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HOW VISUAL COLLABORATION CHANGES THE WAY YOUR TEAM WORKS TOGETHER

Reading time: about 7 min

Collaboration is always happening all around us. Whether you're asking a friend
for feedback on an idea or asking a store clerk for help finding a shirt in your
size, we collaborate in many ways across our everyday lives. Often, without even
realizing it, we're incorporating visuals into this collaborative
communication—hand gestures, jotted notes or drawings, quick charts, and lists
are all visual ways to quickly and clearly get our message across. 

This natural tendency to collaborate translates to the workplace, too. Research
from McKinsey finds that organizations that implement collaborative techniques,
either through technology or other processes, see up to 30% increased
productivity. This demonstrates that an organization that embraces
cross-functional brainstorming, open discussions, and mixed-skill teams, can tap
into the collective power of its people. Pair these methods with the power of
visuals, and you can unleash new ways of thinking and problem solving across
your organization. 


BENEFITS OF VISUAL COLLABORATION 

The COVID-19 pandemic forced most of us into almost overnight isolation from our
workplaces and teammates, and teamwork doesn't thrive in isolation. However, it
also encouraged many companies to accelerate their digital transformation
efforts and remote work capabilities to ensure teams could stay connected and
collaborate virtually.  

Visual collaboration was a significant and necessary part of that shift. When
face-to-face interactions aren't possible, visual communication and
collaboration tools empower people to work in new and more productive ways.
Plus, visual collaboration is changing the way companies think about teamwork,
and the benefits, especially in the post-pandemic, Next Normal of work. 

Some benefits of visual collaboration include:

 * Clearer communication: Collaboration without visual communication can feel a
   lot like a game of virtual telephone. Static documents or spreadsheets don't
   do a great job communicating big ideas, and a lot can get lost in translation
   over scattered emails, drive-by conversations, or Slack messages. Visual
   collaboration tools give your team a shared, visual point of reference,
   helping communicate big ideas across remote or dispersed teams. 
 * Better retention: A lack of employee engagement greatly impacts your
   company's culture and performance. While everyone on your team doesn't need
   to have the same level of participation, it's important to find ways to make
   your team members feel seen, valued, and included. For some, remote work can
   add to feelings of invisibility, and manual processes and static resources
   can leave more introverted team members feeling ignored, dismissed, or
   uninterested. Virtual conferencing tools like Zoom can help keep teams
   engaged (even if they're not on camera during every call), and visual tools
   like flowcharts can help team members better understand how their
   contributions make an impact. 
 * Big-picture view: If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then visual
   collaboration tools might just be worth a million. Visual collaboration makes
   it easy to show all the moving parts of a plan and how those parts ladder up
   to larger strategic goals or organizational structures. 
 * Better workplace efficiency: Remember when email was heralded as the biggest
   advancement in workplace efficiency? Fast forward four decades, and most of
   us have more emails to read than we can keep up with. Depending on emails to
   communicate with your team leads to lost time and employees who fall behind
   if they happen to not see an important email. With visual collaboration, you
   can ensure that team members are updated and aligned on the latest
   developments. It also provides a space for employees to see the latest
   version of projects through a single source of truth.
 * Faster to innovate: One of the best things about visual collaboration is that
   you can see changes in real time and discuss their impact while you have the
   right team members engaged. Even something as simple as a timeline can be
   easily improved by showing teams how date changes will impact the project in
   real time.


BEST PRACTICES FOR COLLABORATING VISUALLY

Visual collaboration is a tool that can make a major difference in the
trajectory of your team, but it's all about how you use it. For one, adoption
across the whole team may take time. Two, your team and its objectives evolve,
which means you'll likely have to make adjustments to your visual collaboration
approach as well. Below are a few tips on how to help your team adopt visual
collaboration and use it to their advantage.

 * Lead by example: The team will take their cues from you as the project lead.
   If you introduce a tool and never refer to it again, they will assume it's
   not essential to the project. Instead, take every genuine opportunity you can
   to note how visual collaboration can help team members achieve a certain
   objective or work more efficiently. 
 * Balance team and individual participation: One of the great things about
   visual collaboration is that it can help bring out introverts who may
   contribute but don't necessarily want to be the center of attention.
   Encourage team members to make contributions to virtual whiteboards through
   messaging or chat or drop in a visual mockup so that the team can see what
   they've worked on without having to "present" it. By the same token,
   extroverts who always have a lot to say create space for the team to
   contribute as a whole by garnering consensus before making a decision or
   moving on to another topic.
 * Continually adapt: Once you adopt a visual collaboration tool, you find that
   the team will use it in many different, and sometimes unexpected, ways, and
   there may be some features that you need to add or remove to help the
   teamwork better together. Solicit feedback from team members, especially in
   the early days, to get a sense of how the tool works for them and what
   changes they’d like to see.
 * Acknowledge all team members: Even with video as an option, some team members
   may still be prone to "hide" during a conference call. You don't need to call
   them out, but something as simple as doing a roll call at the beginning of a
   session can help people feel acknowledged without putting them on the spot.
   The goal is to let the team members know that they are essential to the
   project.


HOW VISUAL COLLABORATION SOFTWARE CAN HELP YOUR TEAM

Once your team is comfortable with visual collaboration, they'll begin to see
the benefits that it provides. It's not just a fancy way to communicate—it's a
way to communicate faster and more clearly, leaving space for teams to innovate
at warp speed. Here are a few ways visual collaboration software can help your
team:

 * Streamline the visuals for consistency: It's highly likely that at some
   point, more than one team member will be working on the same asset using
   separate files. You can create a single source of truth by reviewing those
   versions as a team and determining what should be integrated into the next
   iteration without having to send a thousand emails.
 * Provide clean, simple visuals for quick understanding: There are inevitably
   times where you could spend ten minutes describing a concept that makes total
   sense to you but is difficult to get the team to envision. You can save that
   time, and more clearly communicate the concept, by sharing visuals that get
   to the point quickly and accurately.
 * Create mockups quickly: It's possible to mock up a proof of concept with
   visual collaboration tools. The ability to create mockups quickly means that
   your team is aligned from the beginning, which reduces the chances of
   miscommunication and wasted time.
 * Allow all team members to participate simultaneously: Today's projects are
   often complex, multi-pronged, and require the input of many different teams
   from all branches of the organization. With collaboration tools, you can have
   those different teams in the same room at the right time. That kind of
   convenience puts even complicated projects on the path to success by
   incorporating pivotal stakeholders just at the point where you need them.

Want to learn more about effective collaboration? 

 



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Lucidchart is the intelligent diagramming application that empowers teams to
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real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more.

The most popular online Visio alternative, Lucidchart is utilized in over 180
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