A Guide on Constantly Productive Virtual Brainstorming Sessions

Brainstorming is such a valuable activity in any company that demands creative thinking.

16:14 07 December 2021

Brainstorming is such a valuable activity in any company that demands creative thinking. As well as helping teams come together to conjure innovative ideas in a focused environment, brainstorming sessions are a great excuse to get people from across the business engaging with each other.

 

The "psychological safety" of an environment that encourages the exchange of ideas has benefits beyond brainstorming sessions; employees are likely to carry that sense of trust into their everyday work communications.

 

However, since the boom in remote work, meetings have been taking place virtually with increasing frequency, and, without adjusting to the virtual workplace, brainstorming sessions just won’t be as productive as they were in person.

 

We’ll discuss how you can not only mitigate the effects of the virtual context on your brainstorming sessions but actually embrace this new environment and come up with ideas to boost productivity that simply weren't possible before.

 

Equip yourself with the right tools

First, think about how you’re going to achieve your aims for the session. What tools will you need to carry out your key brainstorming activities?

 

• What sort of capabilities do you require from your communications system? How many employees are you catering to? Do you need access to video conferencing? Would the ability to split up into Breakout Rooms enhance your sessions? Do you want employees on the move to be able to call flip between their phones and desktops at a moment's notice? 

 

• Do you need collaboration tools such as clear, visually appealing mind-maps? Perhaps a virtual whiteboard everyone can draw on, or something as simple as a shared Google Doc attendees can contribute to?

 

Once you have a clear idea of your requirements, you’ll want to review the available tech. UCaaS providers will be able to equip you with all the features we’ve mentioned above in a single app. 

 

Some of these even arm you with Voice Intelligence technology that can transcribe your conference calls automatically to eliminate the need for notetaking in your sessions altogether - your creative flow will never be interrupted again.

 

Prepare everyone for your session

Your virtual brainstorming session will go by faster than you'd expect, so you want to use this time effectively.

 

One great way to guarantee this is to give everybody a head start. This means attendees will enter the meeting adequately prepared and in the right mindset.

 

Make sure everybody's clear on the problems you're trying to solve ahead of time. Maybe you need ideas for your blog. Maybe part of your site isn't getting the conversions it needs. Maybe your new multichannel order management system has highlighted flaws in other parts of the business.

 

You should have decided on the prompts you'll be giving attendees in advance, so send those out well ahead of time to give employees some thinking time.

 

You must also make sure everyone is familiar with your chosen business software ahead of time. If you're using a new virtual whiteboard software, include that in your email to attendees and ask them to get to grips with the tool before the meeting.

 

If you're running time-pressured activities, you don't want to lose out on someone's best idea because they couldn't find the right button on the mind-map software.

 

 

Finally, think about how many people will be attending this session and how your techniques and technology will handle this.

 

If you've run in-person sessions before, you might overestimate how many people can comfortably work together crammed into the windows of a video call. 

 

Start small at first. If you know you need to bring together a large group, consider how you're going to structure activities and use breakout rooms to create smaller teams for more focused sessions.

 

Pick the right team

Your virtual brainstorming sessions are going to be most effective if you enlist a diverse group of staff. No matter the topic, you want to get a good representation of different sectors of the company.

 

Think also about the mixture of introverts and extroverts and how you might want to distribute them. 

 

Make sure you have some of the company's creatives in the room so you can rely on people thinking outside the box. But don't forget to have some of the more grounded, detail-oriented people in the company around to consider the bigger picture.

 

 

Set clear roles and responsibilities

In a virtual brainstorming session, you don't quite have the presence you would do standing in a room with everyone. If your meeting has more than one or two activities, consider assigning roles.

 

Your session will need a facilitator to keep the group on-task, make sure everyone has a chance to contribute, clear anything up, and manage the distribution of team members into smaller groups. If you're reading this article, this is probably you.

 

You'll have your hands full running this session. Assign a dedicated timekeeper whose only job is to keep the session running on schedule.

 

You want everyone to focus on participating as fully as possible, so consider assigning someone to take any relevant notes - like assigning specific attendees tasks following the session. If necessary, you might also task them with collecting materials produced in the meeting, like screenshotting mind-maps or making sure documents are saved and distributed.

 

If everyone is clear on what they're doing, when, and how, you'll be in an excellent position to have a really productive brainstorming session.

 

Encourage collaboration

So, you’ve invested in great tools to facilitate collaboration and given attendees time to come up with ideas, but the session has started, and you’re met with awkward silence. How can you encourage employees to offer up their great ideas? 

 

The key is to keep it focused but fun. Make sure everyone in the call is clear on the goal - on a busy call, you might want to present a big slide for everyone reading "How can we improve customer interaction management?" or "What on-brand gifts could we send to new customers?". But, for a more relaxed, informal feel, you could make use of game show-style sound effects to announce the beginning and end of different tasks.

 

 

You don't have to pick one group configuration and stick to it for the whole session. With some team members being more introverted than others, it might be an idea to start off with a group activity to warm people up to presenting their own ideas.

 

Different people will thrive in different activities, so run through a good mixture of these. This might include group mind-maps on virtual whiteboards, contributing to ideas in one big Google Doc, or a timed rapid-ideation game with a prize for the winning team.

 

You want to discourage attendees’ natural instinct to seek approval from their peers. This could prevent people from entertaining their best and most unusual ideas.

 

Finally, as the facilitator, you want to pay attention to the composition of groups and how people are interacting with each other. Make sure nobody is dominating the conversation in their groups and reconfigure these where necessary.

 

 

Follow up

If the meeting went well, you've got too many ideas than you could possibly act on. You need a clear method of selecting the best ideas and prioritizing tasks to act on immediately.

 

Send out an email to all the attendees thanking them for their contributions, asking them how they found it, and if anything could be improved.

 

Regular virtual brainstorming sessions could be a huge asset to your company. Make a note of anything you thought went well or could have gone better and keep improving over time.

 

The virtual setting doesn't have to be an obstacle you're trying to overcome. You could embrace the benefits of remote work by running an asynchronous brainstorming session.

 

Getting everyone on the same call is a big investment. But you can reap the benefits of a brainstorming session on smaller issues just by setting up a collaborative Google Sheet and using instant-messaging tools.

 

Clearly label your fields so that employees know what ideas you’re looking for, then give them a week or two to contribute whenever they have the chance.

 

This gives people time to come up with great ideas, and it's so low-effort that you can be "running" many brainstorming activities all over the company, tackling many different issues at once rather than over weeks.

 

Harness the strengths of the virtual workplace

It’s easy to see how virtual brainstorming sessions might lack the unique energy of in-person collaboration. But with the right tools and some creative thinking, you can not only overcome the challenges of the remote workspace but develop ways of working together that weren’t even possible before. 

 

Bio:

Grace Lau - Director of Growth Content, Dialpad

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cold calling software and cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Here is her LinkedIn.