Howspace releases Steps mode to enable collective collaboration and democratize decision-making in the facilitation process

Facilitation and co-creation are made more straightforward and organized while allowing everyone’s voice to be heard in a presentation or workspace

HELSINKI, Finland (June 28th, 2022) Howspace, an AI-powered collaboration platform designed to enable dialogue-driven engagement, learning and facilitation, has developed a new mode, Steps. Steps makes it easier to prepare and facilitate a learning process or interactive presentation in advance and run it while successfully engaging everyone involved.

The rise of remote and asynchronous work makes involving people easy, but merely using different tools does not make change happen. Democratized facilitation is necessary within organizations, but it can be complicated with many moving parts to keep track of while maintaining full engagement of all individuals in a group. Steps removes some of that complexity and makes facilitation easier, transparent, and more interactive.

Organizations like The United Nations use Howspace to encourage and facilitate more engagement through digital channels in settings that include learning, change management, and strategic planning. Howspace lets organizations move away from collections of arbitrarily assembled tools that make it difficult for people to connect in today’s remote – and tomorrow’s hybrid workforce worlds.

“Steps is important because it brings transparency and democracy to the decision-making process and allows presentations to become interactive for everyone involved. The future of work presents a paradigm shift that introduces participatory leadership, collaboration, and inclusion on all levels,” says Howspace CEO Ilkka Mäkitalo.

Steps is essentially an interactive presentation mode within Howspace. A page in Howspace can be set to Steps mode. The facilitator can make a manuscript and plan how everyone will collaborate in their session in advance. They can choose what is visible and what is hidden at any given time, and changes are published to all participants. In the first step, the facilitator can ask a question of everyone. In the next phase, participants can give it a rating as well as add questions and comments to it to continue the dialogue. After that, in the third step, the most highly rated questions and comments will filter to the top. The process moves smoothly forward and only the current phase will be visible for the participants to keep the process as easy and noiseless for the participants as possible.

“This is a game-changing feature. In the past, when I wanted to go through a presentation and make it interactive at every step of the way and rate comments and questions, etc., I had to make all of the changes manually. It could get confusing because with manual settings, you can make mistakes and it’s time-consuming. With Steps, it’s so much easier to create a comprehensive presentation with steps and questions in advance because the feature is easy to use. Huge things can be done with just a single facilitator – in the past, you may have needed a few facilitators to pull off something like this, but now it’s simple and seamless,” says Trevor Durnford, Certified Professional Facilitator and Co-Founder at Facil Profundo.

Founded as a spin-off in 2008, Howspace today employs 80+ people in Europe and North America, offering support to customers and partners in more than 30 countries. The company has previously raised €15M in funding, and has been featured in Quartz’s ranking of the best medium-sized companies for remote workers. 

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Watch this video to see how Steps works

For additional information:

Howspace media kit with pictures

Ilkka Mäkitalo, CEO

+358 50 558 6648
ilkka.makitalo@howspace.com

Howspace is an AI-powered collaboration platform designed to enable dialogue-driven engagement, learning and facilitation. By bringing facilitation methods to a digital environment, it delivers increased involvement, engagement, and sustained impact in both learning programs and organizational development initiatives. Howspace is built on over 20 years of management consulting and organizational learning expertise. Howspace is already trusted to drive engagement and change in over 30 countries, with over 180 partner organizations in 27 countries. To learn more, visit www.howspace.com.