9 Reasons Your Next Whiteboard Should be Digital

The rise of new and more powerful digital and remote collaboration tools over the last several years has caused many business leaders to re-evaluate how their teams operate on a day-to-day basis.

Whether it’s simply changing how meetings are run — or shifting an entire workplace philosophy — there really isn’t a prescribed formula for how to properly leverage remote collaboration.

For a large number of organizations, it starts with something simple — finding a tool that feels familiar, but still provides that opportunity for dramatic change. Whether you’re just looking to dip your toes into digital alternatives — or dive right into a fundamental shift in business practices — you don’t need to look much further than your boardroom to know where to start.

With millions of people around the world breaking up with their old office whiteboards in favor of a digital alternative, we decided to ask around to see if we could find a trend across the business world.

We looked at data from thousands of survey responses, and spoke to dozens of C-suite executives, office managers, and team leaders from around the world to see if we could come up with a definitive list of the top reasons to make the switch to a digital whiteboard.

Based on what we heard, these are the 9 reasons your next whiteboard should be digital.

1.    Generate More Ideas

One of the most common benefits shared among the people we spoke to was not only the increased volume of ideas they saw after switching to a digital whiteboard, but the improved quality of those ideas as well.

The most obvious reason for this is the enhanced teamwork capabilities afforded by a digital space (i.e., remote collaboration) — but there’s more to it than just adding additional people into a working group.

Ideas tend to evolve as they are explored, and with features such as commenting, voting, and line connectors at your disposal, you team can explain, elaborate, ask questions, and connect thoughts much more easily than they would with dry-erase markers, pushpins, and yarn.

2.    Support for the Hybrid Workforce

There has been much discussion about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the global workforce — specifically about the rise of the Hybrid Workplace Model.

With some major employers expecting as much 80% of their workforce to remain hybrid post-pandemic, the need for digital collaboration tools is more apparent than ever.

The benefit of a boardroom whiteboard is that anyone in the office can contribute at their leisure, but if most — or even part — of your team is remote, that benefit becomes a roadblock. Keeping your team actively contributing to meetings, project management, and ideation from outside the boardroom means relying on video conferencing, emails, instant messaging, etc. — not the most effective method of team engagement.

By shifting to a digital whiteboard, your entire team can contribute, regardless of where they are — a few floors apart, or across the world.

3.    Broader Team Engagement

Ideas don’t come to everybody at the exact same time, the exact same way. By getting out of the confines of a boardroom, you aren’t stuck relying on the same active team members and their rapid-fire brainstorming on a crowded whiteboard.

A digital space can open the door for the more introverted, shy, or reserved members of a team to participate, and give the entire group a chance to reflect on a topic and come back to it later (without running the risk of your whiteboard being claimed by the next team in line).

The benefits of going digital extend beyond just having more people interacting with your work as well. With a variety of fun templates and icebreakers, a digital whiteboard promotes team-building and helps engage team members regardless of where they are stationed.

4.    No More Physical Limitations

Your team is flexible, and your tools should be too. Whether you rely on floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, a series of calendars, or corkboards with pushpins, your best ideas and planning sessions are still limited to the space and materials you have.

While the physical tools of old leave you stuck with a finite number of sticky notes, dried up markers, or limited board space, switching to a digital whiteboard allows your team — not your workspace — to define the boundaries of your ideas and meetings.

5.    Space and Place

Physical whiteboards are a mainstay in boardrooms across the world — but as we well know, not everybody is at their creative best in an office environment. Going digital with your team collaboration tools allows team members to work from a space that is best-suited to their thinking and working style.

With a cloud-based digital whiteboard, users can access their workspace from virtually anywhere, meaning when that idea strikes in line at the coffee shop 3 hours after a meeting, it is no longer lost to a wandering mind or left jotted down on a napkin — it can be instantly added to the digital whiteboard.

6.    Continuity and Asynchronous Collaboration

If you’ve ever sat struggling to keep the ideas rolling an hour into a drawn-out meeting, you understand that momentum can be your friend — or your worst enemy. As things taper off and the team exhausts their critical thinking skills, momentum can easily be lost and the meeting or project stalls out.

By embracing digital alternatives, lost momentum can become a thing of the past. With the ability to engage remote teams, work asynchronously, or add ideas at any time, from anywhere, your projects, workspaces, and meetings can keep a level of continuity that simply isn’t possible when you rely on a physical tool.

7.    Security and Privacy

The security and privacy of your boardroom whiteboard might not be at the top of your mind most days, but it is a cornerstone of the digital alternatives on the market.

Leaving your work out in the open on a traditional whiteboard doesn’t just run the risk of having it erased, it leaves it vulnerable to peering eyes or unwanted alterations.

By transitioning to a digital alternative, your team can freely work on sensitive or proprietary projects with access limited to only those that need to be involved. From business planning to software engineering, you can rest assured that your data is safe on a secure cloud-based server.

The most advanced digital whiteboard solutions available carry Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 certifications, encrypted data transfer protocols, and offer additional layers of security such as two-factor authentication, ensuring that your team is more protected than ever.

8.    Automatic Transcription

Working in a shared boardroom with one or two whiteboards runs a certain risk. Sure, you can finish the meeting with P.L.O. scribbled somewhere in the margins, but chances are, the next time someone needs that whiteboard, all your work is as good as gone.

The most common solution to unwanted data purges from your whiteboard is a shaky, blurry photo of your meeting on someone’s smartphone that will probably spend the next half decade sporadically popping up as photo album memory.

If your team is dedicated to preserving work at all costs, you might get a transcription or artist’s rendition of your whiteboard after the meeting, but too often these deliverables are out of context, missing information, or incorrectly translated from boardroom hieroglyphs.

With a digital whiteboard, you can quickly and easily export all your work, eliminating those issues. From simple word clouds and vote tallies to professional branded documents, PowerPoints, or spreadsheets, the automatic transcription capabilities are a time and effort saver that no modern organization should be without.

9.    Improving Structure with Templates

If you’re still using a traditional whiteboard to facilitate your meetings and team projects, then you know first-hand how much time can go into prep and organization. From drawing funnels, calendars, timelines, and sections on the board to sorting out sticky notes and marker colors, you spend as much time trying to make your project management efficient as you do actually working on the project itself.

With a digital whiteboard, you’re only ever a few clicks away from a template designed specifically for the task at hand.

Many of the people we spoke to noted that the key to a good digital whiteboard solution was flexibility in their unique use cases. A traditional whiteboard can accommodate virtually anything the user can think of, so it’s important for the digital alternative to be able to do the same.

When shopping for a digital whiteboard, you should ensure that there are templates available for your team, use case, or framework of choice — from simple brainstorming or content planning to design thinking, sales management, or business planning.

Conclusion

Switching to a digital whiteboard might seem like a minor change in the grand scheme of things, but the benefits to your team and business could be game-changing.

The best way to find out if making the switch to a digital whiteboard is right for your team is by giving it a try!

Contact us today to get started on a free 30-day trial and see for yourself what a small change in your office tools can do for the future of your business.

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