✓Align on goals ✓Centralize projects ✓Connect work across all your tools ✓Automate processes ✓Collaborate from anywhere ✓Build belonging 

Team collaboration software | Qatalog

<h1>Qatalog organizes the ingredients of collaboration</h1>
<h4>✓Align on goals ✓Centralize projects ✓Connect work across all your tools ✓Automate processes ✓Build belonging&nbsp;</h4>

<h2 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;Bring your team together with a work hub</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">Give your team the space for deep work &amp; productive asynchronous collaboration</h3>

Qatalog’s directory places the whole org in your hand. See who owns what, each team’s goals, and workflows. No more “What do they do again?”

Know who’s working on what

Give goals the visibility they deserve. Set a North Star that’s in everyone’s view. No more “Why are we doing this?”

Align teams on goals

Break through silos. See where everything stands with every project. No more meetings just for status updates.

Centralize projects

Single-click integrations with the tools you’re already using. 

<p>Welcome to the first in a series of interviews around the <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/category/future-of-work/" rel="follow">Future of Work</a> by Qatalog. We&rsquo;ve started this program as a way to engage and learn from global business leaders who are championing new ways of work. We&rsquo;re kicking things off with Jim Kalbach, MURAL&rsquo;s Chief Evangelist. Jim&rsquo;s commitment to &ldquo;leveraging collective imagination&rdquo; has inspired us, and we&rsquo;re pleased to share our recent interview with him.</p>
<h3>Qatalog: The &ldquo;future of work&rdquo; topic is receiving a lot of attention. What trends are you following most closely?</h3>
<p><strong>Jim:</strong> We&rsquo;re most interested in the future of team collaboration and new ways of working. We believe that <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">how </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">teams work together is a critical business factor and competitive advantage. The trends we&rsquo;re watching include things like:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Facilitation</strong>.&nbsp;We believe facilitation skills will become more of a priority as a result of increased distributed teams. You don&rsquo;t have to be a trained Facilitator (with a capital F) to facilitate: anyone leading a conversation can benefit from knowing how to drive towards the desired outcomes.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Visual methods</strong>. Visualizing work not only builds alignment and increases engagement, it also accelerates problem solving. Frameworks like the business model canvas show that visualizations aren&rsquo;t only for creative disciplines.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Remote work</strong>. Of course, here at MURAL we&rsquo;re committed to continue to understand the remote condition. We learned a lot in 2020, but we&rsquo;re really just getting started in general.&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span></li>
</ul>
<h3>Q: &ldquo;2020 was about emergency distributed work, 2021 is about optimization for distributed work.&rdquo; Do you agree?</h3>
<p><strong>J:</strong> Yes, I do agree: remote collaboration took off in 2020 out of necessity. Moving forward we&rsquo;ll likely see two things. First, the optimization of distributed work, as you say, which includes not only new tools but behaviors. That&rsquo;s really the frontier we need to work on collectively. How do we better engage remote teams? How do we bring clients into creative conversations in a distributed setting? The list of questions goes on, and we&rsquo;re still learning as we go.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But also I think we&rsquo;ll start to see a shift towards partially distributed collaboration as some people start going back to the office post-vaccine, perhaps in the second half of the year. The challenge of hybrid meetings&mdash;where half of the team is in-person together and the other half is distributed&mdash;is achieving equality of interaction. It&rsquo;s easier for in-person conversations to out-pace those with folks dialed in and to interact with materials in the room.&nbsp;</p>
<p>I believe that what the working world learned about remote collaboration in 2020 will stick. That is, we&rsquo;ll continue to think and work digitally even as we slowly head back to our offices later in 2021.&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"></span></p>
<h3>Q: What kind of organizational cultures do you think best serve those adapting to distributed work?</h3>
