We are a virtual company. Since our workers are spread out across the country, collaboration and culture development present unique challenges. We use instant message and conference calling tools on an hourly basis.
Recently (and quite by accident) we discovered some new and powerful uses of virtual meeting tools. There are many of these conferencing tools on the market such as Citrix GoToMeeting, Cisco's WebEx, and Microsoft's Live Meeting . I'm not going to recommend any single product, but I will mention that Yugma is free!
We keep the meeting software live in the background, and we launch it for many of our 1:1 calls. Rather than trying to explain something, we just fire up an instant meeting , voila!, we can show it to the other person. It's a huge time saver. If you've ever found yourself saying over the phone, "in the upper right corner. Far right" or "where are you looking on that website?", then this idea is for you.
Our favorite use is firing up an impromptu web meeting as our graphics guru makes real time edits to marketing collateral while the team makes suggestions. Rather than trading editing emails back and forth, with static pdfs we can all contribute, play off each other's ideas, and we see immediate impact to our ideas. We complete work faster, with better quality, and we reach consensus much faster since all of us are "owners" .
Of course, it takes a graphic person who listens, and all of us have to be willing to give in on pet ideas. But that's not really any different than collaborating in an office.
Give it a try and share with us other creative ways to make a virtual office more productive.
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