What is a Template? Why are Templates Useful?

If we type “template” in the Google search box, we will get nearly 3.8 billion results, more than the number of results with “world cup”.

Nowadays, it has become more common for people to use templates to help solve problems at work and even make decisions in personal life.

Why does everyone love templates?

Here are the top 3 practical reasons why you should use templates, especially for teamwork and remote meetings.

Save time, reduce errors and repetition.

Templates help you focus on major problems to be solved and what’s more important: getting work done effectively.

For example, when you are having an online meeting with a digital whiteboard such as VUCAC, every participant can write down his ideas quickly by adding a proper template from the library. It helps everyone stay on his point, and follow the agenda. As a result, the whole team can spend more time discussing and solving real problems instead of recreating flowcharts or mindmaps over and over again.

Stay focused on “How” instead of “Why”.

Templates provide a framework for effective thinking, which consolidates some best practices that have been proven useful and practical by others.

It is very similar to how we solve math problems at schools. For example, to calculate the area of a triangle, instead of figuring out why we need to multiply the height by the width and then divide by 2, we simply apply the formula and fill in the numbers.

What’s more, we can use templates to not only edit the contents but also get the instructions on how to fill in the blanks and understand what those blanks mean.

Let’s say we are having an online retrospective, we can directly choose a pre-designed retrospective template from VUCAC platform and kick off your meeting right away.

Better visualization for creativity and ideation.

Visuals are usually more effective than words at depicting ideas.

Despite its outstanding usability, templates are more visually appealing and expressive, which promotes more work engagement.

Usually built-in templates are designed by creative professionals or industry experts. And they are good at creating visual aids and illustrations that especially help convey complex ideas and processes.

Don’t hesitate to use these powerful and beautiful templates in your next meeting.

VUCAC templates have everything you need.

Currently, you can access a variety of built-in templates for FREE on the VUCAC whiteboard, including SWOT analysis, 5W2H, sticky note groups, Kanban and so on.

These are featured templates that are most commonly used in brainstorming sessions or workshops.

For example, the “5 Whys” analysis shown below is a technique to help team pursue the root cause of each problem without distraction.

To make the best of this template, sometimes you need to ask the why questions more than five times before reaching a conclusion.

Another example is 2X2 priority matrix. It is an effective analysis tool, also known as the lean prioritization method.

This template usually helps teams and project managers determine the order on their to-do lists or select solutions according to their relative importance.

Try these templates for FREE and let us know how we can make your collaboration better.