How to create a workspace for your business with Notion
From startups to established businesses, having a centralized and organized workspace can dramatically enhance your business. A well-designed workspace boosts productivity, encourages team collaboration, and positively impacts your bottom line.
This guide will take you through the steps to set up a tailored Notion workspace for your business, regardless of industry or team size.
1. Define a clear structure
Begin by considering your business structure. Do you have multiple cross-functional teams, or do you rely on individual freelancers? Do you work across a range of products or services, or focus on one area? Identifying your structure will help you create an organized workspace.
Notion is ideal for this because you can experiment with different structures and quickly adapt your workspace as your business evolves, minimizing disruption.
Once you’ve defined your business's structure and hierarchy, it becomes easier to design a Notion workspace that reflects it.
For example:
- A business may have dedicated teams for Sales, Marketing, and Operations.
- Another business might use product squads, each responsible for a specific area of a platform or product.
- A startup may have a few individuals who cover multiple areas, from development to sales.
Are you planning to create separate spaces for each team or squad, each with their own project database? Or would a single workspace with tags or colors to differentiate teams or areas work better?
We recommend starting with a simple, welcoming homepage that serves as a high-level view and navigation hub. Your homepage might include a company-wide project and task database, along with links to team or area-specific pages.
2. Identify your workflows
With your structure set up using pages, team spaces, and databases, the next step is to identify how work flows through them. Think about how you categorize and move items, such as ideas, designs, research, bugs, or new products, through your business structure.
For example:
- When a new idea comes in, one team member might triage and tag it, then pass it to a designer for further work. The designer might then send it back for review or forward it directly to development.
- You might target new clients who start as prospects, enter an onboarding process, and eventually complete a free trial. Capturing all these data points can provide valuable insights.
- You might conduct user research that needs to be filtered to different teams based on responses to specific questions.
These workflows often coincide with meetings, so consider linking your workspace to your meeting structure to access key information more easily and run more productive meetings.
We suggest using basic status tags and setting up custom tags unique to your needs, such as tagging by product or service, team, priority, or item type.
Use templates and automations to enhance workflows
Take advantage of templates and Notion Automations to streamline processes. Templates can ensure consistency across tasks. For instance, a “Bug” template might prompt team members to include crucial details, like reproduction steps.
Automations can handle routine actions for you. For example, if a task status is marked as "Done," your automation can notify a team leader and update the status to "Under Review." Or, if an item in an "Ideas" database is tagged as a "Bug," it can move to a dedicated “Bugs” database, prioritize itself, and notify your development team.
Many workflows require additional tools and apps. Notion offers a wide array of integrations to help streamline processes. Consider integrating your most-used tools to improve efficiency.
3. Customise for collaboration & communication
Now you’ve got a structure in place and system for work to flow through that structure, you’ll want to think about how you can optimise the workspace for those using it.
To get the most out of your workspace you’ll want to guide people on how it’s to be used. Think about adding on page guides to help with this.
For example…
- You may want people to add comments directly onto a page, or by using the comment feature.
- You may want to setup a filtered view so certain teams only see what’s relevant, helping them to stay focussed.
- You may want to limit access to certain pages or areas based on their role
Notion has an array of great features for collaboration - customisable page layouts, database views and filters and permissions for pages alongside comments, suggestions, page analytics, history and more.
We suggest setting up custom filters for databases to show focussed & relevant views. For example a ‘In progress’ view of all tasks, or a team / area page that filters to only show items tagged with that team or area.
4. Refine, then refine again!
By now you should start to see a structure workspace that helps you clearly identify how you can process items and work to smoothly manage projects - but you are never done and your workspace will never be perfect. Needs are always changing, unique cases always crop up and your business will grow. We suggest adopting an approach of continuous refinement to make the most out of your workspace.
Notion has high levels of customisability when it comes to needing to rename items or move things about without disruption. You can regularly add, remove and recolour tags, icons as well as bulk edit and move pages around various databases all to suit your needs.
It’s important to remember that the effectiveness of your teams workspace can come down to many things; from work culture, objectives and goals through to devices used to access it.
Get in touch with us if you need support or advice setting up a workspace, or get started with our premade workspace template →
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