What do you do if your strategy team needs to enhance virtual collaboration using technology?

1 Assess your needs

Before you adopt any new tools or platforms, you need to assess your team's needs and preferences. What are the main objectives and deliverables of your strategy projects? What are the current pain points and gaps in your collaboration process? How do your team members like to communicate and share information? How comfortable are they with using technology? You can use surveys, interviews, or workshops to gather this data and identify the best solutions for your team.

2 Choose the right tools

When selecting tools and platforms to support virtual collaboration, your strategy team must consider factors such as functionality, usability, security, compatibility, and cost. Project management tools, such as Asana, Trello, or Basecamp, can help with planning, tracking, and managing strategy projects. Communication tools like Slack, Zoom, or Teams can facilitate real-time interactions between team members. Collaboration tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or Miro enable teams to collaborate on documents, presentations, spreadsheets, or diagrams. Finally, feedback tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Loom allow teams to collect and analyze feedback from stakeholders or clients.

4 Foster engagement and trust

Maintaining engagement and trust among virtual team members is one of the challenges of virtual collaboration. To create a positive and supportive team culture that fosters collaboration and innovation, you can use technology to celebrate achievements and milestones, encourage learning and development, and build rapport and connection. For example, communication tools can be used to share success stories, give recognition, solicit input, show appreciation, and host social events. Collaboration tools can be used to share best practices, resources, and insights. Additionally, feedback tools can be used to solicit opinions from team members and create learning opportunities.

5 Evaluate and improve

Finally, you need to evaluate and improve your virtual collaboration using technology. You need to measure the impact of the tools and platforms you use on your team's performance, satisfaction, and well-being. You can use feedback tools to collect data and feedback from your team members, stakeholders, and clients, and analyze the results. You can also use project management tools to review the outcomes and outputs of your strategy projects, and identify the strengths and weaknesses. Based on the evaluation, you can make adjustments and improvements to your technology choices and collaboration process.