say, a win-win situation for both the company and the employees.

        Improve your employee training with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence. Try this app for free and check how it can work for your training courses, and more!

        This app is available for Confluence Cloud, Data Center, and Server.

        Read more about how your team can benefit from using LMS for Confluence:

        If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post.

        Related posts
          #All #How To#AI#News#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Jira#Bitbucket#Case Study#Learning Management#Collaboration#Project management#Task Management#Document management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#monday

          Easy Steps to Amplify Employee Training in Atlassian Confluence

          November 10, 2022
          #Document management#How To#Confluence#Learning Management
          11 min

          Luckily, employee training is no longer limited to classroom learning with cluttered PowerPoint slides and handouts with endless paragraphs of text. Nowadays, when training content is more accessible than ever before, both employers and employees have higher expectations of employee education. Companies are looking for solutions that can help their teams learn and retain information effectively and remotely. Trainees are looking for well-structured courses with interactive and engaging content they can access in one place.

          We will show you how companies that focus their attention on continuous employee training can benefit from using Confluence along with izi – LMS for Confluence and Smart Attachments. A bundle of these solutions powers up Confluence helping its users create effective training courses and manage learning or educational materials with ease.

          Below are some steps that can help any organization provide its employees with education courses tailored to their needs.

          Step 1: Populating space storage with training content

          Document management is of the utmost importance when it comes to retaining training materials. Course administrators need to work with multiple files and documents to create engaging training content and deliver clear messages on a given topic to each worker.

          With the help of the Smart Attachments for Confluence app, course administrators can benefit from using a centralized file storage in every Confluence space aggregating the informational modules for courses. This solution helps them instantly create a clear hierarchy of educational resources adding separate folders for different courses, topics, or learning modules. They can rapidly re-use these materials in any training course or on Confluence pages.

          training content in Confluence

          Course administrators can keep their files in Confluence with no need to use any other file-sharing services. They can also edit files right in Confluence with the help of the Atlassian Companion app keeping the entire history of document changes in the space storage.

          For more tips on how to better work with files and documents in Confluence, check our blog post on document management.

          Step 2: Creating a new training course

          izi – LMS for Confluence allows course administrators to create new courses from scratch. They can divide the program of the course into multiple topics and populate them with the required learning modules and quizzes. They can also reuse existing materials, quizzes, and tests from other training courses or add any Confluence page that contains important information to the course.

          To facilitate the interaction between the course modules and the learner, the administrator creates engaging content. Having an LMS in Confluence, they can easily combine text with YouTube videos, images, PDF files, and more.

          training course in Confluence

          They can add more modules and sections, swiftly reorganize or rename them, or delete the ones they don’t need.

          employee training in Confluence

          The next step is to create even more effective training materials and add more useful information for self-study.

          Step 3: Embedding additional training content into course modules

          Adult learners are self-directed and goal-oriented. This means that any course creator needs to focus on what’s important for the employees and be short and concise so that the learners can quickly refer to and recall the information. So it can be useful to put the employees in control of the learning process and provide them with additional resources they may need to dive deeper into the topic.

          The Smart Attachments for Confluence app helps course administrators avoid endless texts and embed files and folders into the course modules right from the space storage. This way students can access this information in one module and easily navigate through directories with materials finding resources to enrich their knowledge.

          embed files and folders in Confluence

          When the course is ready, a learning administrator needs to share it with the employees.

          Step 4: Enrolling participants

          Even the employees without a Confluence account can take advantage of the training course created with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence. Course administrators can effortlessly add Confluence users and emails of their colleagues to the list of course participants.

          enroll course participants

          Moreover, they can add the course to the Learning catalog (available in the Confluence header menu). This means that all Confluence users can find this course in the Learning section and easily self-enroll.

          learning catalog in Confluence

          Step 5: Tracking results

          Course administrators can access all the required information to evaluate the employees’ progress. They can check the average time the participants need to complete each module and view the completion rate per module to get some insights. They can also get detailed information about the progress of every participant.

          tracking course results in Confuence

          Moreover, you can create customizable reports about all the courses on one page. Learn more about how to create course reports and check course results on the fly in this blog post.

