Online whiteboard is an effective collaboration tool that you can use to make team meetings more efficient and creative. By giving employees various tools and an infinite canvas to work on, you offer them countless ways to share their ideas and suggestions with their teammates.
However, if you aren’t implementing different creativity sparking techniques over time – online whiteboard meetings can get stale. This can lead to prolonged meetings without proper problem-solving.
So, to help you out, we created a shortlist of creative techniques you and your employees can use during whiteboard sessions to make your meetings more interesting, dynamic, and constructive.
Brainstorming
It seems that brainstorming and online whiteboard fit perfectly together. This technique is based on gathering ideas regarding specific issues from a group of employees without discrimination or judgment.
Present the issue you need to tackle, then encourage your employees to share their ideas on the online whiteboard, even if some concepts may seem odd or off-topic. Encourage employees to discuss and build on each other’s ideas. End the session by picking the best ideas, divising a project plan, and assigning tasks to each person on your team.
Mood Boards
Mood Board is like a virtual collage made of videos, words, images, or sample objects that its creator arranges as they wish.
Members of your designer team may use the mood board technique to better express or explain their concepts to other team members. You can use a blank template and insert a button to upload videos and images or screenshots via the Chrome extension.
Random Words
This creative technique allows employees to look at issues they need to tackle from a different perspective. If you need to generate countless ideas for a new product, for example, this is the simplest way.
Start by putting words, short stories, or even tweets on the whiteboard to encourage a brainstorming session. Then choose your keyword -preferably a noun and list all the words from your whiteboard associated with it.
Once you’ve finished this, try to correlate your problem with the words listed. You’ll be amazed to see how the human brain can make connections between seemingly unrelated things. This simple technique may inspire your employees to be more inventive in the problem-solving sessions and think out of the box.
Mind-Mapping
Mind Maps developed by Tony Buzan are an effective technique for structuring information and note-taking.
They are also useful during brainstorming sessions. If you want to make a mind-map, place your main idea in the center of a digital whiteboard. Then ask your employees to add keywords and images branching out in different directions until you get an organized structure.
You can use various tools like icons, post-its, shapes, and videos to visualize the problem or an idea you’re working on. In this way, you can get a clearer picture of the solution that you need.
Online whiteboards can do wonders for your cross-team collaboration and creativity. However, you should continue experimenting and trying new techniques that can inspire your employees to be inventive.
