How to set up your Notion workspace for your team (2023)

Getting your team’s Notion workspace organized starts by creating centralized systems for accessing information, managing projects, and enabling cross-functional collaboration.

Once you’ve set the foundation, your team can go about customizing these workflows depending on their needs. From engineering product roadmaps to your marketing team’s wiki, the baseline systems you establish when onboarding your team to Notion support the growth of your team — and their work.

To get your Notion workspace up and running, start at thesidebar. This is where your company’s projects and information live, so keeping it clean, clear, and organized makes finding and using information easier. If info is inaccessible, it might as well not exist.

You'll first want to set your teamspaces and information architecture, which occupy theTeamspacessection in your sidebar.

To manually add new top-level pages from scratch to yourteamspaces, click+to the immediate right. A blank page will appear giving you the option to either create a database, empty page, import information, or work off an existing template.

But maybe you don't want teammates changing top-level pages in teamspaces. In theTeamspace settingssection in your sidebar, findSecurity. Once there, you'll be able to toggle off the ability for teammates to edit the sidebar. However, this feature is only available onEnterpriseplans and you must be an admin to activate it.

After your sidebar has been locked, this helps reinforce the keeping of relevantnested pageswithin your top-level pages. For example, your top-level company home page might have nested pages for benefits info or how to request PTO. Having these as sub-pages keeps the information organized and easily accessible.

Don't forget — teams can also customize their pages. From headers and columns, to Figma files and code snippets, each team wiki can be tailored to the work at hand. Learnwriting and editingbasics, then tacklestyles and customization.

To manually add new top-level pages from scratch to your WORKSPACE section, click + to the immediate right. A blank page will appear giving you the option to either create a database, empty page, import information, or work off an existing template.

But maybe you don't want teammates changing top-level pages. In the Settings & Members section in your sidebar, find Security & identity. Once there, you'll be able to toggle off the ability for teammates to edit the sidebar. However, this feature is only available on Enterprise plans and you must be an admin to activate it.

After your sidebar has been locked, this helps reinforce the keeping of relevant nested pages within your top-level pages. For example, your top-level company home page might have nested pages for benefits info or how to request PTO. Having these as sub-pages keeps the information organized and easily accessible.

Don't forget — teams can also customize their pages. From headers and columns, to Figma files and code snippets, each team wiki can be tailored to the work at hand. Learn writing and editing basics, then tackle styles and customization.

Once your initial top-pages are up, invite your team to the workspace. In the sidebar, click Settings & Members. Under Workspace, select Members. Tap the Add members button. Enter their email address.

Before inviting teammates, you’ll have the option to set each person you invite into your workspace as:

Then clickInvite.

If you want to add teammates even faster, in the Settings & Members section of your sidebar, you can:

As your team grows, you might need to update permission settings for the folks in your workspace. You can learn more about , guest access, and creating permission groups to quickly and easily share pages with teams at your company.

Now that you’ve set up your Notion workspace for success and invited all your teammates, you can inspire collaboration.

There are several ways to work with your team using Notion depending on the situation. Namely, you canuse the @ mention in several places within your Notion workspace to tag teammates and set reminders.

Whether it’s the engineering team’s tasks or the company-wide roadmap, Notion databases are essential for running projects and executing them with speed and precision. We suggest creating shared databases (as top-level pages) for:

For any shared documentation, whenever possible, use one big database. Why?

Because properties, filters, views, and more allow your team to slice information however they need. Having one big database fosters important company-wide transparency and learning, while individuals can customize what information they see and how they see it.

Here are a few more tips for getting the most out of your team's databases.

Templates help ensure you’re running processes consistently. And as your team grows, they’re important for scaling those processes.

You can create any number of customized templates that spin up immediately, containing questions, prompts, or edge-cases. Because templates are so customizable, if your team learns something about how a project was done, the template can be updated. This promotes learnings across your team and takes those learnings forward into everything you do.

For your different databases, you might include:

Pages comprise Notion databases. And inside pages is where the work actually happens. But you need a way to spell out key facts around your team's work.

Database views are also customizable, helping you and your team surface relevant information your database.

Let's say you have a company-wide roadmap. Want to see all projects organized by status? Create a view for it. Want to see a table organized by project priority? You can make a view for that too. What about a calendar of all the launch dates? Yep, you can create a view for that.