M+E Daily

The digital transformation of work being pushed by the impacts of the pandemic has resulted in the new way many people work. Knowledge workers can work remotely and are often more productive and effective doing their jobs. Employees and employers have discovered the benefits of remote work: increased productivity, removal of daily commutes, recruiting the best employees regardless of their location, improved work life balance, and benefits to the environment.

Video conferencing accompanies this evolution by simplifying how these teams connect and by making the sharing of information easier. Visual collaboration enhances the experience.

Video conferencing

Video conferencing meetings usually consist of attendees sitting in front of their camera on their phone, laptop, desktop, or in a video conferencing room seeing all the other attendees. The interactive part of video conferencing is the sharing of the screen. Video conferencing is effective for general meetings and brainstorming sessions, but in large groups participants are not always fully engaged. Video conferencing is two-dimensional, thus not conducive to true interactive collaboration or the visualization of complex ideas and discussions.

But turning on webcams didn’t change how meetings work. Other than status meeting updates, there is typically one speaker, one presentation, and many listeners. Users are stuck looking at a PowerPoint slide deck or whatever someone screenshares. There is no meaningful way to interact with the content being presented and everyone half listens, waiting for their turn to participate.

While the benefits of video conferencing tools were indispensable during the pandemic, heavy reliance on the technology comes at a cost to creative thinking. Ideas and information are lost if they are not captured during meetings, or they are quickly buried within chat threads. The cumulative effect is a lack of shared visibility and persistent workflow coordination that impedes decision making. The work world has permanently changed. The new workplace centers around communication and connection.

To be effective, organizations will need to be open to new norms, new tools, and a reimagined work culture. Consider sharing the presentation before the meeting and focus the meeting on making decisions, opening discussion, and getting work done.

Visual collaboration

Visual collaboration takes the basic elements of video conferencing and adds more elements of interactivity. Creativity is enhanced with visual collaboration. Visual collaboration offers a meaningful way to interact with the content being presented.

Bring the call to the content not the content to the call.

The challenges for collaboration solutions are to reduce or eliminate organizational silos in the workplace, to overcome distance, and reduce cultural barriers all while conserving the quality of face-to-face interaction. The real power of visual collaboration comes from the clarity of the meetings, and consequently their efficiency. It is time to improve meetings.

Too many meetings start late, have no agenda, and lack a summary or follow-up. Participants are often not prepared or focused and there are people who hog the meeting participation.

The best collaboration when using technology happens when the tools adapt to us, not when we have to adapt to the constraints of the tools. For the tools to meet our needs, we need to select components and platforms that treat all the participants as equal — regardless of where they are or how they are participating. Meeting virtually with a group of colleagues and debating a topic, has totally different dynamics than being a tile in a grid of video faces.

Visual collaboration:

• Provides better efficiency with remote meetings.

Visual collaboration improves efficiency with remote meetings and ensures high impact engagements with other collaborators. Connect with other stakeholders and dive straight into business, from wherever you are located.

• Makes project management easier.

Using visual collaboration makes managing projects, workflows, and business processes a lot easier. Now firms and organizations can digitize older procedures and leverage new methods of doing things for a better output. It also provides fresh opportunities to improve project management even as it boosts output and makes the quality of work better. It helps ensure consistent workflow among groups.

• Ensures instantaneous teamwork.

The value of teamwork cannot be overstated and is crucial to the success of any organization or project. Legacy conferencing tools lack real-time teamwork capabilities. The availability of many diverse technologies and devices, including cloud infrastructures, make real-time collaboration possible.

• Makes better engagement with remote personnel possible.

When people work remotely, they face the issue of not having the desired level of connection and involvement. Such workers may feel as if they are not an important part of a project and consequently seem not to be included. Using visual collaboration leads to better work efficiency and engagement with all the stakeholders.

Use secure and agile online tools to communicate on work projects and interface with others. Video conferencing is useful to provide face time, but teams need tools that allow for conversation and simultaneous usage of online workspaces that drive real-time integration of every aspect of the team’s workflow.

Strive towards visual, equitable meetings and creating a common work environment to share everyone’s work both real-time and delayed. Imagine having all relevant content in one place before the meeting, then everyone goes to that place and clicks a button to see and talk to each other.

That is how meetings work in Bluescape.

Bluescape is a secure, infinite, collaborative workspace designed to accelerate decision-making by enabling anyone to create, communicate, visualize, organize, and strategize virtually anything, anywhere, anytime.

Bluescape allows people to stay informed about their co-workers’ activity without requiring manual check-in. All work product is stored and updated in a virtual location, for easy access and up-to-date review. Operated on cloud-based software, Bluescape can be accessed on multiple devices, including large-scale, high-definition, multi-touch screens, iPads, laptops, and mobile devices.

There is no limit to the total amount of information an organization can have in Bluescape. The format of the information is visually organized (by the person who uploads the information) so the content is clear, and ideas are easily understood. No other platform combines this second visual self-organization with other features like video conferencing, an API for easy integrations, and the broad array of content types.

Complex organizations require more than just collaboration. Teams need virtual whiteboards. Enterprises need smart collaborative features and enterprise ready scalability and security. Bluescape delivers with intuitive features teams need, and the architecture to support thousands of users and project propriety data.

Why use Bluescape?

Bluescape workspaces let you visualize and organize all content, and everything needed to share and discuss is instantly accessible with no need to search for documents.

Save time by organizing and sharing content in a visual workspace and eliminate the time and effort involved in finding files buried in chat threads.

Make faster, more informed decisions by interacting with multiple sources of information at the same time. Quickly reference and compare options at-a-glance instead of sending individual files back and forth.

Get more done by brainstorming, presenting, and reviewing content with others who can quickly meet in a workspace.

Integrate workflows by using the Bluescape template library or create custom templates to visualize and streamline meetings and workflows.

Enjoy fewer, better meetings by annotating and commenting on content in the workspace. Status is instantly visible instead of scattered across multiple conversations.

Stop asking if you shared the right screen, fumbling with presenter handouts, searching for files on the fly, and not having meeting notes available when you need to refer to them. Bluescape is a superior experience for true video and meeting collaboration. The entire meeting is represented visually, so there is no need to type meeting notes after-the-fact. Follow up meetings are more productive. Simply pull up the canvas from a previous meeting to get everyone up to speed in seconds.

Bluescape delivers what video conferencing and enterprise messaging lack, an easy way for teams to gather around all their content to see the big picture. Persistent, virtual workspaces help teams collaborate more effectively from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

— By Dr. S. Ann Earon, president of Telemanagement Resources International Inc. (TRI Inc.), and a Bluescape consultant. Telemanagement Resources International Inc. (TRI) is a 40-year-old management consulting firm specializing in unified communications and collaboration, and Founding Chairperson of IMCCA, the non-profit industry association for conferencing, collaboration, and unified communications. She can be reached at 609-597-6334 or via email at [email protected].