How to use Hibox to improve your team’s brainstorming

It’s far too easy to get stuck communicating via internal email for the majority of your time at work. Employees spend on average 6 hours a day dealing with things related to internal email at work, instead of actually communicating and sharing thoughts. It’s habit for most employees to send an email rather than have a phone or face-to-face conversation with other employees in the exact same office as them.

Though convenience has made it easy to communicate from one spot, we’ve lost the ability to discuss ideas in an interactive way that encourages group contribution and constructive feedback.

Our current ways of sharing thoughts and ideas with each other don’t promote a mixing of ideas and viewpoints from across departments.

There’s a better way to get your team sharing ideas, building on them, and coming up with your company’s best new products and solutions.

We’re going to show you how to use Hibox to create a digital space that’s ideal for actionable brainstorming, and that all team members can participate in, no matter where they are.

1. Use group chat to organize conversations

Get your team chatting together in a group chat stream where they can discuss together in a quick, interactive way. Chat is an intuitive form of communication that actually helps promote brainstorming. It breaks down the communication barriers that can exist in the office — you can’t talk over someone in chat. Studies have found that employees feel that chat dissipates a lot of the bias (from seniority, gender, personality, etc.) that can occur during brainstorming meetings, and instead offers them the opportunity to share more freely.

You can even create different streams for discussing different ideas to keep your brainstorming sessions focused and organized. Streams are great for brainstorming new marketing and sales strategies, developing new content ideas, and even conceptualizing designs together.

The best part? Chat is searchable and recordable in Hibox. So if you want to look back on an idea, you can easily just search by a keyword, and find whatever you need.

Your team can keep comments organized by “quoting” ideas that have been shared and tagging individuals as well.

2. Turn talk into action

Just like an in-person meeting, there’s no point to all the discussion if you don’t follow it with actionable steps to bring ideas to fruition. Create tasks directly from chat messages in Hibox to get the ball rolling right away. Assign tasks to users directly and set deadlines without ever leaving the brainstorming chat stream.

Your team can keep track of all ‘ideas-turned-tasks’ in a task list located directly to the right of the stream.

Keep everyone on schedule by using the task calendar. Visually show your team how they’re doing on turning discussions and ideas into real, tangible improvements and solutions.

3. Discuss “in person”

Face-to-face time is always good for building the team rapport that supports strong working relationships and brainstorming. In Hibox, use the group video chat function to instantly call a group videoconference right within the platform. You don’t need to get everyone signed into Skype. Your team can move straight from chatting in a stream to speaking in person, whenever necessary.

For some of our brainstorming sessions via group videoconference, we’ve even used whiteboards to sketch out ideas we’re discussing and then shared the pictures in the chat stream to look back on at a later date!

Even whilst you’re on the group call, you can still chat and create tasks — so you can make sure you stay on top of what you’ve discussed after.

4. Keep everyone on the same page with files

There’s another reason that email is awful for sharing ideas: multiple versions of files. It’s too difficult to keep files updated and sent to all those who need access to them while working together. Right within your Hibox brainstorming chat stream, you can share files from your computer directly, through Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox. Your whole team will have access to the latest versions of files in the file list of your stream.

Developing ideas together has never been easier or more organized.

Think about how much time your team can regain from segregated and unproductive communication (like email) by using Hibox instead. Creating a digital environment that functions like an open office is ideal for collaborative and actionable brainstorming. This is the best way to ensure your team has everything they need in order to do what you hired them for: bring brilliant ideas to life.

Try Hibox for free today for the best brainstorming with your team.

Originally published at www.hibox.co on October 3, 2017.