System
Confluence Cloud
Short description
Enable HR teams and employees to navigate a complex HR Confluence space through a structured, in-space navigation menu that surfaces policies, onboarding guides, benefits information, and HR processes scattered across multiple pages, without requiring users to understand or remember the underlying page hierarchy.
Challenge
HR spaces in Confluence tend to grow rapidly and uncontrollably: employment policies, onboarding checklists, compensation and benefits documentation, performance review templates, offboarding procedures, and training resources accumulate over time across different parent pages. Without a structured navigation layer, employees waste time searching or relying on HR staff to point them to the right page. HR professionals themselves struggle to ensure that policy updates are consistently discoverable, and that sensitive content remains accessible only to the right people.
Actors
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👩💼 Sofia – HR Manager
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🧑🤝🧑 Luca – People Operations Specialist
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🧑💻 Petra – Employee (General Staff)
Actors Goals
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Sofia wants to organize the HR Confluence space so that employees and managers can self-serve HR information without contacting HR directly for routine questions.
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Luca needs a structured navigation to quickly access onboarding templates, policy documents, and compensation guidelines when supporting new hires or answering employee inquiries.
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Petra wants to find the right HR policy or form quickly, leave requests, expense policies, or performance review processes, without browsing through an unfamiliar space structure.
Use Case Scenario (step-by-step)
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The HR space in Confluence has grown organically over two years, with pages nested under different parent pages, no consistent structure, and critical documents buried several levels deep.
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Sofia, as a Confluence Administrator with HR space ownership, accesses the SubSpace Navigation configuration panel inside the HR space by clicking the configuration icon in the SubSpace Menu.
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Sofia creates a new In-Space Menu for the HR space, with top-level navigation items reflecting the most-used HR knowledge areas: Onboarding & Offboarding, Policies & Compliance, Compensation & Benefits, Performance & Development, and HR Forms & Templates.
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Under each top-level folder, Luca adds Internal Link items pointing directly to the relevant pages, regardless of where they appear in the page hierarchy. The navigation structure is designed for users, not the page tree.
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Icons are added using SubSpace Navigation's menu icon feature, making the menu visually intuitive and easy to scan at a glance.
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All employees entering the HR space now see the structured navigation menu instead of Confluence's default page tree.
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Petra, looking for the parental leave policy, enters the HR space and immediately sees "Policies & Compliance" in the top navigation. One click brings her to the policy page, without searching or contacting HR.
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When the company updates its remote work policy, Luca updates the target page content. The navigation link in the menu automatically reflects the updated content; no menu reconfiguration is needed.
Outcome
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Employees like Petra self-serve HR information in seconds, significantly reducing inbound HR queries.
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HR professionals like Luca spend less time answering "where is the form?" questions and more time on strategic people work.
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Sofia maintains a clean, user-oriented navigation layer independently from the underlying page hierarchy.
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Dynamic CQL entries ensure policy updates surface automatically, no stale links or manual menu maintenance.
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Permission-aware display ensures sensitive HR content remains accessible only to authorized staff.
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The HR space becomes a trusted, self-serve knowledge hub for the entire organization.
Implementation Details
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Install SubSpace Navigation for Confluence Cloud from the Atlassian Marketplace.
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Open the HR Confluence space and access the SubSpace Navigation configuration icon.
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Create a new Menu scoped to the HR space, with top-level folders that match HR knowledge domains.
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Add Internal Link items pointing to key HR pages regardless of their position in the page hierarchy.
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Use the Live Preview in the configuration screen to validate the menu structure before publishing.
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Assign the menu as the Default Menu for the HR space via Managing Multiple Menus.