Product Highlight: Using Linchpin and Confluence for Organizational Charts

by | Jul 8, 2021

Organizational charts help organizations foster collaboration and transparency, but they can be challenging to maintain. For Confluence users, we want to highlight how our partners, Linchpin, can make this easier.

Why Do We Need Organizational Charts?

Organizational charts are visual representations of a company’s structure. They detail the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of all people within that organization.

While the concept of organizational charts has been around for a long time, many companies haven’t adopted them. The result of no organizational chart can be chaotic. If you work in a large organization and need to contact someone, you might have to waste a lot of time finding the right person.

Some kind of organizational chart makes information accessible, which is a crucial aspect of business agility. It helps new hires quickly acquaint themselves with the company and hit the ground running. It makes it easier for employees to collaborate.

Whether your organizational structure is flat or hierarchical, having a visual of where people are in the organization is crucial to getting work done.

Challenges to Maintaining Organizational Charts

Organizational charts are not static; they are constantly evolving. Think about your organization. If you hire a new person, you need to adjust the organizational chart. If you onboard a new team, you need to add a branch to the organizational chart. If someone leaves the organization, the org chart needs to change.

What does this mean for the person who manages the org chart? They are constantly updating it, another unavoidable, time-consuming task. And this is why organizational charts can seem like an overwhelming undertaking.

Manage Organizational Charts with Linchpin

Based on Atlassian Confluence, Linchpin offers a solution that takes away a lot of the manual work, by creating dynamic org charts based on the user’s profile data. Within a Linchpin intranet, you have two ways of displaying your org chart. The first is the traditional way, in a classic organizational chart. The second way is with a structure chart. Both methods are available in Linchpin Essentials and Linchpin Intranet Suite.

Once you choose your organizational chart type and establish your structure, it is visible in the Linchpin people directory, and you can display it on any page or blog using the Org Chart macro. This is great for onboarding new employees to give them a visual representation of the company’s structure. It also works well for space overview pages, where you can illustrate which team is using a Confluence space..

Here are two examples of organizational charts in Linchpin.

Org Chart  

The classic organization chart organizes people in a chart based on hierarchies. When a field in the user’s profile defines a superior, a hierarchy of users is dynamically created. It can be displayed on any page in the user’s profile or in the global user directory.


Structural Chart

The structure chart organizes people in a chart based on different profile data. Nearly any field can be used to set the organizational structure. It is possible to use departments, locations or job titles to build a customized structure. Each node will display the right users dynamically based on the users selection in their profile. You want to sync the data from an external directory – go for it! All you need to do is set the initial structure in the administration and you have a visual representation of your company’s structure.


With Confluence and Linchpin, creating your organizational chart takes just a few clicks. After that, the chart stays up-to-date as employees come and go. You can even remind employees to update their profiles by using a feature within Linchpin called “pings.” Organizational charts are now less of a hassle and more of a useful guidebook to your organization.

Ready to learn more about Linchpin and organizational charts? Contact us

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