Enhancing creative collaboration

Deidre Byrne at Slack describes how your approach to creative collaboration needs to evolve

Few things will stop the creative juices from flowing as fast as a big whiteboard with ‘FY25 IDEAS’ written in the middle of it. Creativity and collaboration takes so much more than jotting down notes in marker pen or squeezing into a meeting room for thirty-minutes just before lunch.

Yet too often, our approach to creative collaboration at work hasn’t kept pace with our fast-changing times. From the digital tools you’re using to the culture you’re cultivating, today you have to be intentional about building an environment where creativity thrives.

So, whether you’re rethinking your marketing plan, coming up with a new sales strategy, developing products, or anything in between - how do you get started?

First things first - live or asynchronous collaboration?

One of the first things you need to decide when kicking off any form of creative collaboration is whether it should be live or asynchronous. Catching up live is great to keep the energy high for when you’re first starting out on a plan or you want to brainstorm some high-level ideas for a new project. (Though don’t expect this to happen by magic - always make sure you’ve briefed your team and given them a heads-up on what to expect from the session).  

Once you’re a little more into the details, though, live meetings can be less productive. Sure, creativity thrives on interaction, but some of the best creative ideas also need a little time in the oven to help build them out. This is where asynchronous collaboration comes in - allowing you to share ideas without expecting or needing an immediate response.

Imagine you’re creating a product launch, for example. You’ve got your broad idea nailed down after a couple of brainstorms, and it’s ready to be developed. This is when your sales, product and marketing teams disperse to work up their parts of the plan asynchronously. Instead of needing to work live, you might have shared documents to collaborate in, with everyone updating their parts when they can. 

Too much live collaboration can slow things down, while too much asynchronous work risks disconnection. Striking the right balance between the two is one of the first things to establish if you want to fuel greater creativity, while keeping your team moving efficiently. 

Choosing tools that will bolster creativity 

Driving both live or asynchronous creative collaboration also requires you to have the right tools available - and we’re not just talking whiteboards and Word documents here. 

Creative collaboration thrives on variety, so try to mix the tools you’re using to drive it. For example, you might need to hold a live brainstorming session remotely. Rather than simply getting everyone on a shared video call and calling it a day, use breakout rooms to boost engagement through a platform like Miro to get everyone working together in a vibrant digital environment, and try deploying polls to make it interactive and keep people’s attention. Not only will it help tackle video-call fatigue, it will leave you with a concrete set of creative ideas to take away.

Taking this further, you can also integrate tools like these directly with your productivity platform, so that you can access those insights at any time. 

Beyond specific brainstorming sessions, you should also think about using tools to boost daily spontaneity - a key ingredient in any creative initiative. For example, by keeping everyone connected in a productivity platform, people can hop on an audio-only (or video) ‘huddle’ in one click, without needing to schedule a diary invitation or create a specific link. That way, they can bounce ideas back and forth quickly, and then hop off the line when they need to. This helps creativity grow even when people are working in different locations. 

Over at the high-protein, zero-sugar cereal company, Surreal, founders Kit Gammell and Jac Chetland have used Slack as their productivity platform to move faster and stay creative. By keeping all of their collaboration in one place, they’ve hugely reduced meeting time with agencies, giving them more time back to do the creative, deep work that’s helping the brand thrive. 

Ultimately, to bolster creative energy, you want your digital tools to enable a seamless free flow of information between teams - while keeping everyone engaged and organised. 

Setting creative foundations  

There’s no exact formula for creativity. In a world where our work is more distributed and digitised than ever, you need to build an approach that works for you - and it won’t happen by accident. But by thinking through the role of live and asynchronous collaboration, and arming teams with the right tools, you can get started on creating fertile ground for creativity. 

What’s more, with time to nurture creative ideas, and tools that make it easy to seamlessly collaborate on everything from a sales update to new branding, you might just set your team up for its best ideas yet.

Deidre Byrne is Head of UK & Ireland at Slack

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com