Huddle boards are popular with many organizations because of their power to keep improvement work at the top of people's minds, organize and manage change, and visualize progress. But the traditional model of a physical huddle board hanging on a wall in the workspace comes with some big limitations. That’s why many organizations are taking the huddle board off the wall and moving it into the cloud. Here are the top 8 reasons to take this approach.

1 – Workforces are distributed

Physical huddle boards are much less effective when teams include telecommuters or people in different offices. Distributed teams are more common these days, making the online approach to improvement management more popular than ever.

2 – Leaders need to track multiple boards

Digital huddle boards make it possible for executives and other leaders to have meaningful, real-time insight into the improvement work across the entire company without paying a daily visit to each area.

3 – Lessons can be learned from past improvements

Physical huddle boards, by design, visualize information about current improvement efforts. Unfortunately, that means that the lessons learned from work that’s been done in the past can be lost. Moving the huddle board to a digital environment makes it possible to form a repository of knowledge. It makes it easy for people to see what worked well in solving similar problems.

4 – Knowledge should be spread

Speaking of capturing knowledge, physical huddle boards constrain the spread of knowledge to the department or team. Those who prefer the digital approach believe that it is important to keep people across the organization up to speed on the totality of improvement effort.

5 – Improvement shouldn’t occur in a vacuum

The most successful organizations recognize that improvement efforts should be aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the organization. Physical huddle boards have no mechanism to ensure this, but digital ones can. Corporate goals can cascade down to departments, teams, and individuals to keep their focus on the strategy.

6 – Active workflow helps speed improvement

A daily huddle is a good way to get everyone thinking about how they will contribute to positive change, but let’s face it, people get busy and bogged down by other priorities. That’s why a digital huddle board with alerts and notifications helps to ensure forward momentum and take some of the friction out of improvement.

7 - Employee recognition is necessary for engagement

The best digital huddle boards come equipped with improvement broadcasting features so that when a successful improvement is implemented, the people who made it happen can be recognized and rewarded.

8 – Results should be quantified

It is always gratifying to complete an improvement and take the issue off the board, but the best way to maintain executive and employee enthusiasm for improvement is to measure the impact of each change over time. Paper huddle boards just aren’t cut out for this task, but you can opt for a software solution designed to capture, manage, and measure the impact of opportunities for improvement.

These are the top reasons for going with a digital huddle board that we’ve heard from our clients and other organizations who have done so. We’re sure there are others. If you have some to share, please shoot us a comment.