DO NOT ERASE: How to “Whiteboard” Your Way to More Productivity
Any meeting that involves brainstorming, discussing, and/or mapping out ideas, projects, and concepts (or grouping ideas into different categories) is an excellent excuse to leverage a whiteboard.
Teams today are more distributed than ever, which underscores the importance of visual collaboration. Visual collaboration tools, like digital whiteboards, allow remote teams to ideate and brainstorm virtually. In this article, Angela Bunner, VP of solutions at ClickUp, outlines how digital whiteboards can revamp how teams work for maximum efficiency.
Who can forget the “whiteboard work of art”?
Your team just spent two hours brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign. The group discussed content marketing, partnerships, accounts, audience, and budget — and the green boxes, black arrows, and multi-colored sticky notes on the dry-erase whiteboard captured the highlights. Then, one of your teammates printed “DO NOT ERASE” in all caps above the visual masterpiece. Another person snapped a picture of the whiteboard with their phone. There were vague plans to share, transcribe, and “act” on all the ideas that came out of this brainstorm. Instead, the whiteboard photo sat untouched — along with all those great ideas — on someone’s phone camera roll.
Fast forward to 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic, when most of us found ourselves working from home. In fact, in 2020, 71% of workers were doing their job from home all or most of the time. Because of this, teammates have rarely been able to meet in a room and hash out a problem together — but they still need to collaborate. Today’s remote and hybrid workforce has underscored the importance of visual collaboration. After all, we can’t underestimate the power of visuals — especially when it comes to collaboration. When people hear information, they remember only 10% of what they heard three days later. However, if a picture is paired with that same information, people will retain 65% three days later.
That in-person marketing brainstorm with the dry-erase board has shifted online. Enter the digital whiteboard, an online version of the whiteboard office workers loved. With the digital whiteboard, users can ideate, brainstorm, and create process flow diagrams — they just do it virtually. This technology’s anytime-anywhere accessibility may make you wonder when and how to take advantage of this tool best.
Best Practices for Visual Collaboration Tools
Let’s look at how virtual whiteboards can help revamp the way your team works and share some best practices for taking advantage of this type of tool — even when you have the opportunity to return to in-person brainstorms.
1. Map the medium to the meeting
What meetings are best suited for virtual whiteboarding?
Basically, any meeting that involves brainstorming, discussing, and/or mapping out ideas, projects, and concepts (or grouping ideas into different categories) is an excellent excuse to leverage a whiteboard. These may include scenarios where you’re creating content like:
- Process diagrams and workflows: Map out a start point, steps, decisions, actions, and end point of your project. This process flow diagram may outline a specific project, its associated tasks, and the task sequence.
- Mind mapping: Write the topic of the mind map in the middle of the drawing. Brainstorm 3-5 main ideas in a circular formation around the main topic. Draw a line from the mind map topic to each main idea.
- Pros and cons: Outline the advantages and disadvantages of a particular decision.
- SWOT analysis: Identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to a project, situation, or competitor.
- Daily standup: Cover the status of your team’s projects during a quick check-in.
Keep in mind that the information contained within various boxes, labels, and arrows on your virtual whiteboard can be moved around. That said, not every scenario is cut out for whiteboarding. Avoid a whiteboard session if you are working with heavy data and structured, detailed project plans. Those can be better suited for a Gantt chart, which illustrates a project schedule allowing you to drill down into links, tabs, and documents and view various dependencies and relationships between and among activities and stakeholders.
See More: Beyond Virtual Meetings: 6 Popular Collaboration Tools to Boost Productivity
2. Agree on a goal, process, and level of detail
Your whiteboard-centric meeting can be formal or informal. An ad hoc brainstorm may not require an agenda, but if your team outlines a more comprehensive project or process, consider setting a session agenda. What is the purpose of the meeting? What problem are you trying to solve? What goal are you trying to reach? What information do you want to capture? How will you add ideas?
If you’re holding a brainstorm about a sprint for an upcoming product feature, you can create four boxes: “risks,” “challenges,” “actions,” and “priorities.” Be clear on the level of detail you use within the boxes, stickies, and shapes. Your whiteboarding vocabulary should be consistent (short phrases and descriptors work best). What you want to avoid is too much or too little information. Too few details, abbreviations, or cryptic terms may confuse people, while too much data can overwhelm them. Also, you want to ensure that people can read and understand the virtual whiteboard when they access it days or weeks after your session.
3. Encourage active participation to connect your team
In a typical brainstorming session, it’s not uncommon for one or two people to dominate the conversation. Research indicates that two people do more than 60 percent of the talking in a typical six-person meeting. As the size of the meeting increases, the problem worsens.
Digital whiteboards allow everyone to have a voice and be a scribe. Those who aren’t comfortable speaking during meetings can still be “heard.” Every participant has a chance to contribute, share, and scribble in real time. The real-time interactivity connects and focuses everyone so that all participants have a voice. There is an implicit expectation that every cursor will be moving. Everyone should be actively engaged, coloring and adding shapes and images.
4. Convert your whiteboarding session to actionable tasks
Whiteboarding allows teams to connect ideation with work and execute this work. You can convert a whiteboard session into actionable tasks, a project plan, or a document — and your whiteboard serves as a permanent, accessible, and updateable record of your team’s thought process.
If I want to understand the status of a project, I can click on a whiteboard link, see the process flow, and view the latest information on various tasks. This saves me the time and hassle of scheduling and conducting a meeting. Whiteboarding and visual collaboration help teams manage in our self-service world, eliminating silos and aligning people quickly. If I have sales engineering and customer enablement teams scattered worldwide, they can create a whiteboard to track the status of various projects. Everyone can see the moving parts and how each maps back to the larger goal. The real-time, always-on, accessible virtual whiteboard quickens innovation, as everyone can refer to the whiteboard when completing their work.
5. Remember that virtual whiteboards aren’t limited to virtual use only
Virtual whiteboarding doesn’t have to stop online. It can also be used at those important in-person gatherings, removing the “take a picture of the whiteboard with your phone” and “do not erase” rigmarole and offering clear action items post-meeting. Virtual whiteboarding is both an art and a science that can help your team map goals to a successful outcome. It brings together teams for a common purpose, captures everyone’s voice, and generates ideas that move the needle.
As more teams embrace visual collaboration, companies’ creativity, productivity, and innovation will increase — these are things you can’t erase!
How are you making the most of whiteboards and other virtual collaboration tools? Tell us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to know all about it!
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