Use Loom to share clear team updates and stay aligned
- Team updates are essential for keeping teams aligned, which is especially important when you’re working with distributed or hybrid teams.
- Traditional team updates face several challenges, including meeting fatigue, time zone conflicts, and a loss of information after the meeting.
- There are several types of team updates, including project status updates, leadership updates, cross-functional coordination updates, and sprint or milestone updates.
- You can use Loom to record, edit, and share team updates with distributed and hybrid teams. Loom allows teams to leave timestamped comments to provide detailed feedback on updates.
When you’re running a business, it’s important to keep everybody in the loop. Teams need to have a clear idea of current progress and priorities at all times to ensure projects go as planned.
Sharing team updates can be a challenge with email and other traditional communication methods, but Loom offers a simple alternative. Learn how you can use Loom to share clear team updates and keep all your teams aligned.
What are team updates?
Team updates are recurring communications team leadership uses to share progress, priorities, and key decisions across teams. These updates are essential after big changes, share-out changes, and planning.
Consistent updates are key when it comes to maintaining alignment across teams and leaderships. Regular updates keep teams on the same page, so every team is working to achieve a common objective.
Why traditional team updates often fall short
Traditional team updates can work if you’ve got small, on-site teams, but the business world has changed. As more businesses are shifting toward distributed and hybrid teams, traditional team updates fall short:
- Meeting fatigue: Teams need regular updates to stay aligned, but that also means teams have to meet often. Over time, these frequent meetings can lead to meeting fatigue, which can be mentally draining and impact productivity.
- Time zone conflicts: When you have distributed and hybrid teams throughout different time zones, finding a meeting time that works for everyone can be a challenge. This is especially challenging for remote workers in other countries.
- Information loss: It can be difficult to absorb all the information during a meeting, which leads to information loss if that meeting isn’t recorded.
Written updates are also an alternative, but they lack the context, clarity, and engagement that live meetings and asynchronous video communication offer.
How to share team updates using Loom
Loom is a simple way to share team updates through short, contextual video messages. This asynchronous communication allows distributed teams to receive updates on their own time, reducing the need for frequent meetings and encouraging alignment across teams.
Loom has a structured workflow for creating effective video updates that keep teams aligned, so it’s easy to use Loom for team alignment.
Step 1. Define the purpose of the update
If you want to record effective team updates with Loom, the first thing you should do is define the purpose of the update. Are you providing a team update for status reporting, decision communication, or progress visibility?
It’s also important to make sure the message of the update is focused on key outcomes, that way each team update is actionable.
Step 2. Prepare key talking points
Before you record a team update with Loom, outline major milestones, risks, and next steps. These are going to act as your key talking points during the update, helping you clearly convey the purpose of the update.
Preparation is a key aspect of effective team updates because it reduces unnecessary details. Outlining your talking points gives you a chance to figure out how to provide a clear team update with no fluff, so you have a loose script to follow while you’re recording.
Step 3. Record your update with Loom
The next step is using Loom’s screen recorder to record your team update. Start by signing into your account, then download and install the Loom app.
Open the Loom app and click Record. This will open another window that allows you to choose whether to record just your screen or your entire desktop.
Select your microphone, then click Start Recording to begin recording your team update. When you’re finished recording, hit Stop Recording and the file will be uploaded to your Loom account.
Use screen recording to show dashboards, roadmaps, or documents while narrating. You can also use Loom to record a voiceover after capturing the screen recording, which can help improve clarity.
Visual context helps teams get a better understanding of team updates.
Step 4. Share the update with relevant stakeholders
When you’re finished recording, Loom will automatically create a link you can use to share your team update with relevant stakeholders. You can share this link through the communication and collaboration tools you’re already using, such as Jira, Confluence, or Slack. You can also send the link via email.
Asynchronous communication with Loom is a key part of staying connected and aligned across teams. Stakeholders can view team updates on their own time, so you don’t have to worry about coordinating virtual meetings across time zones.
Step 5. Encourage feedback and interaction
After sharing team updates with relevant stakeholders, invite them to comment directly on the video to provide feedback. Stakeholders can leave comments or use reactions to provide feedback directly through Loom.
Loom also allows stakeholders to provide timestamped feedback, which lets you know the exact moment that’s being referenced in the video. Stakeholders can leave a comment with a specific timestamp that you can click to navigate to that time in the video.
Step 6. Store updates for future reference
One of the best parts about using Loom for team updates is the video library, which allows you to store team updates for future reference. When you’re finished recording a video with Loom, it’s automatically added to your Loom library. You can also store Loom videos in other shared spaces, such as a cloud storage platform.
Recorded updates create institutional knowledge that can be referenced at any point in time. Loom also allows you to organize videos within your library, so you can separate team updates from other Loom videos.
How to share team updates using Loom
There are several types of team updates you can share with Loom, each serving a different purpose and helping to improve communication across teams.
Project status updates
Project status updates provide an update on the current progress of a project, giving teams a better understanding of what to do next. Creating project status updates with Loom means you don’t have to hold frequent meetings to update teams about projects, so you don’t have to worry about coordinating meetings across time zones.
Leadership updates
Leadership updates allow leaders to communicate priorities and strategic direction to teams. These updates also let teams know when there’s an organizational change or restructure, keeping everyone in the loop without the meeting fatigue.
Loom makes it easy for leaders to provide updates with visual context, which can help teams understand both the strategic decisions and the reasoning behind them.
Cross-functional coordination updates
Async video is a key part of cross-functional alignment, helping teams communicate and collaborate better. This is important for distributed cross-functional teams where communication is a challenge regardless.
Adopting async work with Loom also helps cross-functional teams reduce project delays. For example, a design team can submit a proposed UI design for review and other stakeholders can approve the design on their own time.
Sprint or milestone updates
Regular project updates are always important, but they’re even more important when you reach key delivery checkpoints. Sending team updates each time you reach a sprint or milestone makes your current progress more visible and keeps everyone aligned with project timelines.
Best practices for effective Loom team updates
Creating effective Loom team updates starts with some basic tips:
- Keep it concise: Updates should be short and focused, making it easy for teams to absorb the information.
- Use visual context: Using dashboards, roadmaps, and documents can provide visual context that’s hard to convey through speech or text.
- Provide consistent updates: Maintaining a consistent cadence ensures teams maintain alignment and communication.
- Encourage engagement: Encourage teams to engage through comments to make team updates more effective.
- Summarize key decisions/actions: Create a summary of key decisions and actions to make team updates actionable.
Build a culture of transparency and alignment with Loom
Alignment across teams is important, especially when you’re dealing with distributed or hybrid teams where communication can be a challenge. Regular team updates keep every team in the loop, so everyone can work toward a common objective.
Adopting video-first update workflows makes it easy to keep distributed teams in the loop, even if you’re in different time zones.
With Loom, you can record, edit, and share videos with ease. Loom enhances collaboration by allowing teams to leave timestamped comments on updates, and the video library makes it easy to store and organize previous team updates. Try Loom for free and eliminate the hassle of providing team updates through live meetings.