There are a number of qualities that leaders hope their teams exhibit. Productive. Efficient. Collaborative. Engaged. But there’s another term that should rank near the top of this list: Creative. When McKinsey research shows that creativity is directly correlated with high performance, you want your team to feel empowered to bring their best ideas to the table. So here’s the question: How do you unlock your team’s peak creativity?
This situation might seem all too familiar: You’re working in Miro, need quick access to your brand’s logo for an upcoming presentation, but can’t remember where it’s stored. You open multiple tabs, search your history, and minutes later, find the icon you need… but this endless search loop continues to pop up throughout your work day. Even internally at Miro, we know this problem all too well.
When the pandemic hit, organizations struggled to support a workforce in upheaval. According to one McKinsey study, companies were experiencing an innovation crisis. Ninety percent of executives believed that the pandemic would fundamentally change the way they do business – and just 21% felt equipped to pursue new growth successfully. Now more than ever, executives are prioritizing innovation-led growth, aiming to draw out sharp, creative ideas to shape the future of doing business.
Look at any desktop or in any junk drawer and you’re bound to see a stack of Post-It Notes. You may be surprised to learn that the idea for Post-It Notes wasn’t born out of endless focus groups or relentless brainstorming sessions, nor to fulfill a high-level corporate strategy or objective. Rather, a couple of curious employees at 3M are responsible for creating what has grown into one of the company’s most recognizable products.
If you’re an Airtable, Clickup, Gtmbub, Unito, or Smartsheet user, your workflows are about to get even smoother and more connected. With Miro’s robust new slate of apps and integrations, you can move your projects from ideation to planning to execution with ease. With our tools for streamlining the transitions between phases of work, the status of your tasks automatically stays up-to-date in all your go-to-tools, like magic.
Working from home is the new norm, with most employees embracing remote work. Flexible work models have plenty of benefits for both employees and companies while having little to no negative impact on productivity levels. However, distributed teams have their own challenges. Managers must adapt to workers in different time zones, implement asynchronous communication, and ensure remote workers are still engaged.
Hybrid collaboration is complex. It’s not just about “in the office” or “not in the office” — it’s also about leadership, connection, creativity, and the technology that enables your teams to adapt. Over 77% of companies have adopted a hybrid work model, but how can executive leadership optimize it for their teams? Here’s some of the lessons we’ve learned to help leaders cultivate hybrid collaboration.
In business, meetings can feel like wasted time more often than not. It’s true that no team gets anywhere without a collaborative spirit and tight lines of communication. But there’s a reason for the saying, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Trying to engage everyone in everything with no process and structure for doing so can lead to stagnation.
In an ever-evolving marketplace, companies have to constantly innovate new products or update existing ones to satisfy customers. A stagnant product line can lead to customers choosing newer or better products from competitors. Ideas drive innovation. But leaders have a tough time sorting through the hundreds of ideas from different concepts, teams, and products. Categorizing and prioritizing these ideas can help teams focus on the innovations with the highest potential for success.
As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Whether you’re a lumberjack or not, there’s a powerful truth to Lincoln’s wise words. And that’s the importance of planning. Coming up with a solid strategic plan is a crucial aspect of any business. How can you expect to achieve your objectives if you don’t know what you’re aiming for?
To meet the challenges of the future, businesses have to stay agile. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that in 2020—one of the most challenging years on record—businesses with agile practices outperformed non-agile teams on almost every dimension that matters. Agile organizations saw greater customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance than their competitors.
Our mission to empower teams to unlock new ways of collaborating motivates us every day to invent powerful-yet-simple tools. This month, we released features and updates to help you keep your projects on track and your workflows united, with fresh frameworks, a new shape pack, improved integrations, and more. To see how Miro’s newest innovations can help your team work better together, check out our roundup of releases from June.
As we shift into a new world of hybrid work another glaring trend is emerging: the workforce is more divided than ever. Today, people work in silos, ideas get lost in separate tools, and isolated teams lead to disengagement, work waste, and slowed progress. Among employees who self-identify as disengaged, 75% are actively looking for new work. The reality is, we have a digital economy, which requires a new way of working that is digital first, multi-team and multi-location.
