Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for virtual work environments has skyrocketed and has forced the realization that the future of employment will always involve remote work possibilities. Remote work adds various tools to the workplace and has the potential to improve efficiency, but also comes with its own unique set of struggles. Some of those are visual collaboration issues: problems arising from the use of visual collaboration tools.
In this article, we will briefly outline both the most common visual collaboration issues and problems with virtual work in general, and how Fresco is able to create solutions to circumvent them. You can learn more about what visual collaboration entails by reading our comprehensive guide and checking out our thought lab to read up on all of the recent Fresco blog activity.
Visual Collaboration Issues
Indecision
Indecision in the workplace can be a real pain and can hinder your team’s momentum during collaboration. Indecision happens when people need to make a choice or choose a path, but can’t seem to decide what is the correct option. Collaborating (and working more generally) virtually can be difficult for some and due to some distraction, lack of motivation, or any other reason, can lead to indecision between co-workers.
When working virtually and not collaborating face to face with your teammates it can be hard to be decisive. Communication is more difficult and it is harder to gauge what people are thinking and how they want to move forward. The virtual setting makes it even easier to be indecisive because you aren’t physically present with people, something that helps push decisions and actions.
Fresco helps solve the indecision posed by virtual collaboration by providing clear and simple guidelines to your collaboration. No matter what template you’re working on, you will know exactly how to operate it and how to build your results. Because Fresco does the hard work for you, you and your team simply have to work together on the template, follow the guidelines, and there is no room for indecision to occur.
By utilizing real-time collaboration the communication gap is shrunk as well, helping teams communicate in real-time without fail. Something that makes communication more difficult is the back and forth style of virtual communication, rather than face to face. By emulating in-person collaboration, Fresco takes virtual collaboration to a whole new level.
Text Solutions
One of the hardest ways to collaborate is through messaging. It can take hours to simply put your point across in a way that everyone will understand, and that’s not even considering the multitude of questions they may have about it. Messaging, or any kind of text solution, is stagnant if it’s your primary collaboration tool.
Don’t get me wrong, it is an essential tool for the workspace. If you are working remotely as most people are right now, it’s not an exaggeration to say it’s 100% vital for a collaborative work environment. It may be vital for the workspace, but visual collaboration tools are equally as important if you are to collaborate effectively in a virtual environment.
Fresco is a positive fix to problems posed by message-based solutions. By enabling real-time collaboration with as little as a click, Fresco fundamentally changes the way people collaborate within the workplace. Using it couldn’t be easier, just select a template and go. With a wide variety of both simple and complex templates, you are sure to find one that fits your needs. And if you don’t you can always create your own to build the perfect canvas for your team.
By creating seamless collaboration within the workplace, Fresco creates a collaborative environment that surpasses basic messaging solutions. Using visual collaboration tools in the right situations is key to their success, and using them as a replacement for messaging is one way to resolve the problems of a virtual workspace.
Follow Through
Visual collaboration is a powerful tool for any team to collaborate online and from anywhere. This versatility is why we emphasize it as the future of work. Visual collaboration provides tremendous collaboration power to teams of any size, but sometimes lacks the follow-through required to carry momentum through an entire project.
Sometimes in collaboration forward momentum is not the desired outcome, and the final product simply looks like some form of acknowledgment, visualization, or brainstorming process. In other scenarios, however, you may come up with an end product or final thought that needs to be transitioned to an entirely new workflow, and there’s nowhere to easily plan it out. Once you are nearing completion, there is a need to reach out and grab what comes next, and this is lacking in current visual collaboration tools.
This is where Fresco sets itself apart. At Fresco, we understand that collaboration needs fuel after it’s done to make any significant change. That is why we’ve incorporated our own lightweight task manager into the collaboration network. This means that you can quickly cycle back and forth from your current board and the task manager, adding and assigning tasks to everyone in the team with ease. By giving team members specific tasks and assigning a status, you make moving forward much easier.
This solves the problem of lack of follow-through or motivation to carry forward. By easily giving people a mechanism to assign tasks and initiate the first step of the process, it becomes far easier to manage moving forward.
Conclusion
These three problems are very common to anyone who has used visual collaboration in the past and should be obvious pitfalls to those who are avid users. Fresco takes all of the current negatives into consideration when creating our product and we have built features to circumvent the current visual collaboration issues. No matter your needs, you can always find a solution with Fresco.
