Online whiteboards were created to solve many problems, one of the biggest ones being the lasting engagement from meetings. Gathering your team to participate in a workshop is one thing, but ensuring that these takeaways are implemented is a whole other story.
It’s often the case with traditional whiteboards that the spark of brilliance or importance is lost soon after the session is finished. Especially with many teams still operating remotely, this is a place that online whiteboards help improve dramatically.
In this article, we’ll highlight some of the important ways that online whiteboards create lasting engagement from meetings and help teams implement their takeaways.
Easily Collaborate with Others
Online whiteboards make collaborating online extremely simple and you can share your board with just one click. This means you can include people who might be located somewhere else. You can even introduce experts who wouldn’t normally be available as a helpful resource for your whole team. No matter where you’re located, you can access a wide network of collaborators.
Being able to involve people from around the world is helpful, but online whiteboards take it a step further and enable everyone to make unique contributions to the board. Everyone can simultaneously add their thoughts and contribute to a shared space for the rest of the team to see. Through visual collaboration, you can create an engaging and collaborative environment for everyone to use and learn from.
Every Board Lives in Digital Permanence
A big disadvantage of conducting workshops and brainstorming sessions in person is having to try and cement the takeaways of your board in a memorable way. Often the pictures and notes are simply thrown away, never to be used again.
Online whiteboards create a board that lives in digital permanence and can be referenced at any time. Where traditional boards need to be recreated or loosely remembered, virtual whiteboards can be recalled with perfect accuracy, just as they were created. This means you can remind your team of the important takeaways that you learned and consistently take inspiration from your previous work.
Additionally, for teams that work in recurring cycles, you can now use this board as a focal point for your workflow, returning to it and updating it weekly depending on your progress.
If you’ve struggled with retention from workshops in the past, incorporating an online whiteboard is the best way to ensure lasting engagement with the content during the session and long after it’s finished.
No Loss of Context
One great aspect of online whiteboards is being able to jump into them and instantly collaborate on any given exercise. Given the fact that people are collaborating simultaneously and their contributions are saved on the board, you can pick up the context of the board very quickly.
You can see who created the notes, read through the chat to see what questions have been answered, or analyze the organization of the board to see how it positions the exercise being conducted, all at a glance.
This means that you can immediately jump into an exercise or come back at a later time and work within the same context as you had in your initial session. This makes creating lasting engagement easier than ever.
Retain More Ideas
Idea retention is the core of creating lasting engagement, and online whiteboards enable you to capture more ideas in a more efficient manner.
Traditionally, or over a conference call, it can be hard to capture every idea that comes up and some thoughts can simply get lost in the void. On top of this, some people might feel disincentivized to speak up in a large group setting when they actually have something meaningful to contribute.
Online whiteboards provide a space where everyone can make individual contributions that move the team towards their overall goals. This means you can capture and retain ideas in a more efficient manner, and you can guarantee that your spark of brilliance will stay on the board.
Additionally, online whiteboards aren’t limited by space and are able to expand endlessly, so there’s never a need to compromise based on space or importance.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why creating lasting engagement is important for teams. Especially when this lasting engagement comes from online meetings and virtual workshops, online whiteboards are the best tools to maximize your team’s potential. Take a look at Fresco if you want to learn more about online collaboration and using virtual whiteboards.
