The Real Value of Interactive Whiteboards

Does Anyone Really Use Interactive Whiteboards for Remote Meetings?

In what seemed like an overnight shift, our new normal became virtual meetings, webinars, online classes, and digital conferences. As we continue to navigate this new normal, the idea of working from home has become more prevalent. With a mass majority of companies and schools transitioning to a hybrid, if not, a completely remote environment, it goes without saying, remote and hybrid work is here to stay. So, the question we are now faced with is, “how do we ensure that our meetings don’t suck?”

As the numbers continue to increase with the idea of working from home, many are wondering if interactive whiteboards are useful for team collaborations. Roughly 1 million of the 32 million global corporate boardrooms are equipped with some form of interactive whiteboard. But do they really help? I have found that interactive whiteboards in most boardrooms collect dust or are being used as glorified TVs to project the typical PowerPoint presentation. Or they are used as ‘one-click to join meeting’ devices. Is there nothing better for these devices?

The Problems with Interactive Whiteboards

From a use case point of view, interactive whiteboards have been and are still being sold with the promise of complex collaborations where you can do all sorts of things. Manufacturers make promises about how dozens of people can connect and write at the same time and how we are all going to diagram everything in our next meeting. Fun fact, most people don’t do that! When was the last time you asked ten of your colleagues to collaborate with you on the same google doc simultaneously? The truth is this seldom happens.

The issue our industry faces is, team collaborations are oversold, and we target the wrong personas. Manufacturers routinely go after complex uses cases such as engineers, architects, and designers where they are all ‘designing’ together or ‘collaborating’ together.