Creative problem-solving and idea generation are key CEO priorities these days – a critical capability to keeping pace with changing customer needs and competitive challenges. It’s also a prominent theme at the 2018 Cannes International Festival of Creativity, where I’m reporting from this week.
For creative leaders inside companies – and Creative Directors at their agencies – how do you get the best creative ideas even when you can’t get everyone in the same room for a brainstorm? How do you get ideas flowing faster when everyone is just trying to catch-up to a never-ending email thread? In a global, mobile, millennial world, what needs to change?
The solution for 30,000 companies worldwide is a collaboration and productivity platform called Workplace by Facebook. It takes zero time for employees to learn (because it works like Facebook) and gets adoption rates of 80-90% or more.
As a Premium Partner for Workplace, we help companies accelerate change in productivity, alignment and collaboration by getting them up and using the platform, fast. We’ve seen first-hand how Workplace helps companies overcome the traditional boundaries of geography, time zones – all while collaborating in a familiar, dynamic and community-based environment.
We examined creative collaboration at its best and how Workplace is used to do it. The following list of creative hacks are examples of how Ketchum, the Holmes Report 2018 Creative Agency of the Year, is using Workplace to connect their creatives, which you can apply to drive collaboration and boundary-less thinking among your own teams.
1. MAKE VIRTUAL BRAINSTORMS MORE FUN: With Workplace, you can reach colleagues across the globe for one-on-one conversations or group chats without ever needing a phone number again. Try using group chats for a live brainstorming session. You can share your screen and be on camera with your team while sharing images, GIFs and files instantaneously. This is a simple way to drive dynamic interaction and ideation – unlike a conference call or a traditional virtual meeting.
2. DISCOVER IDEAS PEOPLE “LIKE”: Workplace offers users a variety of reaction options to posts and features like survey polling to test ideas and gauge opinions among a group. Especially with a large group, polling is a great method for testing draft concepts or making a decision. Give your own team members a voice by using polling or voting on the theme for the annual holiday party, selecting a new name for the conference room or voting on the most important topics to cover at the next all company meeting. Co-create ideas with your clients or customers by using polling and asserting their reactions (like, love, haha, wow, sad, angry) to content you post in the group.
3. SHARE “AHA” MOMENTS IN REAL TIME: Use Workplace Live video to share updates and key insights from events and client activations to help the rest of your team take part in the experience. Get up close to show how an activation is set-up properly and teach other team members to do similar work. Share inspiration of the week with a leader video series, featuring a different creative leader each week sharing their latest creative inspiration in a 60 second video. Host live, all company meetings to keep the entire organization informed of the latest company news and provide creative motivation.
4. GET THE RIGHT BRAIN POWER ON THE PROBLEM: Need someone specific to weigh in on a creative challenge? Create a call-to-action by tagging a colleague using the @ symbol and they will be notified of the post. If you’re not sure who to tag, you can tag entire groups and events, use the search function, or the organization chart to find a colleague with the expertise you’re looking for.
5. THINK BEYOND YOUR OWN WALLS: Take “thinking outside the box” to the next level by inviting clients to join a multi-company group. They don’t need to have a Workplace account to join – you can invite them by simply using their email address. Using a group helps you stay connected with your client or customer between meetings, share creative deliverables and files for review, edit and leave comments related to draft materials, or post industry news, trends and best practices – all in one place. Also, consider inviting a guest expert from outside your company to join a brainstorm group on a special topic or use a multi-company group to hold a virtual focus group with stakeholders outside your company.
Want to learn more about using Workplace by Facebook to drive creative collaboration within your own organization? Visit daggerwinggroup.com/workplace, or contact Liz O’Connor. Click here to download our 5 Creative Collaboration Hacks for Workplace by Facebook.