Defining qualities of visual collaboration
Any improvement in collaboration is valuable, but to truly lead the business towards constant innovation, visual collaboration must fit a few criteria.
Facilitates teamwork and communication
As hybrid and remote work becomes the norm, the ability to connect teams side by side on a shared canvas, from anywhere in the world, is one of the most important parts of visual collaboration.
Visual collaboration provides a space for teams that are no longer in office together to share ideas, provide feedback, learn from each other, and solve problems. Teams can work more efficiently because collaboration is no longer limited to real-time discussion or slow emails—it happens asynchronously.
Organizations can also diversify and democratize ideation through visual collaboration. Without physical restraints to collaboration, organizations can be sure they’re bringing unique perspectives to any project (and employees have a more consistent outlet to share ideas).
Visual collaboration should facilitate both real-time collaboration—with features like timers, laser pointers, voting, and color-coded sticky notes—and asynchronous collaboration through comments and guided content sharing.
Brings clarity to complexity
You can’t have visual collaboration without visuals. Using visuals to communicate is a well-known way to increase a team’s ability to understand and retain information. Naturally, one of the fundamental qualities of visual collaboration is the ability to clarify complex data, processes, and ideas by distilling them into intuitive, easy-to-understand visuals.
There’s a key component to this concept that’s often overlooked: To move efficiently, visual collaboration should employ intelligent features and automation to help teams gain the clarity they need to jump quickly into action. By automatically visualizing complex data sets and synthesizing ideas, teams spend less time manually interpreting information and more time on the work that matters.
Aligns teams around a single source of truth
Perhaps the most important aspect of visual collaboration is that it has the power to align teams across the organization in a way that hasn’t been done before. Not only does collaborating visually create clarity in the moment, but it also provides a record of ideas, current state, project plans, and decisions that teams can refer back to at any time to make informed decisions.
Visual collaboration solutions should integrate with popular technologies to simplify where important information lives and include a variety of pre-made templates to help teams standardize and organize projects.
When teams have the context needed to move forward, they can adapt to changes quickly, onboard new team members faster, deliver value more consistently, and innovate continuously.
Benefits of visual collaboration
The promise of visual collaboration is not difficult to grasp. As illustrated in the example above, visual collaboration has the potential to function as the cornerstone of how your organization gets work done. Analyst firm Gartner® has validated the need for visual collaboration in your tech stack as part of the new work hub, a collection of applications needed for collaborative work (Gartner, “Deliver Peak Digital Employee Experience Excellence in 4 Steps,” June 15, 2023).
Organizations that enable proper visual collaboration experience the following gains:
- Increases efficiency and agility: By improving communication, clarity, and alignment, visual collaboration eliminates many of the inefficiencies that teams (especially remote or hybrid teams) face: slow project handoffs, manual data analysis, miscommunications, and versioning issues. By centralizing critical company information, team members can easily share knowledge and gather the context they need to work—and adapt their work—quickly and confidently. In fact, 30% of workers believe that visuals are the key to increased alignment and quicker task completion.
The result? Faster time-to-market and consistent value delivery amidst constant change. In other words, by increasing organizational efficiency and business agility, visual collaboration can act as an enterprise’s competitive advantage in a complex world.
- Propels strategic initiatives forward: Most large-scale organizational changes—like migrating to the cloud, developing new products, or leading an agile transformation—involve cross-functional teams across the business. Visual collaboration is the unifying factor that bridges these silos and aligns teams around common goals, timelines, and deliverables.
- Scales innovation: By collaborating visually, your organization will organically create a record of ideas—and the path to prioritizing which ideas to act on—that teams can trace back as a guide to make decisions. Through this innovation repository, teams have access to all the context they need to replicate successful decisions and iterate on ones that fell short. As a result, innovation becomes more consistent and scalable—even as new team members are onboarded who weren’t part of past projects.
The best part is that an innovation repository is formed as a natural artifact of collaboration, so teams don’t need to spend any additional time on documentation.
- Increases employee satisfaction and engagement: Visual collaboration can be incredibly empowering for employees, particularly dispersed teams. Not only does visual collaboration create a more consistent touchpoint for connection—particularly for hybrid teams—it provides an outlet for employees to share their ideas and participate in decision-making, regardless of where they’re working from or their collaboration style.
And, when employees aren’t bogged down with frustrating communication and manual work, they can focus on more satisfying and innovative projects.
Choosing the right visual collaboration solution for your business
As is evident by the varying definitions of visual collaboration, not all platforms in this market are created equal.
Many visual collaboration solutions provide a space to collaborate and brainstorm, but their diagramming and data analysis functionality is limited to static documents that must be manually updated and can easily become outdated. Or they provide basic data visualization but lack the flexibility needed to brainstorm ideas or plan projects based on that data.
In order to reap the full benefits of visual collaboration, keep the outcomes you’re looking for front and center when evaluating platforms and don’t settle for a tool that only gets you halfway through projects.
Visual collaboration is not just a buzzword—it’s the key to aligning teams, accelerating innovation, and scaling major initiatives. And as more organizations look to adopt visual collaboration solutions, the right visual collaboration solution could just be the competitive edge your organization needs.