<p><strong>J:</strong> Culture does play a big role, and the ones that adapt best already have the necessary qualities to adapt to effective distributed work. For example, we&rsquo;ve found some of these cultural aspects to be most important:&nbsp;</p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Encouraging engagement</strong><i>.</i> Distributed work is best when people can participate and stay interactive with the group. Otherwise, it&rsquo;s far too easy to drift off and multi-task on something else and not contribute. Work cultures that seek engagement from everyone in the group thrive better in distributed contexts.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Inclusion of diverse perspectives</strong>. Distributed teams can be more inclusive in the range of people included because there are lower barriers of distances and location.<em> Cultures that are open to diverse opinions&mdash;even if they are outlier opinions&mdash;not only collaborate better but are also better prepared to innovate. </em>Having a diverse mindset helps to adapt to remote collaboration and produce better results.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Creating psychological safety</strong><i>.</i> A certain flexibility is required with distributed work and openness to experimentation. Failing needs to be OK: If you get it wrong, that&rsquo;s OK&mdash;you&rsquo;ll learn from your mistakes and move on. People have to feel safe about contributing creative ideas, even if they end up failing.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h3>Q: What's the biggest challenge for you and your team at work these days? And how do you work on overcoming it?&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>
<p><strong>J:</strong> As a company, MURAL has changed dramatically in the last year. Of course, we&rsquo;ve been advocating for <a href="https://www.mural.co/ebook" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">improving remote work</a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for years and we believe we have a solution that can help. When companies found themselves &ldquo;</span><a href="https://www.mural.co/blog/suddenly-remote-recap" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">suddenly remote</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">&rdquo; because of the pandemic, we were there to help, e.g., with content, guidance, extended offers, etc.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>But there&rsquo;s no doubt that our business grew at the same time. We&rsquo;ve tripled the size of the company, and we received <a href="https://www.mural.co/press-releases/series-b" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Series B funding</a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Although we&rsquo;ve always been a remote-first company&mdash;with global teams on four continents&mdash;any organization would struggle to scale under this rapid growth.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>So our challenge was less around how we work remotely than it was how do we scale as a remote company to meet market demand.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Q: It's believed by some within the creative industry that there's no real substitute for face-to-face collaboration. Do you agree with that? How are you addressing this idea at MURAL?</h3>
<p><strong>J:</strong> Yes, I agree with that sentiment on one level. In fact, one of our guidelines for good remote collaboration is to &ldquo;meet in person.&rdquo; If you know your colleagues personally, remote collaboration is a lot easier.</p>
<p>But you could also say there is no substitute for distributed collaboration as well. So I find it problematic viewing face-to-face collaboration as all or nothing, black and white. The reality of our modern work environments should best be seen as a continuum of modes&mdash;from completely in-person collaboration to hyper-distributed teams. You have to be able to function across a range of modes and settings, and be able to move between them as well.</p>
<p>At MURAL we&rsquo;re committed to developing best practices for digital collaboration, whether in-person or distributed. For instance, <a href="https://www.mural.co/blog/5-tactics-seamless-remote-work" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">here&rsquo;s a short post I wrote a while back summarizing some techniques for moving between modes of collaboration</a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. And we continue to learn new techniques from our community. As work moves back to the office post-pandemic, we&rsquo;ll be watching closely how customers and partners think and work digitally, and how the line between in-person and remote blurs.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve also built capabilities into our platform to make the transition easier. MURAL Scan is still in beta, but will be released soon. With it, you can scan a wall of physical sticky notes and drawings, and digitize them to a mural canvas instantly.&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span></p>
