Working together, apart: Virtual workshops for remote collaboration

It’s imperative that teams work together to address business problems and reach the best possible solution. Each team member brings a unique skill set to the table, and they need to be able to share their expertise and project experience. Excluding any of the team members’ input increases the chance of project failure.

Workshops are designed to help groups tackle a specific subject or project together. Workshops are an effective way to enable team collaboration, brainstorm effectively, and solve specific problems facing an organization. To be successful, workshops require the participation of many different stakeholders, including executives, frontline workers, subject matter experts, and business analysts.

Workshops help teams improve their businesses across a variety of disciplines, allowing them to:

• Optimize their portfolio of business opportunities: Organizations that can recognize the opportunity to re-align, re-allocate, and resupply their work will be in a better position to take advantage of the new reality that this next decade will bring.

• Create innovative solutions: Staying ahead of the competition requires companies to develop new products and services to keep pace with their customers’ changing wants and needs.

• Develop buyer personas: Understanding a company’s buyer personas will reveal their wants, needs, and roadblocks to buying and will help organizations market to, sell to, and service their customers.

• Build customer journey maps: Understanding the customer journey gives companies the information they need to improve the customer experience.

• Pursue data science projects: Domain experts, technology gurus, and statistics wizards need to share their expertise with each other to ensure data science projects are successful.

No matter the specific problem your workshop focuses on, the general goals of these workshops are the same:

• Generate diverse ideas.

• Share those ideas with other workshop participants.

• Identify the top ideas and build consensus around these ideas.

The traditional, in-person format of workshopping has often used whiteboards or post-it notes to collect and share ideas. A sudden move to remote work might have teams suddenly missing the mess of colored stickies. Online meetings can heighten the problems that teams face when brainstorming, sharing ideas, and deciding where to place their focus moving forward. With team members connecting remotely, it can be even harder for the quieter voices on a team to be heard and easier for bolder, louder individuals to dominate the conversation.

Digital transformation efforts have extended to all aspects of business, and workshops are no exception. Ruptive, a digital workshops platform, gives businesses the tools they need to bring remote workers together and allow teams to collaborate in a central, digital location.

Our team at Indigo Slate uses Ruptive to stay connected and collaborative. With Ruptive, we use virtual workshops in problem-solving working sessions to share ideas, vote on solutions, prioritize our next steps, and ultimately help our team decide on a path forward together. Let’s take a look at how your team can use virtual workshops to continue working together, even when you’re apart.

The Ruptive digital workshops have reduced overall length of workshops from days to hours. Ruptive makes remote workshops easier and more meaningful with three advantages over traditional workshops:

1. DigiNotes

2. Remote participants

3. Automated reporting

The results of workshops are only as good as the participants’ involvement in them. To ensure your workshop generates sound solutions, you need to include the right workshop participants—those who will provide their unique expertise to help solve the problem at hand. With Ruptive, participants can provide their input from wherever they are located, whether that’s across the globe or in their home office.

Facilitating a workshop can be a lengthy, laborious process. With Ruptive, automated reporting quickly summarizes the workshop content, letting teams analyze the data and easily summarize the results to share with team members. This makes it faster and easier than ever to use workshops as a tool.

Ruptive even delivers out-of-the-box reports for specific types of workshops. These reports help identify and create:

• Top-ranked brainstorming ideas

• Buyer personas

• Customer journey maps

• Data science projects

These types of reports help the company facilitate communication to all employees, helping them understand their target customers. Automated reporting is also used to summarize brainstorm sessions and data science projects, highlighting team members’ top-rated ideas.