Case study

How to complete an eight-handed assignment remotely with Klaxoon

PRO

Level
In-person
Remote
Shared by 
Léa Ferrer
Malakoff Humanis, Communication Officer in Master 1 Social and HR Management at INSEEC

Coordinating in teams for school work never is a piece of cake! Léa Ferrer, a student at INSEEC in M1 Social and HR Management has experienced this for her work psychology assignment. With 4 students, a common project and a global lockdown, how does one collaborate with the distance? Léa chose the Klaxoon Board to bring together her classmates around a common support and brainstorm remotely. Discover how a simple Board saved Léa's assignment!

From (non) phone collaboration to visual management

November 2020. Léa Ferrer is a communications officer in a work-study program at Malakoff Humanis and in a Master's degree program in Social and HR Management at INSEEC. Her psychology professor gives her students an assignment: to identify the links between work psychology and human resources functions. In groups of 4, the students had to answer 4 questions on the subject in around 15 pages.

As the state of lockdown had been declared, Léa and her classmates are looking for the best way to work together while being apart. "We start by making phone calls in conference mode. We take notes individually, but the truth is, it doesn't really get us anywhere because no one is really sharing." In order to tackle this pressing issue, Lea suggests changing the method and using Klaxoon.

As part of her work at Malakoff Humanis, she already uses Klaxoon to facilitate the use of digital tools by MH employees.

The goal was to gain clarity and efficiency, that we could all see concretely what to work on together.

A whiteboard to co-construct the assignment

Lea decides to use Board, the visual workspace, in order to have an open platform to share and work collectively. She starts by buildsing her Board so that each participant can intervene and put their ideas forward. She establishes a dedicated area for each question and picks a color code so that the ideas are immediately categorized.

  • In yellow, the cognitive biases
  • In purple, the definition of bias
  • In blue, concrete examples
  • And in green, useful links

To go through all these items, she draws a table. In this table, each column corresponds to a line of thought to be followed in order to answer the question of the assignment.

She does all of her setting up before sending the Board to the other participants, in order to create a unique and shared framework.

Thanks to the preparation ahead, they can ideate and ultimately gain in productivity. 

Efficient teamwork with Board

To answer the different questions they form pairs, each of which focuses on one axis and puts their ideas on the Board. Then, once everyone is done with this step, they move on to the next axis. Thanks to the board and the ideas that appear one by one on the different areas, everyone finds that group thinking is made easier. Each pair can present their ideas to the other team and challenge each other to come up with more.

It's easier to challenge each other on simple ideas than on already written content. When we work together, we use Messenger to call each other and orally explain the ideas we put on the Board.

In parallel, the Board becomes the basis for writing the final deliverable, the famous dossier. And the icing on the cake, thanks to a few screenshots, it's very easy for them to show the progress of the project to their teacher so that she can also bounce ideas off of them or refer them to others.

In between work sessions, Lea goes over the board to organize the categories and make sure that the board structure is still relevant to their assignment. And in just a few sessions, it's ready.

Collaboration made easier, even at a distance


Lea is thrilled to have been able to use Board for her assignment, and so are her classmates. While she was the only one in her group to know Klaxoon and its Board before the project, all the participants were able to familiarize themselves with it in no time, thanks to its design being highly intuitive.

While distance and confinement made it very difficult for them to collaborate, the Klaxoon Board made up for it.

Thanks to the Klaxoon Board, we were able to directly confront our ideas and establish an exchange rather than having one person give his ideas.

Exchanges have been facilitated, their productivity and the quality of their ideas have increased. Léa estimates that she has divided her work time by 2, thanks to the use of Klaxoon.  And as a little bonus, as Lea herself explains, "We had a lot of fun".

For Lea, the benefits of Klaxoon lie in its ease of use. Thanks to the Board, she and her classmates could easily :

- move on to writing the deliverable, using the ideas and charts on their Board. Everything is clear and visual.
- assign tasks to each other, divide up the parts to be written and ultimately improve their collaboration.

Each new idea made us bounce off another, and one thing led to another and we built the case, with ideas we hadn't thought of at first.

Despite the distance, thanks to Board, Léa transforms the brainstorming meetings of her assignment into iterative workshops, during which the collective intelligence of her group revealed itself.

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