The rise of remote workforces has brought challenges with cross-team collaboration to the forefront of daily workflows. A recent survey by PwC found 39% of employees identified difficulty collaborating as the number one reason for being unproductive as they sheltered in place. Managers navigating the best ways to boost productivity will realize it starts with supporting team collaboration.

The number of remote workers surged this year. Lucid found that 75% of employees think collaboration has suffered most while 86% of managers believe productivity has been most impacted. This disconnect between employee and managerial viewpoints illustrates the growing need for collaborative spaces that also enhance productivity, enabling remote workers to not just brainstorm, but also identify project priorities, clarify actionable next steps, and streamline strategic planning.

Lucidspark, the latest addition to the Lucid visual collaboration suite, is a virtual whiteboard application designed for freeform ideation, group brainstorming and real-time collaboration across teams. This intuitive digital canvas maximizes the speed of ideation to empower teams to bring their best ideas to light and seamlessly transition between workflows and drive action.

Let’s take a look at what your team can accomplish through the brainstorming process in Lucidspark.

Facilitating innovation

Teams can leverage Lucidspark features to easily set the context for a whiteboard session to best manage the facilitation of collaborative work with the right team members. Using Lucidspark’s features, facilitators can easily set the context for a whiteboard session to most effectively manage collaboration and inspire ideation.

What does this look like? Agendas within the notes section contain links to additional resources to help teams come prepared. Facilitators ensure the appropriate stakeholders are involved through sharing and engagement settings. 

Timer and voting capabilities keep teams on task while still providing a space for every voice to be heard. For example, after collaborating on a product roadmap, team members can vote on which ideas should be prioritized for implementing in the next quarter. This facilitated style of brainstorming enables both divergent and convergent thinking, allowing leaders to guide teams through the ideation process to achieve a collective outcome.

Real-time collaboration

The flexibility of cloud-based, real-time collaboration enables remote and traditional workers to seamlessly engage together in ideation sessions, easily develop ideas and workflows, and achieve project and team alignment. 

Online whiteboarding provides the space for remote workers to build off each other’s ideas. Share your own ideas in the visual or text format that best fits your creativity style, such as listing customer insights on sticky notes. Color-coded collaboration easily tracks individual contributions in real-time, and each team member can provide feedback with emoji reactions. For instance, teams can react to the listed customer insights to prioritize which pain points should be addressed in the next iteration of the product roadmap.

Freeform ideation and brainstorming

Now it’s time for the fun to begin. Lucidspark is built to make brainstorming as seamless, creative, and collaborative as possible with your entire team engaging together in real-time.

With text and visual elements, the online whiteboard provides the necessary flexibility to bring out the best of everyone’s creative demands. Quick sticky note creation allows ideas to pop up within seconds, as opposed to the time spent writing on physical sticky notes. Freehand drawing and quick tagging enable team members to connect ideas together. 

An infinite canvas provides every team member with the ability to contribute and create freely without distractions or limitations. And no idea is ever lost as all of the stickies, comments and votes can be found in the revision history. 

Automating organization and synthesis of ideas

If you’ve ever joined a brainstorming session, chances are you ended up with the time-consuming process of organizing and deciphering the resulting pile of sticky notes. Participants struggle to remember who shared which ideas and which ones were their favorites.

Through data-backed synthesis, Lucidspark organizes, gathers and sorts these ideas automatically, seamlessly transferring from ideation into creation. Tags, colors, and other criteria allow ideas on the board to be searchable and sortable. Team members can bring their voice to the table by providing immediate feedback through voting sessions. Templates and containers help reduce hours of administrative work by enabling facilitators to quickly and easily organize ideas in the way that best determines next steps.

Action-oriented analysis 

Moving from freeform thinking to action-oriented processes should be seamless. Lucidspark makes it easy for facilitators and team members to identify clear, actionable next steps and create presentation-ready deliverables once a brainstorming session has concluded. Teams can easily align on priorities, transition into existing processes, and reassess as projects move forward. From there, managers can continue to work with teams to develop the agile workflows needed to build momentum and turn innovative ideas into reality.

Learn how your team can transform scribbles into action plans with Lucidspark. 

With 55% of executives planning to implement permanent remote work options following the pandemic, leaders must provide teams with the software needed to stay productive and high-performing while also seamlessly plugging into existing workflows. Whiteboarding solutions are already being evaluated as critical tools in achieving these results while enabling connection across team members. 

Lucidspark augments in-person brainstorming and maximizes the speed of ideation to empower your teams to achieve the highest levels of innovation. Whether your brainstorming is to ideate solutions, determine project priorities or improve customer experience, virtual whiteboarding is sure to play a critical role in driving future business strategy.