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Notion is a powerful tool for creating a company's wiki, but designing an effective and efficient workspace can be challenging. In this article, we explore some best practices for designing a bulletproof company's wiki along with some actionable tips and insights drawn from our very own experience.
When it comes to creating companies’ wikis, Notion is a super powerful tool: it allows teams to share information, workflows, processes, documentation and files in a very straightforward and efficient manner. However, designing an effective and efficient wiki workspace can be a challenging task. In this post, we'll first have a look at what a company’s wiki might look like, then we’ll explore some best practices for designing a bulletproof company's wiki workspace on Notion, and provide an example case of structuring Notion databases to replicate the 5Ws + 1H from the world of journalism.
Normally, a company’s wiki is the area where all of the company’s knowledge base lives. These are some of the things you might want to include in your company’s wiki:
- Standard operating procedures
- Guides
- Training material
- Onboarding procedures
- Legal, HR and financial documents
Once you’ve decided what to put in your company’s wiki on Notion, there are a few best practices to follow:
Define your goals and structure
Before diving into creating your Notion workspace, it's important to define your goals and structure. Is there a hierarchy of content? If so, what are the main categories and subcategories you want to cover? Would you rather organize your space via tags or metadata? What are the key properties you want to include and track? Answering these questions, for example, means you’ll need to start by deciding between a tree-based and a tag-based approach, which will define from the get go how you need to structure your workspace (needless to say that Notion database features facilitate a tag-based approach which will return enormous gains in terms of performance).
The goal here is to create a clear and organized structure for your Notion workspace, which will make it easier for your team to find and access information.
Knowledge siloing: your worst enemy
Individuals and teams have a tendency to keep valuable information, skills, workflows, process or expertise to themselves, rather than sharing it across the organization. This tendency is known as knowledge siloing (or knowledge hoarding) and can lead to enormous inefficiencies, useless redundancies and missed opportunities, and is often seen as a barrier to collaboration and innovation within a company. By leveraging Notion teamspaces and collaboration features you can make sure knowledge silos are a thing of the past.
The Single Source of Truth approach
In a single source of truth context, the goal is to have each component of your system stored only once and then fetched in any other location as referral and not as a duplicate to ensure consistency, accuracy and avoid duplication of information. In Notion these components are called blocks. To ensure that all information in your Notion workspace is accurate, consistent, and up-to-date, you should consider utilizing a Master Data Management (MDM) Database (or Master Data Repository) as a central database. This database acts as a single source of truth for all the data within an organization, providing a comprehensive view of all the data assets and their relationships.
The MDM database is responsible for connecting and integrating data from various systems and databases across the organization, allowing for efficient and effective management of all company knowledge. By structuring your company's wiki system on Notion based on relational databases and connecting them through the MDM database, you can ensure that all information is accurate, consistent, and easily accessible across all departments.
With the MDM database as the single source of truth, data can be integrated from multiple sources into a unified view. This allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the company's data assets, enabling better decision-making and more efficient management of knowledge. Additionally, the MDM database provides a central location for managing data governance, ensuring that all data is properly classified, tagged, and protected according to company policies and regulations.
Design “healthy” redundancies
Sometimes (especially in data rich scenarios) information may become "sunk" or hidden within the system, making it difficult to find or use when needed. To resurface this information in the relevant context, the right approach to dashboards structuring and database relations, consists of the use of "healthy redundancies" wherever and whenever possible.
First, database structuring should be designed in a way that enables easy retrieval of information. This can be achieved by organizing data into meaningful categories or tables, with clear relationships between them. For example, if we have data on customers, their orders, and their payments, we can structure our database to have separate tables for each of these categories, with links between them to ensure data integrity.
Second, relationships between tables should be set up properly to ensure that data is properly linked and can be easily retrieved as needed. For example, we can establish a relationship between the customer and order tables (and forget about those “Customer ID” fields!). This would allow us to easily retrieve a customer's order just by looking at their page within the customers database.
Third, the use of "healthy redundancies" can help ensure that important information is not lost or forgotten. This means referring (not duplicating!) important data across multiple pages or dashboards to make it easier to retrieve. For example, we could store a customer's address in a “Places” db and then have a linked view of the database “Places” dynamically filtered by client, to have a list of all the places linked to each customer within their own page, while at the same time having a page for each place (for example a city) with all the occurrences of that place form any other database (e.g. all the customers that have an office in that city). This was, a piece of information that would have been sunk within the client’s page, is given much more value by being connected all other occurrences of the same data.
By implementing these approaches, we can develop a system where "sunk" information resurfaces in the relevant context. The right approach to database structuring and relations, along with a savvy deployment of page templates and dashboards will ensure that data is properly linked and easy to retrieve, while healthy redundancies will help ensure that important information is not lost or forgotten.
Leverage Notion collaboration features
One of the main benefits of using Notion for a company's wiki system is its collaborative features. You can invite team members to view and edit pages, comment on content, and tag each other in notes and tasks. By leveraging these collaboration features your company can achieve enormous savings in the time spent in back/forth emails, never ending meetings, etc. especially if you work with a remote or hybrid team. Overall, this is another way in which you can foster a culture of knowledge sharing and teamwork as opposed to a knowledge siloing approach (as mentions above).
Customize your workspace
Finally, Notion allows for a high degree of customization, so you can tailor your workspace to meet your team's specific needs both in terms of UI (the layout) and in terms of UX (the user experience). You can use custom icons, colors, and fonts to make your workspace visually appealing and easy to navigate. You can also create custom templates and databases that are tailored to your team's workflows and processes and when you need to add a specific category of content you can launch a specific template that presents characteristics that are tailored to that specific type of content. Notion offers a variety of features that can help you create the consistency and organization that your company’s wiki system needs.
In conclusion, designing an effective Notion workspace for your company's wiki can be a challenging task, but it is worth the effort. By defining your goals and structure, customizing your workspace, leveraging Notion's collaboration features, and avoiding knowledge silos, you can ensure that your team has easy access to the information they need. Furthermore, by adopting a Single Source of Truth approach through a Master Data Management (MDM) database, you can ensure that all information is accurate, consistent, and easily accessible across all departments, while providing a comprehensive view of all the data assets and their relationships. Finally, the use of "healthy redundancies" can help ensure that important information is not lost or forgotten, while enabling easy retrieval of information. By following these best practices, your Notion workspace can become a bulletproof company's wiki system that fosters knowledge sharing, teamwork, and innovation within your organization.