Do you groan inwardly when a calendar invite for yet another meeting pops up in your workspace inbox? If you’re in a leadership role, how do you think your team feels about it?
Americans spend roughly 15% of their working lives in meetings. However, surveys reveal that they consider 71% of those gatherings unproductive and pointless. Time is money, and this wastefulness costs organizations roughly $37 billion each year.
Business leaders owe it to themselves and their teams to make the most of their face-to-face time. However, the new working reality of remote and hybrid arrangements complicates the typical conference room get-together. Fortunately, they can use today’s new and improved digital whiteboards to optimize their next meeting.
Increase Engagement
Business owners know that some employees do better jobs than others. However, those who fail to perform often do so because they feel divorced from meaning and purpose in their work. A recent Gallup poll reveals that only 36% of employees engage in the workplace, meaning they have a strong mental and emotional connection to their careers. Others do the minimum necessary to collect a paycheck, while a few actively spread negativity.
Why the separation? One reason is that many employees feel voiceless in the workplace. Management hands down edicts that they must obey without any opportunity to give meaningful feedback or provide input on how things could run more efficiently. After feeling unheard for long enough, they shut down and ask, “Why bother?” Instead of feeling greater agency over their careers, they exhibit behaviors associated with learned helplessness.
However, digital whiteboards allow everyone to participate in real-time polls while seeing how their colleagues respond. This can enhance team decision-making, helping leaders see what those in the thick of it think is the best direction to go. It democratizes the process and gives everyone input while keeping it anonymous so introverts don’t have to brave speaking over others to be heard.
Enhance Collaboration
Collaboration can be difficult if workers take different shifts or some report to the office while others remain remote. Email chains can become nightmarishly long, with many members of the group losing interest – and vital messages – along the way. Posted bulletin boards can become disarrayed. Maybe one team member takes home a crucial file and gets sick, putting everyone else on the team behind when they don’t report to the office the next day.
However, digital whiteboards enhance collaborative efforts. They empower employees to connect to one hub from anywhere at any time. Time-stamping and version histories mean you can go back and recover lost data whenever necessary to maintain continuity – no more missing files.
Furthermore, staff members can present everything in a visually appealing manner. Many digital whiteboard programs allow users to add comments and sticky notes adjacent to paragraphs needing revisions or graphics that others struggle to interpret. Employees can draw diagrams and maps to illustrate ideas – they aren’t bound by text alone.
For example, let’s say they’re creating a massive client presentation on the merits of a new computer program. This one project might employ copywriters, graphic designers, and technical experts. Using a digital whiteboard allows each person to complete their portion as it will appear in the finished copy, commenting and rearranging things to make them more aesthetically pleasing without losing content. All collaborators can edit the template for the final document.
Improve Project Organization
The flexibility of digital whiteboards makes them fabulous tools for improving overall project organization. Individual contributors complete their work in isolation too often in the business world. However, if they can’t envision what the completed whole should look like, they may make errors that cost considerable time and money to correct.
Think of your digital whiteboards as an architect’s drafting table. No one would set out to build a home by telling one person to frame walls, another to pour a foundation, and a third to put on the roof without giving them a floor plan. If they did, they’d end up with three different pieces that didn’t fit together correctly, requiring endless effort to fix.
A digital whiteboard gets all your team players on the same page. It lets staff members start at the conclusion, creating a cohesive vision for each project – a skeleton they can flesh out with the details. When all the pieces work together, they experience greater synthesis and harmony, a smoother workflow, fewer frustrations and “do-overs,” and higher productivity.
Digital whiteboards also help maximize productive meeting time without losing continuity. For example, the team can practice the Pomodoro technique, where they work for 25 minutes, followed by a 5-minute break. They can pick up right where they left off when they return without shuffling papers.
Connect Team Members From Anywhere
The world of work has changed, whether employers like it or not. While vaccines now exist for COVID-19, they aren’t perfect and workers with immunodeficiencies have legitimate concerns about sharing close quarters with strangers, forcing a shift to a digital workforce. Furthermore, scientists warn that the reality of climate change will bring future pandemics and, with them, the resulting disruptions in business practices for those who eschew virtual solutions now.
Digital whiteboards empower teams to connect from anywhere. They can hold hybrid meetings, with some participants in the traditional conference room and others attending virtually without skipping a beat. They can work across time zones, as notes and presentations remain safely in the cloud for staff on the other side of the world to access at a reasonable hour.
Expand Hands-On Learning Opportunities
One of the biggest frustrations teachers faced during the recent pandemic shift to virtual learning was how to engage hands-on or tactile learners in an online environment. Learning styles don’t disappear once people reach adulthood and digital whiteboards can help teams expand continuing education that engages all staff members.
For example, employers can include multimedia presentations, including audio and video for those learners who tune out during lectures alone. They can also have participants solve problems directly on the screen, brainstorming responses and then wiping the slate clean like one would a traditional high school whiteboard. Team members can do far more than type; they can draw, create graphics, or incorporate multimedia clips.
How Digital Whiteboard Can Help Optimize Your Next Meeting
Today’s workplace is changing and savvy employers know to seek the best tools for taking their business into tomorrow. A digital whiteboard can be essential in managing your workflow in a virtual world. Consider the above ways that digital whiteboards can optimize your next meeting. Then, evaluate your options and invest in the right solution for your team.
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