<h3>Q: You've been running innovation and design workshops for a while now. What are your strategies for facilitating successful collaboration?</h3>
<p><strong>J: </strong>There are lots of details to consider, many of which we captured in our book, <a href="https://www.mural.co/ebook" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Facilitating Remote Workshops</a>. But at a high level, there are two overarching principles that guide my style of remote facilitation.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The first is to <b>design an experience</b> for the workshop in advance. When I give in-person workshops, I can improvise some of it on the spot. It&rsquo;s also possible to observe progress in a room and determine if a person or group is lost. In remote settings, that&rsquo;s harder to do.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Laying out your workshop visually in MURAL forces you to break things down and get more granularity. Instead of 30-minute chunks of time, you want to think in 10-minute or even 5-minute chunks. <i>And you want to be much more explicit about your instructions: don&rsquo;t leave anything to chance</i>. This requires more upfront planning and preparation, but you gain that time back afterward with reduced consolidation and transcription time.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The second thing to consider is how to <b>maintain engagement</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You have to get creative on how you can involve others and get their participation with the tools available to you. I find using a range of inputs and planning for frequent calls for participation increases engagement. For instance, you might share your audio and video with a conferencing tool like Zoom. But also consider how you can use the chat function for quick polls and inputs. Or use an online polling tool like Menti for live input. Adding interaction in a MURAL canvas increases the engagement even more.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>When you put it all together&mdash;a designed experience with frequent engagement&mdash;you can not only keep a group&rsquo;s attention for four or more hours, you also get better results.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Q: Tell us more about the Jobs To Be Done toolkit. We're especially interested in how it could be used to advocate for change.</h3>
<p><strong>J:</strong> The <a href="https://www.jtbdtoolkit.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">JTBD Toolkit</a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is a follow-up project to my book, The</span> <a href="https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">JTBD Playbook</a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The two complement each other. The book covers a lot of ground work and points to other resources to learn more. It&rsquo;s really a hub of resources to get started with. The Toolkit focuses on deepening knowledge and skills around core concepts of JTBD, so it&rsquo;s a lot more focused. We also offer live workshops each month through the Toolkit. Combined with our monthly webinar, it&rsquo;s really a place for ongoing conversations and learning around the topic of JTBD.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>For me, Jobs To Be Done is a way of seeing the people you serve independent of technology or solutions, including your own. This gives you a new and unique perspective on your business and points to hidden opportunities. The techniques of JTBD guide you in finding new possibilities through a structured language of analysis and techniques for modeling human behavior.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Q: And finally, tell us what work-life balance means to you today?</h3>
<p><strong>J:</strong> Great question. Not sure if anyone really knows the answer to that, do they? But one thing I&rsquo;m finding more and more is people seeking purposeful, meaningful work. Employers pay you in money, which is a renewable resource for them. In return, you give them your time, which is a finite resource you never get back. If you&rsquo;re going to spend ⅓ of your day working on something, it should be meaningful and rewarding to you.</p>
<p>So, yes: things like flex-time and the option to work from home may contribute to better work-life balance. For sure, we want colleagues at MURAL to have that control over their time and work. But at a deeper level, working for something you really care about brings work-life balance as well.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

