1. From Native Confluence tables to Smart and vice versa

Smart Tables revolutionizes the way you view and analyze sales data. Here’s how.

It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface that everyone with varying levels of expertise can use. The Smart Tables view allows sales teams to interact with data quickly, like sorting, grouping, and filtering, directly within the view mode, eventually leading to more dynamic data analysis. Also, with the view mode capabilities, making timely decisions while in a meeting or when urgent data analysis is required is no longer a challenge.

What’s even greater is how simple it is for teams to switch between the native Confluence table and Smart tables without losing context or data, ensuring they can adapt to whichever view best suits their current task.

Generally, Smart Tables’ flexibility can eliminate the need to export data to other programs for different views or analyses.

2. Excel functions grid

Excel functions are no longer confined to spreadsheets. Smart Tables brings them right into your Confluence pages by integrating advanced Excel functions directly into a familiar workspace, making them more accessible to all team members. VLOOKUPs, SUMIFs, AVERAGEs, and even complex nested IF statements are all at your fingertips.

Ultimately, performing real-time data calculations helps make immediate data-driven decisions without leaving the Confluence page.

3. Improving collaboration

That’s not it! Smart Tables doesn’t exclude the spreadsheet functionality and offers an extra macro for free, called a “Live spreadsheet.” This macro acts as a real-time collaboration and data manipulation tool, similar to spreadsheet software, but integrated into the Confluence page.

You can simultaneously make changes with your sales team members on the spreadsheet without sending back-and-forth emails to share data updates. This can be crucial in fast-paced environments where data needs to be current and universally accessible.

4. Effortless editing for sales data and filter views

Sales teams can quickly make inline edits to sales entries or deal statuses which favors quick adjustments during sales meetings or reviews and ensures data remains current without stepping into the Confluence page edit mode.

That could never be enough without filtering options that help data meet specific criteria. Sales, marketing, CS, and project management teams all benefit from the combined filters. For instance, a sales team could quickly pull up figures to identify top-performing regions, apply filters to check underperforming products, and make decisions on sales strategies for the next quarter.

If you’re looking for a persistent filter custom view, Smart Tables can do it, too. For regular needs, such as weekly sales progress, monthly regional sales, or annual comparisons, this customization allows for quick access to relevant data without repetitive setup.

These custom filters can be shared with other parties, whether Confluence users or external parties, using public link sharing to promote transparency while remaining confident that the filters will stay persistent.

You might be one of many reading this blog from your freshly established home-desks (we bet that you are done working from your living room couch or the kitchen table) or maybe lucky enough to be working from your office with all the team members around.

With all of those things going around you at home, do you think you can keep that balance of performance and Well-being even when you are WFH?

3 factors can affect remote work outcome ( Perf & well-being) during this pandemic:

• Remote work challenges ( Procrastination, ineffective communication, Work-home interference, loneliness)
• Virtual work characteristics (Social support, Job autonomy, Monitoring, Workload)
• Personal traits (self-discipline)

Factor 1: Remote work challenges

These challenges are mainly related to the remote worker’s attitude in accomplishing tasks, communication style, home-work setting, and socialization.

Work-Home Interference: When kids are also studying from home, your homie is on remote work, or even your pet keeps rooming around; this may cause distraction or interruption when you are in a call with a colleague, client, or an important partner.

Solution? “Precautions are better than cure!” Make sure to stay in a closed room, inform your family memberS that you will be in an important meeting, turn off the cam if not needed, and set your phone on silent mode, Voilà!

Ineffective Communication: How many “I cannot hear you” or “I lost connection” did you hear during this year? Information and communication technologies ( ICTs) became the one and only way to keep communication and work going when Face-to-Face meetings became “forbidden.”

Solution? Make sure to have a good Internet Connection, set off your mic when no need for less distraction and effective communication, send a follow-up email/ notes after each meeting to ensure a common understanding of all the covered points. You can use the meeting notes template if you are a Confluence user to make sure that everyone uses the same outline. 

Procrastination: “Procrastination can be from a combination of mental and physical health issues,” says Nitin Desai. “The pandemic has caused increased stress, anxiety, and depression, leading to more individuals suffering from those underlying conditions, leading to more procrastination.”

Solution: Start by dividing your tasks into small steps and actions; Use Trello, Todoist, or the new Atlassian tool, Jira work management to organize work with deadlines and priority; find a team partner who can push you forward to make sure you accomplish your tasks. Mindfulness and self-compassion are your best friends.

Loneliness: This sub-factor is one of the hardest challenges, maybe. We all miss coffee breaks, after-works with our colleagues, our old going-outs & gatherings, and the opportunity of meeting our beloved ones, which strongly contribute to the feeling of loneliness.

