5 Reasons Your Team Needs an Online Whiteboard

Are you using online whiteboards? Here are five reasons why you should and how they can positively affect your business.

Online whiteboards are on the rise, and we can only anticipate that the demand for online whiteboards to continue to increase. On the fence about the benefit of how one might serve your team? Check out the 5 ways your team can benefit from an online whiteboard.

1. Remote Collaboration

Employees of organizations both big and small are opting into working from home and to remote work situations. In the recent past, it was an expectation for teams to be in an office space where they were easily accessible.

Now, employees see remote work opportunities as an integral part of a compensation package. With the growing desire for remote work opportunities, it is as important as ever to optimize the experience of working remotely. The shift has brought many new challenges. One of which is the need to still be able to collaborate as effectively remotely as if it were in person. We are experiencing something unique unfold: remote collaboration.

Remote collaboration is done by using online tools to work toward a common goal. Without face-to-face interaction, remote teams use technology to communicate, often now in real-time. Online whiteboards are one of many tools being utilized to create productive remote work environments. With online whiteboards, content can be created, ideas can be shared, tasks can be assigned, and although teams are not physically together they have a space where they can work together. Online whiteboards create an environment for remote teams to succeed and feel empowered to do their best work.

2. Visualize your Projects

Visualizing your projects from start to finish is a big piece to working effectively as a team. Seeing projects at a glance can go a long way in saving time and focusing on the top priorities. By visualizing your tasks on a whiteboard, you can see where pain points might arise, risks, who is working on which task, and what state certain work is in. Visualizing your projects aids in making sure everyone on the team is on the same page. Without visualization, information can easily be misinterpreted, incorrectly prioritized, or lost altogether. Remember the game telephone? One person starts by whispering a statement to the person next to them, that person repeats the phrase to the person on the other side? What happens after a few exchanges is that the message gets diluted, changed, and the end message is nothing like the original. Project planning with multiple team members is much like the game of the telephone.

Visualization is the key to making sure everyone has a shared understanding. Visual project management is a way for you to organize and manage work outside of the traditional task lists. It allows you to work at-a-glance, but also hone in on the exact specifications of each task needs as well. You can easily set milestones, due dates, and what work is currently on your plate. Trends and decisions can be made much more efficiently and effectively when all of the information is built out visually.

3. Organize all Your Information in One Place

We've all been there, our team member shared a file with us but we can't remember exactly where. Was it in an email, saved to my computer, or shared with me on Slack? We often waste time when our project information is scattered across different tools. Just as visualizing your projects is important, it's just as important to make sure all the information needed is also in the same place. With the growing amount of tools aimed at connecting teams, having several different conversations across several different apps like Slack, email, Google Drives, can get messy and unmanageable, fast. With an online whiteboard platform, all of your most important information can be stored in one place. You can take photos of physical whiteboards and import them into your online whiteboard. You can attach documents and other important information inside your online whiteboard so that all team members can easily access information. Tools like Slack are great for getting a hold of your team members, but with an online whiteboard, all of your important conversations can be stored on your board. It makes it easy to see large amounts of information quickly, in one place.

4. Ensure Everyone’s Voice is Heard

When holding a meeting, ideally you want all participants to feel heard. Not only does this allow for diversified opinions and ideas, but it also creates an environment where teams can become more connected. It can be difficult to make sure everyone is heard, especially in meetings with a large number of participants, introverted personality types, or remote participants. Oftentimes the best ideas are not reserved for the loudest speakers. With all variables to consider, it is important to choose a tool that can help overcome these barriers to meeting equality. Online whiteboards, like CardBoard, include tools that allow each team member the option to participate at their own convenience. Team members can drop in comments for the entire channel to be notified of without the burden of having to interrupt another member. They can drop in digital sticky notes, add annotations of elements that need further conversation, or even vote on cards that are the highest priority. If someone misses a meeting they can quickly see all of the updates to stay organized. They can also add their own updates at their own convenience. You can collaborate and hear everyone's ideas without setting up a meeting each time. Using an online whiteboard allows everyone the opportunity to speak up, collaborate, and provide feedback at their convenience and comfortability.

5. See your Business From Every Angle

Few tools allow you to see your business from every angle much better than an online whiteboard. An excel sheet is great for recording data and reports charts. However, what if you need to build a persona or mind map to garner a deeper understanding of your customer base? Chances are you will have to add additional tools to your workflow causing more complexity in an already complex project.

An online whiteboard has templates and customizable abilities to see your project all the way from the ideation stage into the delivered project. For example; you can begin by having a mind mapping stage to get all ideas out onto the table, follow up with an opportunity canvas to see potential gaps in the market, move into the persona phase of who you can provide a solution to, build out the solution in a user story map, then use a lean coffee retro to review how the project went, and understand what can be improved in future iterations. Complex projects can be simplified through all of the features a strong online whiteboard platform provides.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected]. Or Try out a FREE 14-day trial by signing up for CardBoard HERE. If you have any questions, comments, additional feedback please reach out to us via email at [email protected]

Originally published at https://cardboardit.com on July 1, 2021.