Céline and Noëlle are both perched on high stools. Sitting like in a bar, in front of their laptops wide open. Their gaze, however, is fixed on a much larger screen, placed one meter further away. On this interactive whiteboard appear some cartoons with their own photo, attached to those, animated, of colleagues Xander, Gonca and Philippe, present in the video. Blue, yellow or pink post-its are aligned vertically under each employee’s photo, summarizing the highlights of the work in progress, priorities and planned activities.
Before the meeting, each member of this marketing team was in charge of defining what they would work on. While everyone is speaking in turn, in writing or orally, Simon, the facilitator, can move and rearrange the post-its and icons at will. Does a suggestion come from Gonca, the assistant project manager? Simon opens a pop-up on the side of the screen, types in the idea, then drags an arrow between the collaborator’s thumbnail and the note, which he paints in blue, as he would a marker.
Called Board, this intuitive digital board is Klaxoon’s flagship application. More efficient than the traditional white Velleda panel, it offers an unlimited communication surface that integrates videoconferencing solutions and allows all participants to express themselves through text, images and videos, as well as sharing links, web or any type of document. This interactivity lends itself to face-to-face without losing any of its remote effectiveness. A necessity in this start-up where all employees work in telework at least two days a week. “The council obliges you to prepare the exchange well in advance. Then, whether you are there or not, you don’t really feel the difference ”, assures Marie Barbesol, head of communication.
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When the exchange is complete, everything is automatically saved by the software. Good old meeting minutes are out of date – all meetings are recorded. “This story, adds the dircom, is very useful when you want to get your hands on an idea you had left aside.”
See you in sync?
The Klaxoon tool has a library of over 120 different templates (ready-to-use templates) and the R&D team develops a new one every week. But, says Jeremy, coach of a five-person support team, “as far as we’re concerned, we often use the same models, the ones that best fit the nature of our work.” The customer relations manager, for his part, appreciates the visualization in the form of a weekly program on which he sees in real time the actions of his five employees.
Their goals appear day by day, but also their notes (texts, PDFs, photos), ideas and possible questions. “The strength of the app is that everything that comes to mind can be visualized graphically.” This does not exempt employees from seeing each other! At the end of each day, the coach discusses with his team during “a twenty-minute synchronization, to share the actions to remember”.
Because if, at Klaxoon, the word “encounter” is not in the odor of sanctity, we “synchronize” several times a day and provide “workshops”, which must not exceed half an hour. With the exception of weekly team meetings, which can last up to forty-five minutes, but always via a link to the application, because employees are rarely all present in the same place.
This gymnastic use of the tool forces teams to organize themselves, to list their priorities, to write down their ideas. “The result is that when we meet, we get straight to the point,” says Justine, key account manager. Experienced in board management, the manager likes to customize her workshops to increase the participation of her teams.
Organize quizzes, to measure understanding of a topic, or surveys. Features directly integrated into the software. With one click he opens a window, selects the employees he wants to involve and launches a simple question about the future of a customer account. A few seconds later the screen shows the “for” and “against” diagrams and the percentage of voters. “We discover the opinion of the group in real time, sometimes it is very practical to guide a decision”.
Likewise, when you send a violent memo to your contributors, you can not only see who has read it, but how far the content has been accessed. Likewise, the e-mail has been replaced by the “question” tool, a pink pop-up, which allows you to get the answer to a question from selected employees at any time. In return, the number of replies, the identity of the respondents, the participation rate and the number of collaborators who have only read the message are displayed.
Isn’t this multitude of tools, capable of mobilizing collective intelligence and obtaining rapid feedback, potentially a formidable means of control or pressure? The idea does not seem to have crossed the minds of the young employees of the company accustomed to working on Board in total transparency and “pleasing” directly to the ideas of their colleagues. As they do on their personal social networks.
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