One of the biggest things I’ve noticed over the last two years since teams shifted to remote work is the impact on collaboration. It’s really easy to do all your work in isolation without talking to anyone when you’re at home away from your team all the time.
Unfortunately, creative work suffers that way.
Work designed in a vacuum is limited to your own thoughts, opinions and perspectives. While that may be great in fine art, that’s not what effectively communicating to an audience is about. You need to connect with your audience, which sometimes means breaking out of your own preconceived biases. Collaboration achieves that.
Creative work is always better when it’s collaborative. It’s been my experience throughout my career that the concepts I come up with always become better with select input from others.
Always.
Ideas certainly start individually. You can go on your own, put pencil to paper and come up with them, but at a certain point, you need to stop, share, refine and improve.
When you’re working from home, that means making the extra effort to foster collaboration, even if virtually.
here are my three steps to achieving that:
Step 1: Identify your team and or collaborators.
Create a go to list of trusted collaborators. This may be the people on your team, clients or people you’ve worked with before and admire. Keep this list small.
Step 2: Send them your work and be clear about what you want from them.
Be clear about what you want when sending your work to your collaborators. What would be helpful? Whether it’s specific feedback, editing or design input, make what you need clear to them. This is the time to also do further research or even audience interviews to help shape your concept.
Step 3: Apply select feedback and refine your work.
Review all the feedback from your collaborators, but don’t apply each and every piece of feedback you receive. Look for the commonalities and pieces in their resonate and apply that. If you apply every single person’s feedback your work can end up generic when you need strong and concise.
Try this out with your next project. Make the time to find your pool of collaborators and critically apply some of that feedback – your work will thank you for it.