Solution: ICTs are your exclusive remedy: chat, call and text your colleagues; organize an online after-work or weekly virtual lunch using Slack, Zoom, or Google Meets; play collaborative games like Pictionary.

Factor 2:Remote Work Characteristics

This reflects the work quality of an employee when working remotely. Usually, these characteristics affect and influence the work output effectiveness indirectly. In other words, RW characteristics affect RW challenges which affect RW outcome.

Job autonomy: When employees can decide what, when, and how to accomplish a task without referring to a manager or senior, this is what we call Job autonomy. It is one of the qualities that an effective employee should have even before the era of working from home. This also means saving time by choosing productive ways while doing a task and a balanced Work-life.

Monitoring: As mentioned above, monitoring could be one of the solutions for procrastination. Having a supervisor or a teammate to whom you can report your progress is claimed to be a positive ritual for a better remote work outcome.

Workload: “Are we starting work earlier? Stopping later? Has taken a break for lunch been canceled?” According to a study done by Arik Friedman, a Principal Data Scientist at Atlassian, remote workers are working extra hours or thinking about work during their off-hours more than they used to.

Social support: The remedy to decrease the feeling of loneliness.

Factor 3: Self-discipline

Remote work allows us to be closer to the place we love the most, “Home.” Hence, it could be a source of stress and distraction. Therefore to become an effective remote worker, you need to have an iron will and proper discipline.

Sum up:

Check out our apps for Confluence

After a long selection process, we finally found a suitable candidate for the vacant job position in Creativas: young, active, motivated with the requested knowledge and skills; just the perfect match.
The new hire was overwhelmed to meet the rest of the team, join our Paris office, and start his new journey.

However, things didn’t go as expected, COVID-19 spread widely in France, and the government announced a country lockdown.

Remote work was an easy-to-go option for our team, as we were already familiar with online collaboration and project management tools such as Confluence, Trello, Jira…
But what about our new hire, doesn’t seem to be an excellent start for him, right?
The same situation encountered by many businesses across the world where many leading tech companies in Silicon Valley, like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple… considered remote and flexible work as the new standard.

Here are some tips on how we used Confluence and other Atlassian apps to successfully onboard our new collaborator:

Tip 1: One is enough, don’t get lost between spaces

Create just one onboarding space in Confluence: Centralize all the resources in one space by creating different pages for each phase of your remote onboarding. This helps new hires to get back always to the same references whenever they feel lost. Gather all your docs and links in just one place…everything you need in the same space!
You can start by using the 90-day plan template for Confluence. Atlassian recommends dividing the page into two sections: one at the top for quick links and one at the bottom for internal glossaries and resources.

Tip 2: Set up an onboarding process board

With the help of Trello or any similar tool, create a board mentioning pre-boarding and onboarding steps, tasks, and actions assigned to specific team members with deadlines, checklists…

Tip 3: Meet the squad and virtual office tours

There are two ways to present the team members to the new hires: ask them to make short funny videos to introduce themselves individually.
Or, you can schedule a virtual get-together using Zoom, Slack, Google meet, or any other video conferencing tools.

Share with them some pictures of your old team building activities, events, office parties…

Tip 4: Introduce all the tools you use in your company

While remote onboarding, gather all the tools your organization frequently uses; provide a detailed introduction or a demonstration about how each tool works and which parts are more relevant to your context.

In our case, we built an interactive course for each tool using Smart Courses. We categorized these courses into the onboarding category within the “Remote Onboarding” space.

Check these Atlassian tools for stronger remote teamwork collaboration.

Tip 5: Build your organization glossary

Make a glossary with the frequently used terms in your organization to familiarize the newbies with your company jargon.
Check Smart Terms to know how to build a glossary within Confluence with enriched media assets.

Tip 6: Learn about the organization

Build informative courses about your organization’s culture, products, and services using a dash of media types with a powerful and rich course editor supporting images, videos, audio, Slideshare, PDFs, webpages…

Tip 7: Add the new hire to your social groups

In the absence of team buildings and coffee breaks, making the newbie feel welcomed is still possible. Make the new hire feel like a part of the family: share some fun via your social media groups, or enjoy remote after work( video games, movies…)

Tip 8: A bit of fun never hurts

Gamification can help new hires to familiarize themselves with the organization culture.
Get inspired and know how Atlassian teams are doing virtual team building activities.

Tip 9: Ask your buddy anything:

Assign a buddy ( teammate) to guide the newbies in their first steps.

Tip 10: Check newbies “go with the flow”

How is that? By verifying course progress for each newbie or quiz results, you can evaluate your remote onboarding’s success rate.

After providing all necessary resources to the newbies, the department manager, or the ones in charge, need to track their progress. As we are using Smart Courses, we used the exam mode option and the metrics module. Later on, we assigned other courses to the newbies depending on their progress rates.