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To run a successful business, you must be able to complete individual and shared tasks regularly and reliably. One of the most significant components to achieving this is making sure you create actionable results in your meetings, conversations, and workflow.

Doing so, especially when working remotely, can be challenging due to communication barriers and unnecessary hoops between you and your goals. This article will discuss how online whiteboards provide an efficient solution and help create actionable results for businesses.

Online Whiteboards Recap

An online whiteboard is a tool used to facilitate visual collaboration between team members. On an online whiteboard, you can create notes, organize them in custom structures, and share this board with an entire organization to develop shared alignment and understanding.

One of the reasons online whiteboards are helpful to create actionable results for businesses is because they’re so widely applicable. Whether you’re conducting a weekly standup meeting, analyzing a previous project, or brainstorming new ideas, an online whiteboard allows you to create customer brainstorming sessions to accommodate different needs.

If you want to learn more about online whiteboards, check out Fresco and try using one in your next brainstorming session.

How Online Whiteboards Create Actionable Results

Online whiteboards are widely applicable, but this isn’t the only thing that makes them helpful when creating actionable results. Here are five of the most significant reasons online whiteboards help move businesses forward.

Digital Permanence

One of the biggest struggles with in-person collaboration is the lack of a physical takeaway. Besides a picture, you can’t take the board home with you or use it after your initial session. Because of this, many people find the collaboration process a difficult medium to create actions because the structure is fleeting.

The impermanent format is a pain that online whiteboards solve and expand upon by creating a space that exists in digital permanence. Anything created on an online whiteboard will live on that platform in permanence. This assuredness of creation and permanent access helps teams build actionable ideas.

Being able to access your work at any time also ensures that the action taken from your session is accurate and aligned with the group’s intention. This is another way digital permanence helps businesses create actionable results and ensure accuracy.

Export Structures

If you don’t need to access your board after it’s finished, but you do need to access the data on that board, then online whiteboards let you export all of your notes as a pdf or excel file. This is super helpful when you need to integrate your contributions to a different platform or want to send them to someone without sending the entire board.

Export structures help create actionable results by allowing you to integrate your online whiteboard into other parts of your workflow. Especially when creating action items, integrating the precise ideas and data you created on your board is essential, and being able to export data in multiple different ways helps do just that.

Task Management

Often, people’s first step when formalizing action items is to create tasks externally. However, one of the problems with this is a miscommunication between internal needs and the tasks that get shared. To eliminate this confusion, Fresco has a unique feature that allows you to track tasks internally.

Facilitating task management within your board is super helpful for creating actionable results. You can add tasks to specific people with a deadline and associated status, and this information is communicated on the same platform your entire board lives in. This gives people specific action items they can tackle while also providing a constant reminder of the context and information of the board.

Collaboration Saves Time

One barrier to creating actionable results is the bureaucratic process before you can take any action. This often involves long email chains, communication issues, and multiple meetings to resolve a simple problem. Online whiteboards facilitate quick and intuitive collaboration that eliminates the need to send repetitive emails back and forth.

By integrating your entire team into the same board, you’re able to communicate much more efficiently, and by doing that, you’re able to create actionable results faster and more efficiently.

Easily Integrate Data

Online whiteboards don’t just allow you to export data; you can also import data. For example, you have an excel sheet of information that you want to visualize. You can take this and import it into Fresco, where all of your information will automatically populate as notes on the board. This information could be data that helps support your ideas or a list of potential concepts for your team to discuss.

Regardless of what you want to import, this feature allows you to integrate pieces of information that would usually be inaccessible in a collaboration setting, which your team can now view, edit, and use collaboratively. When you incorporate external data sources into your collaboration session, it creates a more grounded and informed experience for everyone, which is critical when emphasizing actionable results.

Conclusion

If your business wants to focus on creating actionable results, implementing an online whiteboard is one of the best things you can do. Creating tasks, saving boards online, and importing/exporting data help teams stay connected, communicative, and efficient.

About the Author

Paul Van Zandt is the founder of Fresco, a startup enabling real-time collaboration for people everywhere. Fresco allows you to collaborate with your team on an incredibly simple interface customize your workspace, and save all of your changes online in digital permanence. If you liked this article, make sure you check out Fresco to see how you can begin utilizing a futuristic brainstorming method.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash