Okay, so you’re creating all this essential documentation, and you’re establishing a single repository where you can store it all. Great! But with an ever-growing library of content, how can you guide people to the key documents to ensure that the most important stuff absolutely, definitely, assuredly gets read? We created Required Reading in Teamwork Spaces to address exactly this problem — and, if we do say so ourselves, it’s one of our favorite features. Required Reading lets you set your company’s essential information as must-reads that are highlighted for everyone. It’s a great way of making sure all staff — from old-timers to new hires — are informed of your organization’s policies and processes, employee handbooks, or important SOPs. And what’s more, if you make any changes to a Required Reading document, all employees will be kept up to date and apprised of the change — so nothing falls through the cracks. Communicating important updates becomes effortless, and you don’t need to worry that things will go unseen because employees are on holiday or out of the office. And it’s better for your employees, too, because they can see at a glance what’s required of them. This way, they know how to prioritize their time and can easily see which documents they need to read first (before they get stuck in to the rest of your organization’s artfully-curated content library, that is). We think it’s going to make a real difference to the way knowledge and information gets shared and consumed. Here’s how to get started with Required Reading, and a few things we think it’s especially great for — but as always, we built it to be flexible enough to be used the way that works best for you and your team.
Setting a page as Required Reading
To set a page as Required Reading, you first need to have edit access for the space you’re working on. (For more about user permissions in Teamwork Spaces, see this help doc.) You can set a page as Required Reading when you first create it by checking the Required Reading option to the bottom left of the page before publishing.
You can also go into the Settings for an already-published page and edit them to set it as Required Reading. To do this, click the Options menu (the three dots) to the top right of the page and select Page settings.
In the Page Settings pop-up, you can toggle the Required reading option on or off.
Once a page has been set as Required Reading, it will show up for the relevant people in the site-level Required Reading area.
Viewing your Required Reading
You can view a list of your required reading via the site-level navigation bar. The Required Reading area contains all of your read and unread required readings. When you have unread items, a red notification badge icon will be displayed beside the tab.
The items are grouped by Unread, Read, and All. The red badge will indicate the number of unread items.
In the top right, you’ll see a search box that lets you filter the list of items by space or page title.
Within each tab of the Required Reading area, the items will be grouped by the space they belong to. Select the name of an individual item in the list to view it. Below the page or space title, you’ll see an estimated reading time.
Marking your Required Reading as read
Below the content, just above the author information, you’ll have the option to mark the page as read. If you have previously marked the page as read, you will instead have the option to mark the page as unread.
Once you have read an item, it will move to the Read column within the Required Reading area.
A few ways you can use it
Every organization is different, and only you will know which information your company wants to set as Required Reading. But here are some ideas to get you started: HR policies and processes: Use it to ensure every employee knows exactly how things work by setting your company’s guidelines around performance reviews, annual leave, maternity and parental leave, and more as Required Reading. Important dates: All hands meetings, product launches, company-wide holidays — make sure nothing sneaks up on your staff. Employee handbook: Help to build your company culture by keeping staff informed about their perks and benefits, FAQs around how things work in your office spaces, and information about any extracurricular groups or activities they can get involved with. Team-specific SOPs: Whether your marketing team needs to communicate important information about an upcoming campaign or your product team needs to get every developer aligned on product specs before they launch into development, Required Reading lets you do it — and if a new member joins the team down the line, it makes it super easy for them to get up to speed. These are just a few of the ways we envision teams using Required Reading (and a few of the ways we’ve been using it ourselves!) but we’d love to know — how will your team use it? Let us know in the comments below.