Welcome to the first in a series of Future of Work interviews by Qatalog. In this series you’ll hear from global business leaders championing and defining new ways of work.

Jim Kalbach on the future of team collaboration | Qatalog

If you had to introduce yourself in one sentence, what would you say? I’m MURAL’s Chief Evangelist, committed to spreading our mission of new ways of working together and leveraging collective imagination through visual methods anywhere, anytime. The “future of work” topic is receiving a lot of attention. What trends ...

Jim Kalbach on the future of team collaboration

<p>Our meeting habits are outdated. Scheduling another &ldquo;quick call&rdquo; takes seconds and ends up becoming a business black hole. This isn&rsquo;t to say that all meetings are a giant time suck, just that our communication solutions almost always come back to speaking with someone face-to-face.&nbsp;</p>
<p>There exists a disconnect between the working world and the importance of meetings because we all think that ours is the exception. Yet we&rsquo;ve been bombarded with statistic after statistic alerting us to the fact that meetings aren&rsquo;t getting us anywhere.&nbsp;</p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">67% of workers say meetings <a href="https://www.kornferry.com/about-us//press/working-or-wasting-time" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">distract them from their ability to make an impact</a> at work.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">71% of professionals </span><a href="https://www.booqed.com/blog/minutes-wasted-of-meeting-50-shocking-meeting-statistics" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">waste time every week</a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> due to unnecessary or canceled meetings.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A study predicted the cost of <a href="https://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/7-critical-ways-productive-people-prepare-for-meetings.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">poorly organized meetings</a> to reach <a href="https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/a-new-study-of-19000000-meetings-reveals-that-meetings-waste-more-time-than-ever-but-there-is-a-solution.html" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">$399 billion in the U.S.</a> and $58 billion in the U.K.</li>
</ul>
<p>Effective meetings don&rsquo;t just happen &mdash; they require strategizing and iterating. Just as you would analyze a marketing campaign or a product redesign, your meeting format should constantly be evolving to allow employees to perform better and build successful meeting strategies.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>The secret formula on how to run better meetings</h2>
<p>Meeting management is a skill that everyone has to build, but hardly any of us have formal training in successful meeting strategies.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve accepted the norm that most of our meetings aren&rsquo;t going to be productive, yet we return to them week after week. Understanding what makes an effective meeting and how to create one is an essential skill for any employee.</p>
<p>Most effective meetings meet the following criteria:</p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">There&rsquo;s a clear plan, and everyone has access to it ahead of time</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">There are apparent and attainable objectives</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Everyone is engaged&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">They produce results</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">And have a worthy cause that couldn&rsquo;t possibly be accomplished asynchronously</li>
</ul>
<h2><strong>So, what&rsquo;s on the agenda?</strong></h2>
<p>You scheduled an hour-long check-in with your team to troubleshoot a project blocker. But now it&rsquo;s 11:56, and two people have yet to share anything about the project. You check your calendar and realize that one of those two people has a call right after this meeting and can&rsquo;t stay on past 12. Something went wrong here, and it&rsquo;s critical that this doesn&rsquo;t become a recurring issue for your team.</p>
<p>According to a Better Meetings survey, the number one choice for meeting challenges is <a href="https://bettermeetings.expert/meeting-statistics/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">off-topic conversations</a>. Setting an agenda with a schedule and detailed talking points is one way to ensure the conversation stays on track and relevant to what you&rsquo;re trying to accomplish.&nbsp;<if you="" rsquo="" re="" used="" to="" simply="" sharing="" a="" google="" calendar="" invite="" with="" zoom="" link="" attached="" save="" time="" by="" allowing="" everyone="" come="" the="" meeting="" informed="" and="" prepared="" agenda="" s="" content="" can="" include="" detailed="" schedule="" discussion="" points="" or="" questions="" that="" need="" be="" covered="" objectives="" even="" links="" documents="" your="" participants="" stay="" on="" track="" p=""></if></p>
<h3>Share your meeting agenda early and often</h3>
<p>Including your meeting agenda in your calendar invite or email is the first step, but you should also make sure it&rsquo;s widely available through your company&rsquo;s work hub. Remind yourself the day before the meeting to send the agenda around again to ensure maximum engagement.</p>
<h3>Effective meeting tip: Schedule your meeting 5 minutes after the hour</h3>
<p>This scheduling trick saves everyone&rsquo;s sanity, allows for a bathroom or coffee break, and ensures meetings begin on time. Instead of starting a discussion at 11:00, schedule it for 11:05. It gives everyone five extra minutes to arrive refreshed and prepared with the correct documents and materials ready.&nbsp;</p>
<h2><strong>Increase meeting engagement</strong></h2>
<p>We all know what video conference fatigue feels like at this point.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Something to consider: if you sent a survey around after your meeting asking your attendees if it was necessary in the first place &mdash; how many would respond <i>&ldquo;no?&rdquo;</i></p>
