There is a huge wealth of on-line tools that can help your team to ‘meet’ without physically being in the same place at the same time (the technical shorthand is ‘asynchronous‘) and the picture is changing all the time – every day brings a new tool or an interesting (and sometimes commercial) variation on an old one.
To get an ‘up-to-date’ picture, just search for ‘online collaboration tools‘, or ‘online tools for group decisions‘ and take a look at some of the lists, reviews and actual tools that are available.
A few tools that we would recommend you take a look at are:
- ConceptBoard – even though this is an excellent resource for more involved meetings it can also provide an ongoing repository for offline updates and feedback both between meetings and independently of them. It has huge potential for including templates that can facilitate whatever discussions you need
- Trello – is a Kanban board on steroids. It has amazing potential to visualise progress, keep updates, provide the backbone for a meeting, allocate tasks, and generally manage everything (literally everything – we used Trello to manage every aspect of my previous organisation)
- Slack – allows you to keep threads of dialogue going across a range of topics, and to include and update people as you need to
- Microsoft Teams – provides a means to ‘chat’ through ideas and situations together, and to keep in communication with your colleagues on key topics – it is also a videoconferencing solution, for when the ‘chat’ gets a bit involved
- Google Docs, in general, and in particular the following (you will need to create a free Google account if you do not already have one)
- Google draw which you can share in real-time and which can act like a giant section of wall for you to add a template, and people to contribute their ideas and thoughts
- Google_sheets which enables you to explore analyses and run simulations, and to capture plans and track progress
- Google slides which enable you to embed iFrames as backgrounds to particular slides, and capture a series of different inputs, and of course to present those inputs
- Google Jamboard which provides a very simple and intuitive whiteboard – its limited features make it easier for new users to pick up
- Tricider, which enables asynchronous debate on a decision and the criteria and information put forward by others to support different outcomes
- AnswerGarden, which collates inputs into a wordcloud as a basis for brainstorming and for identifying themes and furthering discussions
- DirectPoll, which is a very simple polling tool to enable on-line voting on a number of predefined options
To explore the latest options for these tools, put the following topics into Google and see what shows up:
- Polling software
- Decision Making Tools
- Collaborative Wordclouds
- Shared documents
- KanBan Software
- Shared Spreadsheets
Feel free to capture resources which you feel may be useful to others using this clinic below:
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.