Join us as we walk through “A Day in the Life of a Fuzer,” a blog series focused on how people communicate and their day-to-day experiences with technology in the workplace
I’m passionate about visualization and communication technologies that accelerate the creative process. Before my #FuzeLife started, I spent my career in creative services leading a company that worked on films including Iron Man, Hunger Games, and Avatar so I could tell many interesting day-in-the-life type stories.
For a creative project to really shine, it typically isn’t about one person. Yes, it’s about your instinct and the instincts of the team. But it also relies on having an environment that promotes team collaboration whether connecting people down the hall or around the globe.
It takes a village.
Whether huddled in a war room or spread out across thousands of miles, teams that rely on collaboration – as part of their primary task to create, to build something together – need to stay connected. There’s so much more to team interaction than formalities and action items. It’s about establishing rapport, building trust, and holding one another accountable.
Collaboration isn’t just a nice to have, and that’s why the right technology is essential. The right tools enable collaboration while ensuring quality and project efficiency.
How does UC make its mark on the creative process?
- Collaboration requires the ability to assess non-verbal cues. 90 percent of communication is non-verbal so just think about how much you are missing when you are on a regular phone call. Video conferencing is the gift that keeps on giving. But video collaboration doesn’t shine only for standing calls and major presentations. It can be used in an ad hoc manner when you need immediate feedback. Or it can support more formal face-to-face interactions to drive consensus, speed up decision making, or attain approvals.
- Get into the right workstream. With remote teams, you should be aware of individual communication preferences. Whether it’s asynchronous messaging for fast feedback or real-time interaction when you need to track reactions, creative teams crave a solution to keep the work flowing. For example, you can send a message to a colleague asking a quick question about reviewing the latest specs, but it may make more sense to jump on a video call with screen sharing so you can review the same document at the same time.
- Feedback should reflect real-time changes. To move any creative process forward, feedback must be documented. When that feedback cannot happen face to face, rich media that is high quality and supports markup tools that are persistent and in the context that which has been reviewed, should be used for later reference. Think about how valuable persistent co-editable meeting notes would be to help set agendas, document feedback, and record follow up tasks. If a picture is the equivalent of 1000 words, what about a picture or a frame of video with annotations that help drive the next round of changes in the creative process? That process should be as natural as working together at a whiteboard and with the right tech, it can be that way.
- Communication fluidity improves team feedback loops. While groups should establish a consistent solution for team collaboration, they should be unrestricted to choose the device or mode of communication to use in the given moment, in the office or on the go. When using an app to share ideas, people need the ability to move freely from text-based chat to audio to video, all while being able to view the documents they’re working on together. This is a game-changer when it comes to making last-minute decisions and looping in team members. Bring more to the table by allowing more voices to contribute.
- Version control helps track progress. It is crazy to think that we are still talking about version control in the creative process, but it is still problematic today. Collaboration can be painful when time is wasted looking through email or searching through cloud storage to find the right version of a document. With shorter deadlines and resource constraints, it’s important to know that everyone is aligned and working efficiently. Having the ability to co-edit documents with the right productivity apps and to keeping your communication and relevant materials in one place means that documents and comments won’ be lost in email, conversations will build toward an outcome, and tasks will get completed.
With Fuze, work is finally working. We power every business conversation, whether it’s a quick chat between a creative director and a designer to a video conference with 10 people iterating on the latest prototype. To get a sense of what is possible, walk through the day in the life of a Fuzer in our latest video.
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