<p>If your meeting isn&rsquo;t building forward momentum, you can&rsquo;t expect your coworkers to contribute. It would simply be a waste of their time and yours.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Now that your meeting has a set schedule and concrete objectives, encourage <b>active participation</b> and <b>contribution</b>. These two factors look different for everyone, so it&rsquo;s essential to define them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>An <b>active meeting participant</b> answers questions, takes notes, and follows along. This could look like unmuting themselves in a Zoom conference and answering a question or simply giving a thumbs up with an emoji when asked. While this person has a positive impact on the meeting, they are doing so passively.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Whereas a <b>meeting contributor</b> helps shape the results of the meeting. Contributors can be meeting leaders or attendees who come to the table with data to share, ideas to offer, or questions that help solve problems.&nbsp;</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.danpink.com/resources/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Daniel Pink</a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, researcher and speaker on the topic of motivation and author of the book </span><i>Drive</i>, people need these three elements to &ldquo;buy-in&rdquo; to what you are saying to contribute fully.&nbsp;</p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Autonomy &mdash; Give your employees some control over their work, and have them report out on specific findings at your next meeting.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mastery <span style="font-weight: 400;">&mdash; </span>People want to succeed and are driven to help. Call out someone at each meeting who has accomplished something you admire, and make sure to get to everyone eventually.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Purpose <span style="font-weight: 400;">&mdash; Do they see the connection to the greater mission and their role in it? Get specific about your &ldquo;why&rdquo; and vocalize it at each meeting.</span></li>
</ul>
<h3>Effective meeting tip<span style="font-weight: 400;">: Everyone&rsquo;s WFH environment is different&nbsp;</span></h3>
<p>Participation looks different in every meeting, for every knowledge worker. Our <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/new-way-of-work/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=effective-meeting&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">work-from-home environments</a> are varied, and keeping this in mind is extremely important for <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-to-lead-distributed-teams/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=effective-meeting&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">distributed team leadership</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<h2><strong>Run meetings that get <i>results</i></strong></h2>
<p>Nobody wants to miss a meeting that is integral to their success, or the company&rsquo;s, as long as they understand and expect it to be an essential step toward progress. Create a culture where missing last Monday&rsquo;s weekly briefing means you missed an opportunity to shine, to <a href="https://qatalog.com/projects/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=effective-meeting&amp;utm_content=projects" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">take on a new project</a>, or to give input that elevates others&rsquo; respect for you amongst your colleagues.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The secret? Take your typical meeting time, consisting of a 30-minute data briefing, and cut that time in half. Use the second half of the meeting to create actionable steps, discuss the best paths forward, and <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=effective-meeting&amp;utm_content=goals" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">create a clear-cut goal with a deadline</a>.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">All employees should leave the meeting with an understanding that includes:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What next steps will take place to achieve results</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The deadline for these steps</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Who the stakeholders and dependencies are</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">What barriers they might face, and a few paths through them</li>
</ul>
<p>At the beginning of the next meeting, take the first few minutes to praise and acknowledge those results from last time to increase continuity in expectations and accountability. Everyone will know you mean business for next time.</p>
<h3>Effective meeting tip<span style="font-weight: 400;">: Assess the value of your recurring meetings</span></h3>
<p>A lot of meetings have a historical significance to them and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/virtual-meetings-audio-insights/" rel="follow">haven&rsquo;t been assessed for their practical value since inception</a>. That progress report that&rsquo;s been on the calendar since before you joined the company? Maybe that would be better off as an asynchronous meeting.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>A work hub can eliminate the need for meetings</h2>
<p>With a work hub, you can follow updates to projects you&rsquo;re subscribed to without adding sync time to everyone&rsquo;s calendar. Everything is discoverable &mdash; from goal completion to the documentation you&rsquo;ve been searching for.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>Meeting agendas, project notes, and the actual work can connect together in a work hub to ensure you&rsquo;re not using meetings as a productivity crutch. Instead, you&rsquo;re giving your team back the time they deserve.</p>
<p></p>

