4 ways to improve team and stakeholder communication
Transparent communication is essential to a successful business. According to Grammarly’s 2023 The State of Business Communication, 93% of business leaders and 80% of knowledge workers report that their ability to get their work done is based heavily on how well collaborators share their ideas and communicate their needs.
Transparency is especially important within remote teams, where multiple tools, communication channels, and documents can create disjointed practices. Modern businesses need a platform that serves as teams’ single source of truth, so no one ever has to guess which version of project documentation is most current.
Confluence is a connected workspace that streamlines your team’s communication and collaboration. Because Confluence organizes and updates your team’s pages and documents in real-time, you won’t have to worry about an idea or edit slipping through the cracks.
Confluence's tools and templates make it the best single-source platform available. Its features will help you improve your stakeholder engagement and team communication, leading to better productivity and an improved bottom line. Take advantage of the tool in conjunction with our four ways to improve stakeholder engagement and team communication, and discover what you can do with Confluence.
1. Create consistent strategies and campaigns
No team operates in a vacuum. There are new ideas being added to your team's communication strategies, campaigns, and workflows constantly. And if you work in a dynamic and agile environment, there are likely new ideas being added to your strategies and campaigns regularly. Between emails, direct messages, and video calls, communication can get murky and ideas can become disjointed and difficult to implement. Enter Confluence templates.
Gone are the days of creating one-off documents and sending them via email when something is edited or added. With Confluence templates, you and your team can develop project documents, marketing strategies, company updates, and more—in a single location. Templates also make stakeholder communication simple, as your documentation can be updated quickly and made readily available for skimming or deeper reading. This allows your decision-makers to find and digest your takeaways easily.
Templates make it easy for your team to tackle a variety of projects, from marketing plans to product requirements. No matter your business need, Confluence has a template that can help you maintain consistency and clarity—especially when communicating project updates to stakeholders. Confluence template topics include:
- Business Strategy
- Design
- Docs & Reports
- Human Resources
- Marketing & Sales
- Personal
- Product Management
- Productivity
- Project Planning
- Software Development / IT
- Startup
- Teamwork
Use templates as a starting point for your projects and campaigns, and establish consistency right from the start.
2. Share real-time insights and feedback
If your team is working from disjointed documents across several platforms, there’s a good chance of communication going unnoticed. Sometimes information silos form when teams are working across departments or projects. Knowledge and data can get trapped within a particular group, preventing others in the company from accessing it. So whether it’s for initiatives, deliverables, or team and stakeholder communication, you need a workspace tool that can handle all your knowledge-sharing needs.
Confluence makes collaboration between different stakeholders easy in spaces. Teams create pages that live within an organized and open space, making them easy to find. These pages contain useful company or project information, and users can provide insights and feedback instantly by selecting text and adding an in-line comment. They can also comment on an entire piece of content at the bottom of the page or post.
When team members or stakeholders reply to or like comments, the original commenter is notified. Team members also get timely notifications about any changes made to the existing content or if anything new is added. This is especially great for asynchronous work, because everyone knows exactly why the change was made.
Confluence goes beyond personal folders to team- and project-oriented workspaces. This allows for easy team member and stakeholder access, searchable documentation, and an organizational structure that scales. When people leave or join teams, their documents and projects live on and remain relevant for those who need them.
3. Practice informed decision-making
According to Qatalog and Cornell University’s Ellis Idea Lab, 43% of people in the workplace report spending too much time switching between applications and online tools. When time is money, these end-users can’t afford to waste precious minutes context-switching. By providing context for stakeholders, they can better understand the full picture faster. Confluence supports a variety of content that can help round out your messaging and help stakeholders make decisions with more confidence.
- Analytics: By embedding analytics reports from Google, Adobe, or elsewhere within your team workspace pages, stakeholders can easily recognize growth opportunities, insights, and trends within customer data.
- Tables: Tables help you and your team communicate a large amount of information at a glance, but you need to make sure your cells are formatted for maximum comprehension.
- Images: Embedding relevant images and media files within Confluence pages lets you quickly provide more context for viewers.
- Smart Links to other tools (e.g., Jira, Figma): When your work lives in one tool (Atlassian or other supported third-party platform) and you want to surface it in Confluence, Smart Links can help you do it. Just copy the page, project board, calendar, or other link, and paste it in Confluence where you want it to live. The link will let stakeholders preview the page, or edit or embed it directly.
Stakeholder context goes beyond charts, graphs, images, and links—it’s also important to illustrate areas that may need more organizational support. Include the following elements when creating project updates:
- Project details: Name, project manager, and date of report
- Project summary: Location, timeline, objective, and budget
- Project timeline: Milestones and individual task details, including what has been completed
- Involved parties: Team members, key stakeholders, and customers
- Risks: Potential issues, bottlenecks, and required changes
- Budget status: Investment spent and investment remaining
- Important resources: Attachments and links to relevant documents
- Next steps: Action items
When building a company culture of transparency, it’s important to provide your team and stakeholders with detailed context.
4. Present project updates and campaign results
One of the best ways to illustrate project and campaign updates and results is by sharing them in a presentation. And, with Confluence, it’s easy to switch into Presenter mode. This layout is great for showcasing page or blog post content with reduced distractions—and lets you avoid creating additional slides or presentation decks. When users select this mode, content is shown in a clean, full-screen view—without sidebars, in-line comments, and optional menus.
In Presenter mode, you can also change the presentation’s appearance by choosing cursor spotlight or dark theme. Cursor spotlight turns the cursor into a large circle, making it easier for the audience to follow. Dark theme can help reduce eye fatigue at night, save battery life, and may just be a user’s preference!
Users also have the option of using the Presenter mode template. This template will guide users through creating a page that’s optimized for presentations.
Align teams and stakeholders with Confluence
When transparency is at the forefront of your business practices, it’s much easier to align your stakeholder groups. Confluence makes open communication easy with tools and templates designed for teams.
Try Confluence for free and discover how it can help you engage and inform everyone at your company—from decision-makers to individual contributors.
