At Brandemix, we love brainstorming sessions! They are a great way to exchange ideas, make other people shine, and contribute to the overall growth of a company. Chances are if you are a part of an organization, you must have been a part of such sessions in the past few months.
However, brainstorming sessions have changed over time.
Long gone are the days you could stroll into a room and conduct a brainstorming session with your team. Thanks to COVID-19, organizations across the globe are working remotely more than ever, in which case the organizations must look for creative and harmonious ways to work collaboratively.
Nevertheless, the value of brainstorming has only increased. Brainstorming sessions are not just for coming up with new ideas but also for uniting a remote team to work in a particular direction with a variety of approaches.
Hosting virtual brainstorming sessions is a good way to begin. These can be made fun, creative, and energizing by bringing the team together to generate creative ideas and solve complex problems.
An article by Business Insider reports that allowing employees to brainstorm remotely is a step ahead of all of the creativity obstacles they would ordinarily encounter. These types of sessions are a lot easier to manage by having a planned structure, which will eliminate some issues such as people talking over each other, background noises, and technical glitches.
If you’re looking for tips on how to make your next virtual brainstorming session more fun and engaging, this article has all of the answers you need to engage your remote workforce.
Why Opt for Virtual Brainstorming?
Your “gut feeling” may entirely rule out virtual brainstorming, however, in actuality, they can prove to be far more productive on several counts!
In 2015, Harvard Business published an article on Why Virtual Brainstorming Works Better, wherein Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic – psychologist, states that
…virtual [brainstorming] sessions generate more high-quality ideas and have a higher average of creative ideas per person, as well as resulting in higher levels of satisfaction with the ideas.
Besides, Chamorro-Premuzic’s research revealed that 70% of the participants perform better in virtual sessions, as opposed to the traditional ones. This is often because the employees get to work individually on their ideas, before pitching them at the meeting, reducing fear of judgment.
It can also prove to be more productive and lead to diverse results as the participants are less likely to be influenced by their teammates/colleagues. Virtual meetings also prevent dominant participants from eclipsing their introverted team members, by talking too much.
So underrated, yet GOLD!
Here are five tips to keep in mind while hosting a virtual brainstorming session in your organization.
1. Brief The Participants Beforehand
Always ensure that your employees/colleagues have a brief in advance to enable them to brainstorm individually and become more productive during the meeting. They must be aware of what is expected of them to help them prepare and present; and also maximize the time altogether.
Specifically, in the case of remote sessions, the meeting host must inform all attendees regarding the digital tools and resources that would be used and along with their access, in advance, to reduce the odds of delay, stress, and panic during the meeting. So, if you plan to use a new tool, provide them the access and ask them to set it up in advance. You would also want to consider assigning pre-work using the same tools to ensure seamless navigation of the documents and resources on the d-day.
To have an idea of what to draft, here are samples of items to list in your brainstorming brief:
- Date, time, and expected duration of the session
- The flow of the meeting
- The goal of the session
- Information regarding the primary purpose of the meeting
- Roles each attendee would play
- Useful links for better research on the topic
- Brainstorming questions to give direction to the thought process
2. Keep Them Engaged
During virtual brainstorming sessions, stick to your agenda and goal, and ensure that you keep things moving along quickly. To guide you further, here are extra tips to keep participants engaged during your virtual brainstorming session:
- Keep things interactive and exciting to transcend beyond the virtual distance! For example, Zoom allows you to focus the camera on one person speaking and mute the other microphones, which prevents people from speaking over one another. But even so, you still need to make sure the overall brainstorming meeting flows smoothly and allows everyone to share their ideas. This way, everyone has a stake in the game, without creating unnecessary chaos.
- The attendees, irrespective of seniority and designation, must ensure the household tasks & other personal commitments do not interfere during the meeting. This helps the session to run seamlessly and effectively.
- Lastly, get the conversations rolling, by breaking the ice. Understand that everybody is not energetically on the same level. Hence, the energies in the “room” could feel quite different, especially when we’re remote. One simple tip to break the ice is to use a few team members, who would also be attending the meeting, to lead and model great participation right from the beginning.
3. Make Collaboration Convenient
While brainstorming new ideas, keep a few things in mind to make the collaboration feel easy, even if it’s remote.
- Prepare a shared screen space with brainstorm prompts for everyone’s reference, as a necessity. You can even ask the attendees to keep their webcams off and focus solely on the task at hand. Webcams switched on could be distracting, plausibly leading to introverts getting anxious or feeling conscious about themselves.
- Also, consider using breakout groups to discuss and generate ideas rather than having them all stay in one large group the whole time. Inclined towards this model? Great! You would want to assign a facilitator/ a group leader for each group, to lead the conversation and ideas.
4. Leverage Digital Tools to Capture Input
There are many tools you can use to conduct remote brainstorming sessions. Being able to watch everyone draw on the same board in real-time is priceless because it brings everyone onto one visual level, but you can do that while working remotely as well – with the right set of tools!
An unpopular opinion – You do not require fancy digital tools for every brainstorming session. Yes, while you could use a brainstorming tool like Figma, it doesn’t hurt to try Google Sheets as well. The important rule is to be able to share files and documents in a way that everyone can edit them all together.
Do keep in mind that you would want everyone to have their designated place to provide inputs and ideas. So, prepare the document in advance and in a way that everyone is assigned a specific sheet, row/ column, digital post to jot down their thoughts, or even their slides in the case of Google Docs, Google Sheets, Figma, or Google Slides respectively. The aim here is to avoid multiple cursors interrupting one another and eventually causing confusion and disorganization.
5. Understand Your Participants
Brainstorming sessions are a great way to generate ideas, but they should be attended only by those who are well versed in the matter at hand. Don’t call people together just to fill up space, see who would be a good fit, and then extend invites.
The aim here is to think carefully about who might have valuable input into the subject at hand and then decide who needs to take part in the brainstorming session to ensure that it has a meaningful impact and isn’t bogged down in needless details.
Moreover, remote brainstorming sessions will have all kinds of people; introverts and extroverts. So, you will have to understand each one of them and make them feel comfortable enough to speak up and be a part.
Also, don’t restrict the participants’ list to a certain team. Be open to different points of view from other team members as well. For example, if you are brainstorming over content ideas to write for your company’s blog, the sales and customer support team will give their consumer behavior insights, while the creative team will brainstorm on the creative ideas needed to transform the content ideas into published posts.
Final Thoughts
So how can you have the best online brainstorming session possible? Sharing the meeting brief beforehand, understanding your participants, keeping meetings fun and engaging, leveraging digital tools, and collaborating effectively, are just a few of the ways you can make sure your brainstorming sessions are effective and engaging.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.
