The world of work has changed, and many companies are now organizing differently than before the pandemic, which has accelerated many developments – including the acceptance of distributed teams. The new product suite Atlassian Together aims to support organizations in the transformation to an open, agile, transparent collaboration culture and to provide them with the appropriate toolset for modern collaboration in teams and across teams.
Atlassian Together is a single cloud subscription for the entire suite of work management products, consisting of the most feature-rich editions of Trello, Confluence, Jira Work Management, and Atlas. Secure and simple user administration is provided by the Atlassian Access identity and access management solution. This packaged solution is optimized for the different ways teams work and connects them seamlessly without forcing consolidation into a single piece of software.
Warum Atlassian Together?
Close collaboration between the business teams (e.g. finance, marketing, human resources, legal) and the technical teams of an organization (e.g. IT, software development etc.) has never been more important than it is today. The technical teams form the heart of almost every agile transformation initiative across industries.
In today’s turbulent macroeconomic climate, a company’s ability to respond with agility to dynamic changes can make all the difference. And that also applies to engaged, empowered, motivated and loyal employees who identify with the organization and its goals.
However, cross-team collaboration and smooth collaboration between business and technical teams remain elusive concepts in most enterprise organizations. Why? Because the business and technical teams operate in silos. They work on completely different platforms, use separate and unrelated tools, and have flows and processes that rarely resonate in unison.
These work and application silos made cross-organizational collaboration difficult. And they thwart any attempt by the organization to take teamwork and employee engagement to a higher level.
The main challenges are getting people on the same page and giving them efficient access to information – and these challenges have actually intensified in the last two or three years. Organizations need to balance disparate ecosystems of ways of working and tools, and create a solution that unites individuals and teams.
Atlassian Together wants to help with this and connect those teams that follow different ways of working so that they ultimately collaborate better. Atlassian Together products free each team to operate in their preferred way while removing communication, integration, and tool barriers.
Positive network effects on productivity, profitability and so-called employee engagement are a natural consequence. Atlassian Together has started…
- …to align across teams with business goals and track work progress.
- … to encourage collaboration on projects that span tools, teams and locations.
- …to give people access to the right information from the right teams at the right time.
- … to make the transitions between individual, team-based and cross-team work smooth and without loss of context.
More intention when deciding about work management software
Today’s economic uncertainty is causing many organizations to re-evaluate their tool providers. Businesses are approaching decisions about their work management solutions with more intention. Above all, they ask themselves how it can be possible to eliminate tool redundancies and break down silos.
They are looking to standardize on platforms that allow and support scalability without placing additional burdens on IT teams. And many want to collaborate with fewer partners and take this collaboration to a strategic level.
Atlassian Together gives customers access to a suite of proven, successful work management tools. This solution gives companies the option of standardization based on the Atlassian platform, which eliminates redundancies and saves costs at the same time.
However, standardizing on an Atlassian basis does not mean entering into a closed system. Rather, Atlassian’s work management strategy is to provide customers with an ecosystem with numerous integration options. Such integrations are available for leading collaboration solutions such as Slack, Miro or Figma as well as for a whole range of other providers for more specific use cases.
This means that the teams in the company do not have to give up their proven methods and tools in favor of a top-down solution, but can continue to use them in an integrated environment.
Empowerment for asynchronous, distributed collaboration
In the world of distributed teams, people need the ability to use asynchronous working methods effectively and efficiently. But the switch to asynchronous collaboration is not yet successful everywhere: Atlassians State of Teams Report 2022 says remote and hybrid workers spend 60 percent more time in meetings. This is not a good development. Investing more time in meetings (especially low-value meetings) is not only bad for team productivity, it also drains, irritates, and frustrates many employees.
Maximum integrated work management tools, such as those provided by Atassian Together, help to improve asynchronous communication. People are empowered to easily pick up where other team members left off, without everyone having to be in a meeting room or on a common call. Following, tracking and contributing to important work and discussions is no longer tied to synchronous votes.
Finding and interacting with the right information is easy. Atlassian Together tools alleviate the tedious, frustrating hunt for context, enabling the team to work as productively and efficiently as possible from any location.
Atlassian Together bietet …
- … a work hub that provides orientation at all times. Trello keeps people organized—at the individual, team, or cross-team level.
- … access to the collaboratively collected knowledge of the company. In Confluence, users have a knowledge management center at hand where they can find what they need without much effort.
- … Visibility of the goals throughout the company – including the status of goal achievement. In Atlas, every team has the opportunity to communicate and make transparent their progress.
- … a scalable project and program management. With Jira Work Management, the entire process can be mapped from the idea to completion, along with all dependencies.
- … context at all times. Atlassian work management products proactively provide background information at every level of task processing.
- … best practices and minimal barriers to entry. Atlassian Together provides templates and guidance for a number of common use cases that help teams work effectively and productively faster.
Employee engagement through autonomy and the right tools
Creating an environment that encourages engagement starts with finding the right balance between alignment and autonomy. There must be an alignment between employees and teams with regard to the goals, both small and large. In doing so, they must have a clear view of how their work contributes to the overall success of the organization. On the other hand, teams need the autonomy and freedom to work in the way that gets them the best results.
Achieving the right balance can be challenging as there is a contrast between the needs of the employee and the company. For example, we know that employees prefer flexible work situations. On the other hand, some conservative executives have repeatedly argued that workplace flexibility and labor productivity are mutually exclusive concepts.
This would mean that organizations in which flexible working methods are adopted find lower productivity to be acceptable. Conversely, the highest possible productivity would only be achieved through a strict obligation to be present.
This is nonsense, of course, and during the pandemic at the latest, these executives should have realized that there is initially no causal relationship between an employee’s productivity and location. Many modern companies are showing day after day that highly flexible workspaces and maximum productivity can go hand in hand – provided the company has a set of tools and methods in place that allow people to create lasting links with the goals, teams and work within the create organization with minimal effort.
And closely related to this is the formation and consolidation of employee engagement:
- Employees can create their own work management hubs or dashboards and customize them to suit their needs. This opens a window to work across teams and tools that can create connections and identity.
- Smart Links help save time, automate knowledge and information discovery, and accelerate decision-making by providing context without requiring a user to leave Atlassian Together products.
- Everyone in the organization can track progress toward shared team goals by subscribing to project updates. In this way, many time-consuming, low-value status meetings can be avoided.
- @mentions, tagging, following, giving kudos, leaving comments – teams have various interaction options that promote communication and collaboration, and benefit from the deep integration of the products with each other. All of these features help support a globally distributed workforce infrastructure for asynchronous collaboration.
Want to know more about Atlassian Together? Would you like to see the product suite in action? Our Atlassian experts look forward to talking to you and your team: get it contact with us!
Further information
Atlas: Atlassian’s new teamwork directory
Jira Work Management: New possibilities for company-wide collaboration
Atlassian Cloud with a new data storage option: data residency explicitly in Germany