There’s a quote attributed to Henry Ford that goes, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In many ways, that’s the void online whiteboard tools are filling - they’ve taken the tools from a physical office space and adapted it for digital teams.
Hurray! Now we have a tool for distributed and hybrid teams to have productive and engaging retrospectives!
Not so fast.
Here’s the thing: online whiteboard tools are fantastic for brainstorming a new idea or freely workshopping a prototype.
But here’s the other thing: they’re counterproductive for facilitated meetings like retrospectives.
Counter productive! How? Many whiteboard tools have templates for retrospectives that include several layers of images and shapes that facilitators use. And by several, we mean it! Whiteboard tools are meant to create an infinite whiteboard, so they can get pretty massive very quickly. To help guide conversations through the maze and signal where participants should document their notes or direct their attention during the meeting, vigilant facilitators can use tools forcing participants along a certain path. But if someone makes an errant click, then boom! 💥 The entire board is off the frame. The meeting is disrupted, people are disoriented, and the flow of the discussion is gone.
Even if you have one of the best facilitators around and everyone in the meeting is an expert user of the tool with fantastic attention spans, whiteboards can introduce varying degrees of chaos, disengagement and uncertainty into the discussion and negatively impact the meeting outcome and your team’s psychological safety.
The lack of structure and dependence on either templates or the facilitator’s skills to create a workspace for your meeting can create feelings of confusion and friction as participants try to navigate to the same location as their peers and follow along without disrupting the meeting flow.
To put it bluntly, a whiteboard tool can actually get in the way of your meeting’s effectiveness.😬
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Whiteboard tools are designed to enable remote teams to interact together in a shared space. If your goal is to recreate or enhance the experience teams had with a physical whiteboard, this is the tool for you. Online whiteboard tools are great for teams that want to:
Visually collaborate with each other by adding images and words to an infinite shared space
Perform interactive meeting elements by moving items around the board (some allow mouse tracking of participants)
Use brainstorming templates to inspire ideas and discussion
Use apps and integrated elements to provide a rich meeting space
But what if you’re not an expert user of whiteboard tools? What if your team constantly is disrupted by people clicking accidentally on the board and deconstructing the entire meeting space?
Regardless of how psychologically safe a team may be, the need to regularly ask for clarification, explain where people should be looking, and apologize for the errant click mentioned above can chip away at your team’s safety. How many times will you ask for clarification on how to use a tool before your engagement begins to weaken and your participation stops? 😨🤔
If your online tool is not allowing team members to concentrate wholly on the issue at hand, is it helping your team have productive meetings?
As more teams are adjusting to fully remote and hybrid team dynamics, finding the right tool for your meeting means more than finding the digital version of what worked when you met in-person. So, if we’re not looking for a faster horse, what will help you have better online meetings?
Retrospective tools have built-in facilitation tips and best practices which allows all participants - and the facilitator - to focus on having the best conversation possible. Which is the whole point to start with, right?
In other words, the tool gets out of the way of the conversation and allows your team to have great retrospectives. (Spoiler alert! Even fantastic, experienced facilitators have told us they didn’t know they weren’t having great retrospectives until they used Retrium.)
Retrospective tools are designed to bring the retrospective techniques you’re most familiar with to an online space. Most of these tools help distributed or fully remote teams have the same rich retrospective meetings as if they were co-located. With a retrospective tool you can:
Follow a pre-defined retrospective technique template designed to ease facilitation and increase engagement
Collaborate through interactive meetings elements (gathering and grouping team input)
Vote on topics to prioritize conversations
Collect, track, and export action items for use outside of the meeting
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