Working as a team looks pretty different today than it did a few years ago. More than a quarter of the workforce now prefers fully remote positions, and even more see hybrid work models as the ideal solution to improving their own work-life balance. The way we work is evolving. A new way of work means teams need flexible new ways to explore ideas in remote, hybrid, and in-person environments, and to refresh their core collaboration skills.
That’s what makes finding the right remote collaboration tools so critical. Every function, app integration, and visual element of a Vibe’s S1 huddle room solution was designed to help teams put their best ideas forward, no matter the setting. With the S1 system, you can have the face-to-face collaboration experience from anywhere; teammates tuning into a brainstorming session from home can contribute just as much as those in physical attendance, and the “wow” factor of the Vibe board’s various functions can maintain steady engagement throughout a meeting.
The key to Vibe’s collaborative success? Focusing on the two key collaboration skills of every great team effort: ideation and constructive feedback.
The Two Core Collaboration Skills You Need
Ideation is the process of forming an idea or concept. While it would be nice if every team member entered each meeting bursting with creative new ideas to share, more often, it’s the process of talking through problems that unearths interesting new ideas worth exploring.
Conducting a brainstorming or ideation session virtually via smartboard (on an infinite canvas, broadcast worldwide, in real-time) gives teams an opportunity to share their best ideas as they develop.
Feedback is the other half of the development loop — it allows additional perspectives in during the development of a new product, procedure or business solution. Good feedback refines a rough draft of an idea and produces an actionable way of moving forward.
The ability to write or draw out ideas and deliver visual feedback as a team is a crucial element to any sort of project planning. Whether it’s a new product design, redesigned workflow, or even a simple pros/cons list, it’s important to keep teams on the same page and make every team member feel heard.
How Hybrid Work Is Changing the Way We Collaborate
Hybrid and remote work models are great for a lot of reasons, but the joys of working from home come with an important caveat—it’s really easy to mentally check out of meetings. This is an issue when it comes to collaborative efforts where every voice is needed to refine a product, hire a new employee, or solve a client’s complex problem. Ideation and feedback only work when a variety of perspectives chime in, and they tend to fall apart when participants turn their video feeds off to begin working on solo tasks.
Smartboards encourage interactive, engaging meetings through a variety of tools. These include integrated videos, apps, and features that allow team members to highlight and markup information from their own screens. The Vibe Smart Whiteboard S1 system is also cloud-backed, which means the most up-to-date documents are instantly accessible by everyone in real-time (no more worrying about working from an outdated file or losing important attachments in old email threads).
Why Vibe Is Great for Ideating
Vibe enhances your office’s existing workflow by integrating seamlessly with whichever web-based tools and apps your team already feels comfortable using. The Vibe S1 system comes preloaded with several useful templates for easy word clouds, lists, flowcharts, org charts, value proposition graphs, empathy maps, decision matrices, and other common brainstorming formats.
Providing your team with the ability to share, highlight, and annotate in real time through multiple devices makes our smartboard a perfect tool for exploring and sharing new ideas.
How Vibe Facilitates Great Feedback
When it comes time to stand before your team and vet new ideas, the success of your brainstorming session likely comes down to how engaged your peers are in the ideation and feedback process. Poor input and a lack of constructive feedback leads to underdeveloped solutions and unforeseen complications. It’s better to work out the kinks early, which is why holding your team’s attention and providing an easy means of engaging with your material makes for more successful collaborative efforts.
The S1 all-in-one huddle room solution is just what its name suggests — a hands-on tool to engage hybrid offices, with an intuitive UI and enough visual flair to ensure the contents of your meeting stand a far better chance of being retained. Using a smartboard system, complete with an AI-backed camera and infinite Canvas, encourages actionable feedback from different members of your team by making it easy to identify potential gaps or unknowns. That’s because with Vibe, live feedback can be visual–whether it’s shared note-taking on a Canvas throughout a presentation or checking on audience reactions with a split-screen view.
Whether you’re developing a new product, rolling out a marketing campaign or experimenting with a different hiring procedure, it’s always advantageous to look at a problem from several angles and hear honest feedback first.
Why Vibe Beats Traditional Collaboration Tools
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The Vibe S1 System is an ideal component for any collaborative workspace. It’s built specifically with the principles of ideation and feedback in mind to bring teams together (even across great distances). Here are some of the advantages your office can enjoy during its first brainstorming session with Vibe:
- The traditional whiteboard has clear limits — pens dry out. Erasers go missing. Access is limited to those physically in the room. It’s easy to lose data or notes. It’s confined to a finite surface area. Vibe’s Infinite Canvas never runs out of room; it’s accessible remotely to workers not in attendance; and it automatically saves information to the cloud so as to avoid the whole “do not erase” problem.
- Vibe’s working canvas is accessible from multiple devices simultaneously, including smartphones, tablets, and computers.
- Vibe’s new SmartCam C1 allows everyone in the room to be seen, making that face-to-face connection possible with any remote team members.
- A smartboard offers seamless annotation capabilities, allowing users to annotate over Canvas, notes, or webpages.
- We built Vibe to play well with other common collaboration apps, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Meet, and many more.
- At just $3,239 for the month of June, Vibe’s new all-in-one S1 system comes in at a fraction of the cost of some of our biggest competitors.
Implementing the right tools for the modern collaborative workplace lays a strong foundation for everything else you do. Utilizing a huddle room solution in your next strategy session not only encourages your team to bring forward exciting new ideas, but allows everyone (regardless of location) to act as a key contributor to a worthwhile meeting. With Vibe, collaboration can become your hybrid workplace’s biggest strength.