<aside> 💡 The goal of Part 3 is to audit the current sidebar and define the ideal sidebar of the “General” or main default teamspace.

Successful Outcomes

• The home page of the General teamspace is a neat landing page that links to critical company information
• The workspace has approximately 10-15 top level pages in the “General” teamspace, and owners identified for each of those pages.
• All teamspaces have clear owners and limited amounts of top-level pages </aside>

Step 1: Internal communications about changes to the workspace

Part 3 will result in visual changes to the workspace that will be apparent to all members of the workspace. In order to prevent a disorienting experience for users, a company-wide announcement should be made explaining that the workspace is going to be reorganized, and who to contact if users can’t find something they need. A larger project plan or a call for volunteers to be on a future Notion Council can also be made at this juncture.

Example comms can be found in this document:

Workspace Refresh Comms Template

Step 2: Choose or build a new company home page

All workspaces should have a main homepage that serves as the primary landing space for its members. This homepage should be the first sidebar page in the “General” Teamspace menu, and contain company wide information that is organized in an easily navigable way. Some workspaces will already have a functional company home page, and some will need to built it fresh. You can start with a template in Notion’s Template Gallery if you need to build a homepage from scratch.

• The model for this home page is the Fig Company Home page
• Some examples of pages we recommend for a company home page
  • Mission and Values
  • HR Information
  • Most Important Documents
  • What other information is most important to surface to all employees?

Step 3: Audit current sidebar pages

The most critical pieces of organizing the sidebar are moving pages into the correct teamspaces are removing the ones that don’t belong.

Current sidebar pages should fall into three buckets:

• Pages that are company-wide resources
  • Most of these should be moved to the company homepage designated in Step 1. Others can stay on the sidebar if they are critically important.
• Pages that are already Team/Organization home pages
  • Some of these can stay on the sidebar, as long as they represent the top level organization of a function. You can also choose to move these into the appropriate teamspace. For example:
    • “Engineering Home” can stay as a sidebar page, or move into the Engineering teamspace
    • “Infrastructure Engineering” should probably become a subpage on the Engineering Homepage
• Pages that don’t belong on the sidebar
  • These need to be moved to one of the other buckets or the Archive
    • Examples

Step 4: Declutter sidebar by archiving unnecessary top-level pages

As you audit the sidebar, move pages that don’t belong there to the Archive that you created in Part 2. This content will still be searchable in the search menu, and the owners of those documents will be able to move them out of the Archive.

Step 5: Create new top-level pages (or teamspaces)

Each functional org at your company should have it’s own Top level page in the General Teamspace (or it’s own dedicated Teamspace if you have already implemented Teamspaces).

At this point in the process, each Top level team page (or Teamspace) should have an owner that is responsible for the maintenance of that Page or Teamspace moving forward. If this ownership is not established, those pages will atrophy over time and revert back to a messy state.