In a distributed world, effective meetings look a little different. A few of our effective meeting tips to help you run better meetings.

How to run effective meetings | Qatalog Blog

It’s time to makeover your meetings. Check out the traits of a truly effective meeting, including establishing an agenda, engaging all employees, running asynchronous sessions, and more.

How to run effective meetings — and how to know when to share an async update instead

<p>Our collaboration habits needed a revamp before the switch to remote work. Many of our tools actively contributed to negative working habits, allowing for an <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/workload-management-snowball-and-the-meteor/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">explosion of friction points for distributed workers.</a> And goal-setting is one of those fundamental tasks that, without proper discoverability and contribution, can begin to break an organization from the top down.&nbsp;</p>
<p>We can&rsquo;t keep looking through the rearview mirror. Goal-setting is an entirely new game when it has to align remote workers, and completely unique for hybrid teams. It&rsquo;s up to us to connect purpose with innovative teamwork and transparency. That means getting everyone on board with the bigger picture.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>How we think about the big picture at Qatalog</h2>
<p>Sometimes, the big picture can feel like a moving target between teams. It&rsquo;s the nature of start-up work to ebb and flow, that comes with the territory. And because we have a team that spans 24 languages and 14 nationalities, we had to find a way to keep everyone connected.</p>
<p>This is where our work hub comes into play. When it comes to big-picture thinking, teams need visibility in order to create momentum. Without it, progress remains stagnant and impossible to build upon.</p>
<p>Keeping 30 people involved with big-picture goals may seem like a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but the truth is that when everyone has a <a href="https://qatalog.com/goals/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">designated touchpoint that impacts the company</a>, we all feel more engaged with our daily tasks. Plus, opening big-picture thinking to the whole team allows for new, innovative ideas.&nbsp;</p>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Involve your team in the big picture</span></h2>
<p>Big-picture thinking is the bird&rsquo;s eye view of everything.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In a traditional office setting, many companies cover the big picture through face-to-face meetings such as weekly all-hands. Oftentimes, these meetings have to consist of big-picture thinking because of time constraints &mdash; summarizing details is extremely important to keep everyone invested.&nbsp;</p>
<p>With a distributed team, we move from physical space to digital space. Collaboration moves entirely to our tools in a combination of async and sync communication models. Considering these tools, we should be more connected than ever before with fewer communication barriers. Teams <i>should be</i> communicating exactly how their goals fit into the big picture across the organization in a discoverable format that improves upon the way we did things before.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In reality, we have a lot of things working against us: hyper-connectivity that leads to context switching, hard-shelled silos that seem impossible to break through, and a reliance on tools that often contribute to distraction.</p>
<p>Bring the big picture back into this environment, and it&rsquo;s hard to provide visibility to disconnected employees. We need to take a look at the crutches we&rsquo;ve leaned on that are hindering collaboration, and analyze <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/what-is-a-work-hub/" rel="follow">how to bring our distributed teams together</a> to accomplish these common goals.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Make company goals transparent for the whole team</h3>
<p>The first step to engage a distributed team in the big picture is to make company goals discoverable to every employee. Company goals are the north star. They inform all teams where they should direct their focus. And as a team lead or manager, it's essential to find tools to help effectively communicate those goals.</p>
<p>Creating company goals in a work hub aligns teams and gives everyone transparency into the <i>"why"</i> for their projects. Anyone can assign goals and track progress, so accountability is evident. And if there are questions, team members know exactly who they need to speak with for clarity.</p>
<h3>Give employees space to push back on big-picture goals</h3>
<p>The days of business leaders getting together behind closed doors to discuss strategy and quarterly goals are over. Modern work has brought with it the expectation of transparent, equitable decision-making. And since we know that <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">diverse teams are more innovative,</a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> we can utilize this when we think about creating company goals.</span></p>
<p>Once you've started a conversation about big-picture goals, encourage your team to provide feedback. Allowing your team to share their concerns and ideas will make them feel more connected to the "why" and the purpose of the big-picture goals.</p>
