Collaborating within a team where every moment matters

The challenges we face

Working in a remote team comes with its challenges. Touch points are sporadic, and meetings are precious, sprinkled in here and there as sparingly as possible. For teams operating on a global scale, there is the eternal time zone struggle: when a meeting is penciled in early morning for some of the team, it falls late in the evening for others.

At Team draw.io, we aren’t just diagramming subject experts, we are real people working in a remote team. Our situation is rather unique: we have a cluster of colleagues spread across Europe. The other half of our team is distributed across North America, from the west coast of Canada, all the way down to North Carolina! As with many other teams, we struggle with aspects of remote teamwork, but we’ve also learned a few tips along the way, to make things easier and more efficient.

In this blogpost, we’ll be looking at some of the ways we at draw.io use the tool to overcome challenges we face by working as a remote team. See our very own tried-and-tested internal processes below!

draw.io’s tried-and-tested solutions

1. Real-time collaboration

draw.io is known for facilitating real-time collaboration by enabling users to work together live on diagrams. As a team, we use this functionality to:

• brainstorm ideas;
• plan topics for our content campaigns;
• map out our internal team processes;
• run Agile check-ins and retros.

– All of this is done in draw.io!

Real-time collaboration on a bull’s eye diagram for campaign brainstorming

We use draw.io in Confluence Cloud ourselves, but we have also massively improved collaborative editing in draw.io in Confluence DC. Multiple Data Center users can work on the same diagram at the same time, and now they are able to view changes made to the diagram after a minimal delay while draw.io regularly polls the Confluence DC instance to check for these changes. Your administrator can specify the synchronization speed with which these changes appear for all users.

2. Clarify your processes

In a remote team, it’s much harder to get everyone on the same page and ensure processes are followed consistently. What’s more, it’s not time-efficient to pencil in a meeting every time you want to remind your teammates how a given process works.

At draw.io, we use a range of diagrams to visualize our internal processes. These highlight who’s responsible for which task areas, and ultimately how our processes work from start to finish. We make sure these diagrams are regularly kept up-to-date, and that they are shared with the right people and relevant new starters, so everyone on the team is in the loop and has access to the information they need to succeed.

Our content creation process from start to finish

3. Work transparently

We use draw.io in Confluence – the two go hand-in-hand for us, we couldn’t live without one or the other! We want the power of visualization to show our teammates, colleagues, and stakeholders important information in an accessible and digestible way, but always within the context of wider documentation.

Referring back to our campaign brainstorming process: This diagram does not exist by itself, but forms part of a wider discussion that considered our campaign goal, target audience, and any initial ideas that we want to flesh out in the team meeting.

The bull’s eye diagram within the campaign kickoff Confluence page

As this is a diagram within a Confluence page that all team members are collaborating on, it’s inevitable that at some point somebody accidentally deletes a section of the diagram they shouldn’t have, or revises the Confluence page entirely, without having fully grasped the context of what was there before.

In these situations, you can use draw.io’s revision history to see who made specific edits and when, and then choose to either retain those changes or revert the diagram to a previous version. Similarly, you can utilize Confluence’s page history for tracking and restoring changes to the page content. This means, for example, you are able to revert a draw.io diagram to a previous version, without affecting the content in the Confluence page itself.

4. Successful onboarding

It can be challenging to onboard team members remotely – there are just some things that are very difficult to replicate online like an office environment, and establishing trust.

We want to provide an inclusive environment where our new teammates feel welcome and comfortable. We strive to find a balance between sharing information while not overwhelming newbies at the beginning, and we give them the space and opportunity, and actively encourage them, to voice questions and challenge processes early on.

For our new colleagues, we have a welcome Confluence page with key information about the team members and their roles. We also have a diagram embedded in the page, with linked shapes that take the new starter to the relevant pages they need to get going. This is a great way of helping our new teammates navigate Confluence and draw.io if they’re unfamiliar with these and ensures that, alongside 1-1 meetings and check-ins, they have everything they need to thrive on the team.

A draw.io diagram containing key links shared during onboarding

Remotely interested in better ways of working?

We hope our 4 tips help you and your teams work better together and more cohesively, and have inspired you to try new and different ways to incorporate draw.io diagrams into your daily working, to make remote working work for you and your teammates.

Want to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on social media and learn how others use draw.io, as well as pick up some helpful tips and tricks.