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Deciding between a company wiki and a connected Work Hub

Companies have a lot of information. Documents. Messages. Files. Decks. Code. Emails. If you keep digging, it goes on and on. 

The chaos of information that happens in a company is limitless. This is why we developed tools to help us streamline and organize it.

Sharing information is vital for any company, yet how many of us have wasted time digging through old emails, switching between apps, browser tabs, and folders to find what we need?

In our research of more than 100 software companies, 77% said they have no process for documenting or storing information. According to GitLab’s recent Remote Work Report, only 37% of employees say their orgs do a good job of aligning work. 

Company intranets have been traditionally used as platforms for corporate wikis, but in recent years have been replaced by solutions like a work hub. 

Here’s the thing: information overload is chaotic, and your workday shouldn't have to involve digging yourself out of a trench.

This is why many teams use corporate wikis such as Notion, Confluence, or GitHub to collaborate and spend less time hunting documents down. In this article, we’ll explore how a work hub goes beyond team wikis by connecting with them to kill chaos. 

Top internal wiki software

1. Confluence

Confluence is an Atlassian wiki software that enables project management and collaboration. Confluence offers both cloud-based and on-premise deployment and allows employees to create project documents within the tool. 

2. Slab

Easily create, organize, and discover knowledge for your entire organization, from non-technical to tech-savvy.

Slab has a few interesting use cases but ultimately allows for teams to build a searchable knowledge base to return to time and time again. 

3. Notion

With Notion, you have the tools to build a custom wiki. The benefit here is that you can customize your wiki solution using Notion’s building blocks. You can easily attach project documents in a task, link employee benefits, and post company announcements. 

What are the challenges with company wikis?

We spoke with 150+ teams and found out that company wikis are not without challenges that impact productivity and collaboration of teams, especially when remotely.

1. Information is hard to retrieve without context

Information needs to be accessible. If a slide deck that is part of a content marketing project gets shared to the company wiki without providing context, your teammates aren’t getting the whole picture.

Let’s say you hire someone whose focus is sales enablement. Without the context of that marketing presentation, how is this new hire supposed to see the big picture? 

With a corporate wiki, your documents don’t have generational value. Without a particular formatting process which we’ll get to that information gets lost in the chaos despite the work you put in initially.

2. There’s no standard process

77% of people said they have no process for documenting or storing information.

This means that even though the adopter of the tool, or People and Ops teams, spend time thinking about how to structure a wiki — things can still get lost. Chaos is the constant, remember? 

It becomes just one more thing to do. And adopting a company-wide wiki in a truly effective way takes a lot of time and consideration. 

3. You don’t have access to everything

Knowledge and access is scattered across teams. It only takes 10 minutes on your first day of work to run into the hiccup of not having access to everything. Now sometimes this has to do with tools having limited seats, but how many times have you run into a document you had to ask permission to edit?

You need to bring it all together.

4. The ever-present boogie man of a silo 

While more established teams of a company might use Confluence as their main wiki, younger, more cross-functional teams might start using Notion for its different capabilities and more intuitive UI. 

Two different internal company wikis mean more to dig through once your company is ready to reconnect your teams and establish centralized communication. 

What’s the difference between a Work Hub and a company wiki software?

Working collaboratively across different teams and tools can result in a chaos of information, with knowledge distributed over email, chat threads, and cloud storage drives. Using a traditional system of files and folders makes it hard to find relevant information, especially as your team grows — and especially as different teams have different ways of documenting and storing information.

Company wikis organize information all in one place where everyone can access and contribute. It uses the power of internal links connecting knowledge — just like Wikipedia. 

On GitHub, people share code and build software together. It’s open-source, and a valuable team collaboration toolkit for engineers — but not so widespread to non-technical fields. Notion and Confluence are examples of company-wide knowledge bases that can be used by any team. They’re helpful for creating a clear knowledge base of notes, processes, and company protocols.

With a Work Hub knowledge is gathered from various sources — company wikis, messaging apps, project management tools — and centrally stored in one searchable workspace. Your teams can access information across the whole organization, see the origin of each document, and understand the context. It provides total transparency and discoverability.

Qatalog work hub - product wireframe

This idea of an interconnected workforce is essential when it comes to remote and hybrid work. Because employees are seemingly satisfied with remote work, but feel the pain point of muddling through tools and uncertainty about what their colleagues are doing. As we move into the future of what work is supposed to look like, we can actively choose to eliminate the chaos of misplaced, disorganized, constant information.

Why you need a Work Hub to live with your wiki

When creating a unified workspace for your team, you need a platform that connects information intuitively, making your current apps work smarter — enabling you to compound knowledge without disrupting your existing processes. 

A work hub integrates what you’re already using in order to unlock hidden potential — and without you having to start from scratch. 

When you connect Confluence and GitHub to a work hub, you can:

  1. Use our custom-built, full-text search to find any file quickly across all of these tools. Based on your license and access permissions, you will be able to view anything created in these tools through a work hub, but you’ll need a license to read, comment and edit. 
  2. Track the activity feed of each team member across any connected wiki in real-time. For example, a marketer will be able to see if and when a developer pushes a commit for a specific feature to GitHub, even without having a license for it.
  3. Get a ready and solid framework for teams, projects, and workflows that gets automatically updated. If you want ready-to-use and scalable spaces for every person, team, project or internal workflow, we’ve built them—and they’re all tightly linked and nested together. So you won’t have to worry about creating a template, uniforming inconsistencies, or recreating lost information—because if someone leaves, all their projects, updates, and workflows get automatically passed to their team lead.

Qatalog's Company Section includes a customizable Company page where admins can create and add wiki pages such as the vacation policy or onboarding guides. Admins can also post company-wide updates, and upload important resources or link processes through Workflows. So whether you’re refreshing your hiring process, reporting on user metrics, or chasing that all-hands note, you’ll get more value from knowledge when you don’t waste hours searching for it.

marta-kutt
WRITTEN BY
Marta
Kutt
Chief of Staff @ Qatalog
As Chief of Staff, Marta sets the operations strategy and makes sure everything at Qatalog is running smoothly. This means making sure that company knowledge is centralized and visible, routine processes are automated, collaboration is streamlined, and lots more on top. When she’s not busy building the future of work, you’ll probably find her playing badminton, rock climbing, or giving back to her community
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