<h3>Communicate across teams</h3>
<p>Disconnected teams wreak havoc on production and in turn produce more work to be done.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Unfortunately, siloes are an all too familiar issue when it comes to remote work. When teams have transparency within them as well as the teams around them, they can fill in the gaps and see how their work plays a part in achieving company goals.</p>
<h3>Collaborate regularly</h3>
<p>Prior to remote work, our collaboration practices didn&rsquo;t have to solve many of these pain points. They were just a regular part of our working day, <span style="font-weight: 400;">not a major talking point for fixing work&rsquo;s problems. Today, we look at collaboration differently. Not only is it integral to a company&rsquo;s success, but it&rsquo;s also what holds teams together.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Collaboration is important for every step of setting and meeting goals. If your team is unaware of what you&rsquo;re trying to accomplish, you can&rsquo;t be held accountable for the work you&rsquo;re doing. This works on every level of the company. If teams can&rsquo;t collaborate on company goals, there&rsquo;s no point to having them in the first place. Make sure your big-picture goals are <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">discoverable and transparent</a> with the entire organization to allow for the level of <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/collaboration-software-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow">collaboration you need to succeed</a>.&nbsp;</span></p>
<h3>Develop OKRs</h3>
<p>OKRs are a basic goal-setting framework. They identify the big-picture goal or objective and use key results to track and measure the goal's status.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Before writing OKRs, hold a brainstorming session to decide what problems or challenges you&rsquo;re trying to solve. Then think about what objective you can create to solve that problem. Lastly, identify the steps or key results needed to accomplish your goal.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Many companies have organization-wide OKRs &mdash; such as what the company hopes to achieve in the quarter or year. Company OKRs are great for employees to see the company's overall health, but it's also helpful to have team-level OKRs. You can collaborate with your team on these OKRs to identify what your team needs to do to contribute to the company's big-picture goals. If you work with a small or midsize team, you can also create OKRs for each person. Giving someone a goal to work toward throughout a specific time helps keep your team motivated and productive.</span></p>
<h3>Use tech to connect the team around big-picture goals</h3>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tech is not an end-all, be-all solution for remote teams. We now know that a lot of our work practices were outdated, and reliance on tools doesn&rsquo;t automatically fix the systematic changes that exist. At the same time, tools are necessary to optimize your remote team. Collaboration will be slowed down without them.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>This is why work hubs work. A work hub brings all the functionalities of your existing tools together under one roof, minimizing the pain point of adding just one more tool while connecting your team, wherever they are. Once you set up your work hub, you can <a href="https://qatalog.com/search/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">find anything you're looking for</a> with a quick search. You can also set OKRs, assign projects, connect with team members, and organize documents from one place.&nbsp;</p>
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How to connect your distributed team around big picture goals

Improve big picture thinking | Qatalog blog

Goal-setting is an entirely new game when it has to align remote workers, and it’s up to us to connect purpose with innovative teamwork and transparency.

Qatalog organizes the ingredients of collaboration

✓Align on goals ✓Centralize projects ✓Connect work across all your tools ✓Automate processes ✓Build belonging

Bring your team together with a work hub

Give your team the space for deep work & productive asynchronous collaboration

Single-click integrations with the tools you’re already using.

A work hub makes your current tools speak to one another. Rather than always searching for the next tool to level up your collaboration, a work hub brings the best out of existing tools.

Qatalog organizes the ingredients of collaboration

✓Align on goals ✓Centralize projects ✓Connect work across all your tools ✓Automate processes ✓Build belonging

Bring your team together with a work hub

Give your team the space for deep work & productive asynchronous collaboration

Single-click integrations with the tools you’re already using.

A work hub makes your current tools speak to one another. Rather than always searching for the next tool to level up your collaboration, a work hub brings the best out of existing tools.

Jim Kalbach on the future of team collaboration

How to run effective meetings — and how to know when to share an async update instead

How big-picture thinking can inspire innovative teamwork