Ding—who joined? Ding—who joined? This conference call greeting is still way too familiar to most business professionals, especially those who support distributed workforces. Rapid technological advancement has made virtual collaboration a practical reality for every organization, regardless of size or resources. As long as they have an Internet connection people can now do their jobs from almost anywhere. While companies continue to employ more virtual workers, many learning professionals remain tied to the conference call and email as their primary collaboration methods. This lack of technical and process savvy leads many to avoid virtual collaboration in favor of using nearby resources, and therefore they forfeit the added benefit distributed workers can bring to a project. Even worse, those who do attempt to collaborate through technology remain tied to old tools that waste time and create added barriers.

Effective virtual collaboration skills are essential in high-performing learning and support organizations. Professionals in every role, from designer to project manager, are being asked to work with peers, subject matter experts, and participants in different facilities, time zones, and countries. When project team members do not possess the necessary personal and organizational savvy, these physical boundaries to collaboration can create breakdowns in communication and development processes and ultimately yield a lesser quality product and poor user experience.

Participants in this session will discuss and experience proven strategies and tools that advance virtual collaboration and lead to improved project outcomes. You’ll practice your ability to get work done in partnership with a distributed team brought into the session via cloud-based collaboration tools to redefine your understanding of what it means to communicate in real-time and within the context of the work. You’ll leave the session with a list of affordable tools and proven strategies that you can deploy immediately to overcome existing barriers to virtual collaboration.

In this session, you will learn:

  • How effective strategies for virtual collaboration can become a differentiating strength in your organization
  • How to reduce the amount of time spent in meetings during a project
  • How to leverage visual communication tools to add context and detail to collaboration efforts
  • How to eliminate email and telephones from the collaboration process
  • Which questions to ask when selecting the right collaboration tools to match your personal and organizational needs

Audience:
Novice through advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors who have experienced the frustration of at least one long, dull conference call and wondered how they could make the virtual collaboration experience better for everyone.

Recording