Office Whiteboard: The Token of The Conference Room

Ever heard of whiteboard animation? You may recognize a few popular videos that have been popping up across the Internet over the past few years. The videos feature a lecture or speech, accompanied by a stop motion video of an artist drawing related pictures on a whiteboard.

The Royal Society of Arts popularized this style back in 2011. Their videos garnered over 46 millions views and the YouTube channel was the #1 non-profit channel in the world.

The point here is this — people love whiteboard animation. Why? Because pairing complex concepts and ideas with visual aids helps us to process information more efficiently.

Carla Clark, a neuroscientist, explains that visual cues help keep the brain focused and distraction-free by allowing viewers to follow ideas in a linear progression.

How Does This Relate To My Conference Room Office Furniture?

If you need to pitch a large idea to your team or you want to convey the big picture to your employees, it is important to get the message out clearly and efficiently. A whiteboard can help you achieve this by taking proven concepts, such as visual aids, and using them to help your audience to follow your ideas.

You don’t have to be a professional animator to create a stunning presentation like the folks at the RSA, but using a whiteboard as part of your meeting can help to liven up the mood and boost the amount of information that actually gets remembered.

A Whiteboard Will Improve Your Public Speaking

Study after study has shown that when people sit down and listen to someone speak, their brains are already distracted with thoughts about the speaker’s expertise in the subject matter and other things. If you use the whiteboard, the audience is already focused on something else besides these distracting thoughts.

Traditional speaking advice has always been about facing your audience and looking everyone in the eye. The advice here supports the opposite, and that can be scary to do. You must trust that your team is following along without your eyes to keep track. The good news is that a whiteboard can help you and your audience to follow the train of thought by literally providing a visual cue of where to follow o the whiteboard.