The Perfect Digital Workspace for Creative Teams
What exactly is a digital workspace?
The term might seem self-explanatory — it’s a virtual space for you to take you work — but in practice, what you get out of a digital workspace is really up to the individual, team, and the organization as a whole.
A digital workspace could be as specific as one application, or it could be as comprehensive and wide as an entire suite of software and platforms, usually working in sync to promote efficiencies in collaboration and workflows.
The reality of it is that the perfect digital workspace will have some variability between teams and businesses across different industries, there isn’t one catch-all workspace that will work for every team or individual.
Even when it comes to creative teams, not all are created equal or have the same functionality requirements as others.
Therefore, the first step to identifying the perfect digital workspace for your creative team is gathering data from all participating parties on what they would view as necessary and useful in making their jobs more efficient and effective.
Collaborating on these decisions with your team is paramount. Recent reports indicate that more than ever, employees are feeling the negative effects of utilizing outdated technology and software stacks.
With that being said, regardless of your team’s individual needs or applications, there are a few key factors that should be present in any great digital workspace.
Collaboration Within The Digital Workspace
We might be a little biased here at Stormboard, but we genuinely believe in the power of collaboration — it’s not just what we do — it’s who we are.
When looking for a digital workspace specifically designed for creative teams, the importance of prioritizing collaboration capabilities can not be overstated.
Ideal collaboration is highlighted by the easy and instant ability to communicate with team members near and far, especially important in today’s ever-changing workplace.
For creative teams, the need for collaboration stretches even further. The ability to share documents, video files, graphics, and any other media formats instantly is also needed as writers, designers, and other specialists often contribute to shared projects simultaneously or asynchronously.
Your perfect digital workspace should have leading-edge integration abilities. Connecting with outside platforms or apps can help dramatically in streamlining workflows, eliminating redundancies, and keeping everything accessible and available. This can include integrating with platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, Zapier, Slack, Jira, and others (all of which integrate with Stormboard).
The perfect digital workspace includes built-in tools that foster creativity amongst team members. These tools should help in developing better brainstorming sessions, improved team meetings, more organized documentation, and reporting.
Adaptability Within The Digital Workspace
When searching for the perfect digital workspace for your team, perhaps equally as important as having great collaboration capabilities is a software or platform being adaptable.
Creativity can’t be put in a box, and your tools shouldn’t feel restrictive or purpose-built for a specific project.
An ideal workspace needs to be responsive and moldable to fit the unique needs and processes of each individual team — and each individual project.
Having a rigid, out-of-the-box workspace will quickly lead to creatives bumping into walls and ceilings, stagnating their performance and growth, and grinding progress and efficiency to a halt.
With an adaptable workspace, teams have more creative freedom to create workflows, shortcuts, and solutions that fit specific situations, short or long-term goals, etc.
An even better solution is finding a workspace that comes with a robust set of built-in templates to kickstart virtually any project or process, adding a level of flexibility that will help your team get the most out of your digital workspace investment.
Flexibility and adaptability prevent slowdown, lost momentum, and lag time in getting projects completed and good ideas from the brain to (digital) paper.
Accessibility Within The Digital Workspace
The final key aspect to consider before investing in any digital workspace is accessibility. Accessibility has two meanings: first and foremost, how easily can your team open and start working within the workspace? Does it need to be installed locally? Is it limited to desktops? Is it secure outside of the office?
The second part of accessibility is tied closely to adaptability as discussed above. As with any tool designed to make life easier, it should do just that. Is the interface user-friendly? Can multiple teams use it, or is it limited to specialists? How much training is required to master it?
It all comes down to a simple fact; work needs to be able to get done whenever and wherever individuals find themselves, regardless of their technical skill level.
Having an accessible digital workspace means easily being able to jump into the space via a tablet, smartphone, desktop, or whatever an employee has on hand whenever or wherever creativity strikes (Microsoft Surface Hub anyone?).
With globalization and more companies adopting hybrid or full-time remote work models, teams need to have workspace accessibility from multiple devices, at any time, and pick up right where they or a fellow team member left off.
Similarly, the increase in distributed teams means that co-workers may not even be on the same continent, let alone in the same time zone. While this can promote all sorts of great ideas and different perspectives, it can also present challenges.
Traditionally, it’s been easy to lean across to a colleague and get a quick tutorial on an unfamiliar tool, or head across the hall to tech support for a how-to manual.
With more and more teams being distributed across the globe, it’s important for your tools – especially your digital workspace to be intelligent, but intuitive and easy to use for everybody to help avoid momentum loss due to unfamiliarity with a tool.
The (Existing) Perfect Digital Workspace for Any Creative Team
The last section of this article is the answer to all of the above.
When it comes to collaboration capabilities, adaptability and flexibility, and accessibility, Stormboard checks all the boxes.
Stormboard is used by over 1,000,000 people across virtually every industry in over 180 countries around the world for a reason: it’s the perfect digital workspace.
Features and functionality are important (and Stormboard is loaded in that category!), but more important is finding a digital workspace that isn’t just bells and whistles. Your digital workspace is a huge part of your organization’s digital transformation strategy, and an investment in your team.
Our bias may be showing again, but Stormboard is a flexible and innovative workspace solution that can be customized to the needs of any creative team regardless of size, industry, or designed outcome.
Before you commit your team or business to any digital workspace, get in touch with one of our experts and find out how your organization can leverage the perfect digital workspace.