As more companies shift to fully or partially remote work arrangements, effective communication, and collaboration within distributed teams are important. When employees are working from different locations across the country or around the world, it can be challenging to maintain productivity, alignment, and team cohesion. Online notepads, also called online whiteboards or digital sticky notes, provide a shared online space for teams to capture ideas, take notes, annotate documents, brainstorm, and collaborate in real time.
Team members simultaneously edit the online documents and see each other’s contributions appear instantly. Unlike simple text documents, online notepads often include additional collaborative features like virtual sticky notes, freehand drawing tools, voting mechanisms, embedded media, comment threads, and more. It enables more dynamic and visual collaboration for remote teams.
- Streamline discussions and feedback
The lengthy email chains disjointed messaging threads, and online notepads give teams a single, shared place to exchange feedback and have discussions. Comments and suggestions are documented in context, new ideas can be captured as they arise, and conversations stay organized.
- Improve alignment
When everyone on a team can view, edit, and add input to the same notepad documents, it ensures that all team members literally “are on the same page.” It leads to better knowledge sharing and closely aligned workflows. Miscommunications are reduced.
- Democratize and document meetings and brainstorms
During virtual meetings and creative sessions, online notepads allow equal participation regardless of team members’ locations. All ideas can be documented, visualized, and developed further after the meetings in an organized way.
- Asynchronous collaboration
Remote team members located in very different time zones often struggle to sync schedules and collaborate in real time. Online notepads give teams a flexible, asynchronous way to advance projects and share perspectives without having to coordinate schedules for online in More about the author.
- Centralize key information
Team notepads become a secure, centralized knowledge base where all employees know they can access the latest project information, reference needed documents, and get up to speed quickly. It is vital for remote work.
- Visually communicate
Online notepads incorporate visual elements like diagrams, images, color coding, drawings, and virtual sticky notes to annotate information and communicate more clearly across language and location barriers faced by global remote teams.
Use cases and examples
Some specific examples of how remote and hybrid teams can utilize online notepads:
- Collaborative meeting notes – During video conferences, have a shared notepad open for attendees to add agenda items, capture decisions, document action items, and vote on the next steps.
- Brainstorming workshops – Use virtual sticky notes to enable more inclusive ideation and avoid having loud voices dominate the conversation. Have team members post ideas first, then discuss and arrange them thematically afterward.
- Project planning – Map out plans visually by quarter, month, or week to align responsibilities, deliverables, schedules, and deadlines across a distributed project team.
- Design sprints – Have designers, engineers, and stakeholders comment on prototypes and wireframes in a shared notepad to quickly iterate on product concepts and make decisions.
- Retrospectives – After a project or sprint, conduct a retrospective evaluation by having each team member post what went well, what didn’t, and ideas for improvement on a shared canvas. Discuss patterns and document takeaways.