Companies have become increasingly international, distributed and remote. Sometimes this is the result of expansion or acquisitions, creating organizations with offices spread across countries and continents. Sometimes it is simply the consequence of changing employee expectations: people want to work from home, avoid long commutes and have more flexibility in where they live. And increasingly, companies deliberately recruit internationally to access scarce skills, broader talent pools, competitive labor markets, local customer presence and language expertise. The traditional assumption that the best team is one sitting together in the same building is rapidly disappearing.
Technology has made much of this transition surprisingly natural. Tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams have made remote communication part of everyday work, while platforms such as SharePoint, Confluence and Notion allow teams to collaborate on information and documents. JIRA, Asana and Trello help coordinate work across locations and time zones, and international employment platforms (like Deel) have made it considerably easier to build teams across borders. As a result, for much of our day-to-day operational work, physical proximity is no longer a prerequisite for effective collaboration.
Yet there is one area where many organizations still hesitate: creative and strategic collaboration. When defining company values, identifying USPs, developing a business case, solving a complex problem or exploring an innovation opportunity, our instinct is often to bring everybody together. Flights are booked, hotel rooms reserved and calendars blocked for a one- or two-day workshop. There are good reasons for doing so. Physical interaction makes it easier to read body language, spontaneous conversations happen naturally and taking people away from their normal workplace creates focus and shared energy. It can also strengthen relationships and team spirit, particularly for teams that rarely meet face-to-face.
But there is a significant price attached to that experience. There are the obvious travel, hotel and venue costs, but there is also the less visible cost of people’s time. A one-day workshop can easily become a two- or three-day commitment when international travel is involved. More importantly, a successful workshop is not necessarily a productive workshop. Everyone may leave the room energized, carrying photographs of colorful walls covered in sticky notes, only to return to their normal responsibilities the following morning. Two weeks later, remarkably little may have happened. The problem is therefore not simply whether a workshop should be physical or remote. A more interesting question is: how can we make creative workshops shorter, more focused and more outcome-driven?
Remote collaboration can actually force us to rethink the traditional workshop format. Trying to reproduce an eight-hour physical brainstorming session on a video call is almost guaranteed to fail. Attention spans are shorter online and video interaction is mentally exhausting. Instead of one full-day workshop, it is often more effective to organize several focused sessions of approximately 60 to 120 minutes. This has an additional advantage: the time between sessions can become part of the creative process. Participants can research, reflect, validate assumptions or develop ideas individually before bringing them back to the group. In other words, remote brainstorming does not have to mean doing the same workshop through a webcam. It can mean designing a better process.
That process should combine synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Not everything requires ten people to be present at exactly the same moment. Before a workshop, participants can receive the problem statement, background information and relevant data and contribute their initial ideas independently. Those contributions can then become the starting point for a shorter live session focused on discussion, prioritization and decision-making. Afterwards, decisions, owners and actions can again be handled asynchronously. The valuable synchronous time is reserved for the activities where human interaction genuinely adds value.
This also helps solve one of the weaknesses of traditional brainstorming. In a physical room, the loudest or most senior participants can unintentionally dominate the discussion. Giving people time to contribute ideas individually before discussing them collectively can create a more inclusive and diverse idea pool. Someone who needs twenty minutes to think through a problem should not automatically have less influence than someone who can formulate an opinion within twenty seconds. Well-designed asynchronous preparation can therefore complement rather than weaken the creativity of the group.
The live sessions themselves require a different rhythm. In a physical workshop, a facilitator can immediately see when attention is fading, someone looks confused or two participants want to contribute. Online, much of that body language disappears or becomes harder to interpret. Interaction therefore needs to be much more deliberate. Polls, virtual whiteboards, breakout rooms, voting, chat, quick reactions and regular questions can keep participants actively involved. A useful principle is to create some form of interaction every few minutes rather than allowing one person to speak for extended periods. For larger or strategically important sessions, having two facilitators can also be extremely effective: one leads the discussion while the other monitors chat, questions, timing and participation.
Some basic meeting discipline becomes even more important remotely. Participants should treat a creative session as if they were physically sitting in a workshop room: close email, silence notifications and put the phone aside. Cameras should generally remain on during interactive discussions because facial expressions provide valuable feedback that would otherwise disappear. Good audio matters even more than perfect video, making a headset or decent microphone a worthwhile investment. Simple conventions such as raising a digital hand, muting when necessary and agreeing beforehand whether a session may be recorded remove friction and make interaction more natural. Remote etiquette may sound trivial, but collectively these small behaviors determine whether participants feel that they are in a workshop or merely listening to another video call while answering emails.
Tooling matters too, but perhaps less than we sometimes think. There is no shortage of digital whiteboards, collaboration platforms, polling applications and idea-management tools. The temptation is to solve remote collaboration by introducing yet another platform. The better question is whether the technology supports the process without becoming the process. Participants should spend their mental energy thinking about the problem, not figuring out which button creates a virtual sticky note. The best tool is often simply the one that everybody can use comfortably and that captures ideas and decisions in a form that remains accessible after the session.
And that last point may be the most important. Whether a workshop happens in Brussels, London, Singapore or on a video call, its value should ultimately be measured by what happens afterwards. A workshop should end with more than ideas. Promising concepts need owners, decisions need to be documented, assumptions need to be tested and next steps need deadlines. Short follow-up sessions or asynchronous check-ins can maintain momentum without filling everybody’s calendar with yet another recurring meeting. The objective should not be to maximize collaboration time, but to maximize progress resulting from collaboration.
Physical workshops will certainly not disappear, nor should they. Meeting colleagues in person creates relationships, trust and spontaneous interactions that remain difficult to reproduce digitally. For major strategic moments or when a new team needs to build strong relationships, bringing people together can be well worth the investment. But physical presence should become a conscious choice rather than a default assumption. The question should no longer be, “Can we possibly do this remotely?” but rather, “Which parts of this process genuinely become better when we are together?”
Perhaps that is the real opportunity created by remote work. It forces us to reconsider not only where we collaborate, but how we collaborate. A successful remote brainstorming session is not an online copy of a physical workshop. It is shorter, carefully prepared, highly interactive, deliberately facilitated and intelligently combined with asynchronous work. Done well, it can reduce costs and scheduling complexity while creating something even more valuable: a clearer path from ideas to decisions, and from decisions to action.
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