Productivity platform ClickUp has added a Whiteboards feature today, enabling more visual collaboration for distributed teams to present and brainstorm ideas.

ClickUp Whiteboards will form part of the wider ClickUp portfolio of collaboration tools, which includes Tasks, Docs, Goals, and Dashboards. The whiteboards are native to the ClickUp platform, meaning users will be able to incorporate any work undertaken on a whiteboard into their existing workflows immediately.

Alongside providing a space for teams to come together and map out their ideas, the digital, interactive canvas offers real-time collaboration capabilities to distributed teams. Workers will have complete visibility into all team members' edits and cursor movements and will be able to add content to the whiteboard in a variety of ways, including drawings, text with rich formatting, shapes, sticky notes, images, and other media files.

Quick-Apply templates will enable teams from any department to speed up the whiteboarding process, while any objects created on a whiteboard can be turned into a ClickUp task and shared with both internal and external teams.

Research carried out by ClickUp prior to the Whiteboards launch found that 67% of employees consider themselves 'visual workers'. Furthermore, since the start of the pandemic, 60% of respondents admitted to finding it more challenging to brainstorm and collaborate with their colleagues, with 64% having done less brainstorming with their teams as a result.

Zeb Evans, CEO at ClickUp, said that collaboration requires more than just a physical place where colleagues can meet to brainstorm ideas. He believes that teams need to be able turn thoughts into actions without the use of too many tools.

"ClickUp Whiteboards solves this challenge, as it is built natively into the broader ClickUp platform ... providing a single place for teams to work more efficiently and get more done," he said.