          Use Confluence as LMS for employee training

          Whether you want to boost your employees’ motivation, check their level of skills, or create a smooth onboarding process for new hires — you need the right platform and tools to ensure your staff training is a success.

          Confluence might be an ideal solution for effective interactive employee training if you use it along with izi – LMS for Confluence and Smart Attachments for Confluence.

          If you’re ready to dig in, discover how to encourage self-directed learning in Confluence and ace employee certification helping your employees learn at their own pace.

          If you want to discover more about how to turn Confluence into an LMS for effective employee training, let’s chat about how to get through it in the comments below or you can just drop an e-mail at info@stiltsoft.com.

          Related posts
            #All #How To#AI#News#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Jira#Bitbucket#Case Study#Learning Management#Collaboration#Project management#Task Management#Document management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#monday

            Confluence for Onboarding in Tech Companies

            October 25, 2022
            #Confluence#Learning Management
            14 min

            Here is your workplace, and here is a list of tasks for a trial period. Seems that these words are familiar to everyone.

            As a rule, most people associate the first working day with stress and uncertainty. You need to delve into new programs, get acquainted with a bunch of people (and forget their names at once). And of course, you don’t want to seem ill-prepared and narrow-minded and ask too many questions.

            A lot has changed over the past few years.

            The pandemic forced drove us to the transition to distributed teams that work not only from home but from different countries and cities. We have an office in Estonia and employees who work from Poland, Georgia and Turkey. In these circumstances, it is no longer possible to provide the new staff member with just an office tour with a couple of phrases about our company.

            Smooth remote onboarding and orientation become essential if you want to help newcomers adapt to their new workplace.

            As a tech company, we want to share how our team benefits from using Confluence for onboarding and introduction of new people to the organization, its work processes, culture, and principles.

            When your team is growing fast

            For more than seven years, we have remained a small team that mostly consisted of developers. New people came to the team once or twice a year, and at this point it was enough for us to just talk with newbies about their tasks for a probationary period, show what and where was in the office, create an account in Confluence and Jira, and grant them access to the necessary pages.

            As our business grows, the products evolve requiring new skills from the teams. In less than 5 years, we have tripled in size and realized that onboarding is a vital part of new employee’s adaptation. Especially, when it comes to onboarding from a distance.

            Welcome on board at Stiltsoft

            Everyone at Stiltsoft has a probationary period of two months and gets a list of tasks for this time. We will describe how onboarding goes for our new senior Java developer Alex.

            During the first working day Alex communicates with four people:

            • HR manager provides him with all the required information about the people he needs to contact. She describes our processes on a company level during a Zoom call.
            • Our office manager sends him a laptop, monitor, keyboard, and all the required equipment. He also receives a welcome pack with the branded swag.
            • Our DevOps creates accounts in Crowd, grants Alex access, and creates him @stiltsoft.com email address.
            • And, finally, Alex’s team lead shares the link to the Onboarding space. There he can find a lot of information about how his team works and a list of introductory tasks.

            How we use Confluence for onboarding

            Earlier, our team leads spend a lot of time to tell new employees about how we work and what they need to do. They explained the same things to newbies. They could forget about something or add more details.

            Today, we combine several onboarding practices. We have a separate space for newbies, use onboarding task checklists, and take advantage of training courses to help new employees learn the required information.

            Studying general info about the company

            We use Confluence to document all workflows and we think that a separate space for onboarding is a good idea. Alex finds his title on the home page of the space and clicks it to check everything related to the duties of senior Java developer.

            confluence space for onboarding

            Our company has five different teams that develop apps. The processes within our teams differ a bit and this also applies to onboarding. Since Alex is a part of the Awesome Graphs team he opens the list of tasks his team lead assigned to him. It has an intro that outlines task statutes their team uses and some general information.

            working with tasks in Confluence

            The Stiltsoft Beginner’s Training is among the first links he finds in the task list. It’s a course that consists of seven modules and helps newbies find answers to any questions they may have at the beginning of their work at Stiltsoft. We maintain the relevance of this course and update it when newcomers share their feedback with us.

