Janet started a new job during COVID-19 as head of product management and is responsible for leading several teams in developing and upgrading customer-facing applications. Her company just started hybrid working, and she’s eager to engage her teams on more innovative dialogs and collaborative planning.
Janet knows that people in her organization are burned out from all the video calls and online chats. She’s going to run a brainstorming session in an office she’s never visited and checks with the organization’s CIO for technology options. The CIO recommends reviewing the HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series printer capabilities at all their offices to help get materials ready for the brainstorming and follow-up meetings.
Janet is not alone in the challenge of bringing teams back together to
accelerate digital transformation after a year of largely working remotely.
Leaders looking to boost collaboration must consider alternate tools and
methodologies from what worked pre-COVID, where working in the office was
the expected norm, to the opportunities today and supporting hybrid work
flexibilities.
One of these tools is the advanced secure printer that enables
remote printing from anywhere
and has precise color reproduction and presentation grade output. Teams have
a much easier time discussing, debating, and forming decisions when holding,
touching, scanning, and reading materials shared before and during
innovation sessions.
Here are five ways to improve team collaboration.
1. Hang the Vision Statement on Everyone’s Desk
It’s easy for teams to lose sight of the goals and vision during a digital
transformation journey and while working on innovations. Remembering who the
customer is, the value proposition, the target user personas, and how the
innovation benefits the business are all questions that team leaders should
capture in a
single-page vision statement.
The next challenge is getting team members to learn, understand, and utilize
the vision statement in their daily work. My answer is to print out the
vision statement and ask everyone to hang it by their desk wherever they are
working. The printout is a simple reminder to everyone on the team of the
program’s objectives and is an artifact that teammates can easily reference
when making daily decisions.
2. Print Reading Material to Improve Learning and Absorption
Emails, slacks, tweets, and all forms of digital alerts do an amazing job of
disrupting people from completing their objectives. The distractions are
especially detrimental when we ask team members to read documents or review
presentations in preparing for a meeting or innovation brainstorming
session.
Printing the materials is the most simple answer to this challenge. Everyone’s concentration and knowledge absorption are significantly higher when holding the materials and reviewing them without distraction. When you consider how hard and expensive it is to bring people together to collaborate on critical decisions, getting everyone prepared and on the same page before the meeting is a worthwhile investment.
3. Facilitate Active Listening in Meetings
Now I have to ask, what tools are people bringing to meetings?
There are some meetings where I want people evaluating live data or using
digital tools to review the current status of workflows. When teams analyze
the sales funnel, triage the root cause of a systems issue, or test the user
experience of a new application, there’s good reason to bring laptops into
the meeting room.
Other times, I want people’s heads up and active listening and participating
in the discussion, rather than heads down looking at screens and tools.
Meetings where leaders debate priorities, review customer insights, or
discuss policies, can be more productive when participants have a manageable
number of printed materials in front of them to reference. Distributing
printed materials to participants helps keep people focused on the
discussion at hand, and people are more likely to be listening to their
colleagues and contributing ideas.
Using HP Roam for Business, meeting facilitators can distribute materials securely to participants working remotely, or remote attendees can print materials directly from documents stored on Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, or SharePoint.
4. Capturing Meeting Notes and Action Items
No screens at a meeting? How can participants capture meeting notes? How
should the meeting facilitator capture and share action items?
As a voracious note-taker, I struggled to find efficient practices to capture detailed meeting notes, interface with digital tools to itemize tasks, and share action items with colleagues. I arrived at a straightforward solution:
- Write my notes, sketches, and follow-ups in my notebook
- Scan new pages at the end of the day
- Start the next day by creating follow-ups in the appropriate tools and applications
I make similar suggestions to my teams and direct reports. Everyone has their writing styles and tool preferences, but I remind them that meetings like interviews and other one-on-one meetings where bringing a laptop, tablet, or phone to capture notes is inappropriate. Even diehard digitalists should acknowledge that using pen, paper, and scan-to-cloud capabilities are sometimes the right tools for the job.
5. Brainstorming Collaboratively for Hybrid Teams
Let’s return to Janet and consider how she can prepare for the upcoming
brainstorming session with participants in two offices and several people
joining remotely.
She plans to use several diagrams during the brainstorm and wants
participants to collaborate on making improvements. She simplifies
participation by using
HP’s Roam for Business
capabilities to schedule printouts for remote attendees and prepare large
posters in the meeting rooms. The posters are paired with onscreen
whiteboarding tools so teams can collaborate on changes and enhancements to
the diagrams.
The printouts help participants contrast the original diagrams, while the
whiteboarding tools connect people across the offices and working remotely
to test changes and new ideas. HP’s enterprise printers and technologies
enable collaborative hybrid-working teams focused on digital transformation,
innovation, and all forms of teamwork to exchange ideas and succeed.
The structure provides teams a departure from the remote working conditions
they experienced over the last year. And that should be an underlying goal
for leaders to excel during the transition to hybrid working, collaboration,
and innovation.
This post is brought to you by HP
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do
not necessarily represent the views and opinions of HP.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments on this blog are moderated and we do not accept comments that have links to other websites.