            With the help of this course, Alex learns how to take a three-day vacation, what to do if he needs an IntelliJ IDEA license, or how to buy a book on Amazon. Of course, he reads about a variety of Slack channels we have, starting with important tech related ones ending with the ones where we share our pictures from around the world (we also included a bonus section with the description of our custom emojis).

            onboarding training course

            Alex can open module by module to study the information. In this introductory course, he won’t find any tricky questions in the end, it simply collects the most useful content about different spheres of our work.

            meeting new team

            When Alex clicks the Complete button at the bottom of every page, he opens the next training module. He can take the course at his own pace with breaks and resume from where he left.

            virtual library at work

            We have many spaces in Confluence with tons of useful information about our apps, marketing, software, training and education, R&D. It’s too challenging for new staff to navigate between all these spaces. Moreover, newbies usually get limited Confluence access on their probationary period. The training course that incorporates essential info from different Confluence pages can be a great start for a newbie. You can reuse existing Confluence pages as training modules or create new ones.

            Our HR manager is a course administrator and can check Alex’s progress on this course. This way she can see if some of the modules take too much time to study and can split the information into smaller chunks.

            checking course results in Confluence

            This course is created with the help of the izi – LMS for Confluence app.

            Diving into team processes

            Alex needs to study how the Awesome Graphs team works. His team lead created a list with the links to Confluence pages with the information about code review, releases, Jira workflows.

            team work process

            For example, he reads the guidelines for a new developer. At every stage of studying he can reach out to his team lead and ask any questions. He also has a buddy. It’s a colleague who is not connected with his tasks, but can simply support, listen, and advise something. In general, this practice helps adapt to a new reality in a friendly way.

            onboarding for software engineers

            He also studies the agreements of the Awesome Graphs team in relation to the general principles of coding and their work with tasks.

            onboarding for software engineers

            He finds the information on how the team assigns statuses to Jira tasks, uses filters and dashboards, creates pull requests.

            Finally, Alex is ready for practical tasks for the two months of his probationary period.

            When a probation period comes to an end

            Everyone understands that feedback is important here. Of course, we live in a modern world and use a lot of different apps and services, however, a person still needs communication, approval, and exchange of opinions.

            We don’t want newcomers to have bad experience when there was no feedback from their team lead and when they have no chance to tell us about their probationary experience. We check on the progress of our newcomer at the end of the first and second month of their probationary period. Usually, our co-CEOs, HR manager, and the team lead join this call with the newbie.

            So Alex’s team lead collects feedback about his work from his colleagues after the first probation month and before the final performance review. Meanwhile, our HR-manager asks Alex to share his feedback about the two months of his trial period.

            Key takeaways

            We remember the times when hiring of two people simultaneously was super stressful for the company.

            Today, our clear and transparent onboarding process allows us to hire as many people as we need at the moment. For example, now five people from two countries are on probationary period at Stiltsoft. The onboarding space in Confluence in combination with check lists and training courses saves us and new employees time and effort.

            Here are a couple of things to keep in mind to organize employee onboarding in Confluence.

            Make sure that new hires can find everything in one place

            1. Create an onboarding space with useful information
            2. Create child pages with the names of job titles you have in your company and add information/checklists relevant to different positions
            3. Add links with the names of job titles to the home page of this space
            4. Review the content in this space quarterly to make sure it’s up-to-date

            Take advantage of training courses with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence

            1. Install izi – LMS for Confluence
            2. Create courses for your employees right in Confluence to introduce them to your processes
            3. Reuse existing content and include it in your courses
            4. Create courses for a particular job title
            5. Check new hires’ knowledge with the help of quizzes

            Remember about the feedback

            1. Communicate with new employees throughout the trial period. Help them resolve issues and connect with colleagues.
            2. Collect feedback from the team and the team lead. The more, the better.
            Related posts