An Expert’s Guide to Productivity and Well-being while Embracing WFH and Hybrid Style
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Driving impact over output in a new era of work
As Google’s productivity advisor, I spend a lot of time coaching executives on ways they can make the most of their work day. Over the years, people have come to me with very different ideas about what productivity is, why it matters, and how to achieve it. Often, they think it’s about extracting every last ounce of output from a day—likely because the idea of productivity comes from economics and is most closely associated with factory conveyor belts and efficiency.
My definition of personal productivity is different. It’s less about getting as much as you can out of each day and more about achieving the things you set out to accomplish and making an impact.
Productivity is grounded in understanding yourself as a whole person. What makes you happy at work and outside of work? What are your natural rhythms and peak times for creativity, focus, or efficiency? When are you most engaged in meetings? What makes you feel unstoppable when responding to emails? And when do you need to take a break, do some uninterrupted thinking, or deepen social connections with your colleagues?
When people don’t understand these aspects of productivity, they struggle to make an impact—no matter how well they manage their calendars and inboxes.
During the global pandemic, we’ve realized the importance of sustaining the wellbeing of ourselves and our families, setting healthy boundaries, and bringing intention to the work day. Among those lucky enough to have the flexibility to work from home, many had to juggle new obligations, from homeschooling to caregiving. And without a solid plan in place, people often found themselves working longer hours and facing burnout.
Now, even as the pandemic enters new and unforeseen phases, many organizations are gearing up for a hybrid work model, Google included. As we make those plans, it’s important that people take a fresh look at personal productivity and plan to maximize wellbeing and impact across all the places they work.
I developed this new guide with these challenges in mind. It gathers up all my best productivity and wellbeing tips from over the years, including how to:
- Rethink your time and your calendar
- Transform your inbox
- Make meetings more meaningful
- Bring productivity and wellbeing together
As we embrace new ways—and places—of working, all these areas feel more important than ever.
Download The Google Workspace guide to productivity and wellbeing.
Accuracy and Real-time Updates with Google Maps’ On-Demand Rides and Delivery Solution Impacts CX
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Last year we launched our on-demand rides and delivery solution to help businesses improve operations as well as transform the driver and customer journey from booking to arrival or delivery. When it comes to on-demand rides and deliveries, every minute matters. When users book a ride or order food, they want a seamless experience and real-time accurate updates. Today, we’re taking a closer look into data quality improvements for location, time and distance accuracy, and motorbike routes.
Machine learning helps drive location accuracy
Location accuracy stands at the base of our customers’ operation. The location signals that are coming from mobile devices can sometimes be off for various reasons and a driver’s location can get stuck, or jump around.
Recently we developed mechanisms in our fleet management product that can take in multiple location signals and determine the most reliable location to use for a given vehicle. With that, we noticed drastic improvements:
- Eliminated long periods of location ‘stuckness’ almost completely; a vehicle is considered ‘stuck’ when we think it’s moving but the measured location is not
- Reduced the jumpiness of the location signal by 52%-86%: ‘jumpiness’ is when a vehicle shows a sudden and usually drastic change in location. A jump is determined to exist when the speed the vehicle had to go at in order to cover the distance it did is unrealistic
- Reduced the average jump distance by 44%-86% : ‘jump distance’ is the distance between two consecutive location pings when we determined a ‘location jump’ has occurred.
Dunzo, a local e-commerce platform in India, explains how integrating the order tracking capability within Google Maps Platform’s On Demand Rides and Delivery solution has helped reduce support calls by 90%. The out-of-the-box solution helped Dunzo’s motorbike delivery partners with updating location sync to reduce stuckness and jumpiness as well as deliver premium user experiences.
When the vehicle location is more reliable, the dispatch decision is of higher quality, meaning there is a higher chance you will be able to make the optimal decision. This can lead to less wait time for consumers, increased driver happiness and fewer cancellations.
Improvements in ETA accuracy in motorbike routes
In many geographic areas, road space is limited and car ownership is prohibitively expensive so motorbike is a prominent transportation mode. Motorbike mapping requires unique routing, ETA models, and navigation capabilities. Improvements in motorbike routing and ETA estimation have enabled customers like Gojek to offer better overall services, even in geographies with poor wifi or missing roads.
Recently, we further improved ETA outcomes by developing new machine learning models trained specifically for motorbikes. These models help our systems account for differences in congestion and traffic flow that arise in different regions and scenarios.
Globally, we measured an ~8% improvement in ETA accuracy for riders in the general public, and a ~6% improvement in on-demand rides and deliveries ETA accuracy. In this on-demand economy, where consumers are accustomed to real-time trip and order progress, these improvements will significantly improve their experience.
We will continue to innovate on both our car and motorbike on-demand rides and deliveries capabilities based on customer demand and requirements. We are committed to the success of our customers by building a seamless experience for all parties—consumers, drivers, and fleet operators—in the rides and deliveries journey.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
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Video: How Google App Maker Helps Businesses Build Mobile Apps in No Time
Analysts estimate that the right custom mobile app can save each employee 7.5 hours per week (that’s a week’s worth of lunch breaks!). Yet, too few businesses have the means, let alone the resources, to invest time and effort in building customized mobile apps. Why?
That’s because their budgets center on big enterprise apps like CRM, ERP, and SCM and beyond those priorities.
App Maker was created to enable your line-of-business teams to build apps for the jobs these bigger apps don’t tackle. With App Maker, you can revamp company processes like requesting purchase orders or filing and resolving help desk tickets, create quick marketing assets, and generate sales enablement apps, for example, as if you designed and built the processes yourself.
This low-code, simple, easy-to-use, drag and drop mobile app creator doesn’t need extensive coding knowledge and can build apps in a jiffy. Anyone can make it: As simple as that.
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Securing Remote Workers with Google and Chrome Enterprise
With the proliferation of COVID-19 across the globe, the need for a remote working strategy has become paramount to keep businesses running.
A Gartner survey found that 88% of organizations have asked their employees to work remotely. And 97% of the organizations canceled work-related travel. However, only 10% of the organizations planned to reduce working hours. For us, this shows that despite the prevalence of coronavirus across the world, business demands require that work must go on.
Technologies such as Chromebooks, Chrome Browser, and SaaS applications have helped make this strategy a reality, providing access to critical data wherever employees may be working from during this challenging time.
However, this way of working has created new security challenges for IT departments, who may not be equipped to address these issues.
This session provides a walkthrough of many of Google’s solutions, such as Chrome devices, Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, BeyondCorp Remote Access, and Chrome Browser Cloud Management to ensure your business can keep secure, even in a remote working environment.
Chrome OS’s Hybrid Work Model Powers Google’s Return to Work Strategy
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The pandemic continues to deeply affect our lives around the globe. In some places, new cases are surging and returning to work is the last thing on people’s minds. In other areas, conditions are improving and companies are starting to think about transitioning their workforce back to the office.
Exactly when and how to do this remains complex and varies by country, industry, and company. What’s certain is that hybrid work will become an essential part of the business world moving forward. And finding solutions that bridge the gap between “in-person” and “somewhere else” are crucial.
At Google, we’ve been focused on what the hybrid transformation means for us. To prepare for hybrid work, using modern solutions is a key enabler.
Chrome OS: Supporting Google’s return to office strategy
At Google, we’ll move to a hybrid work week where most Googlers spend approximately three days in the office and two days wherever they work best. It’s no surprise that as the modern, secure, cloud-first platform, Chrome OS is playing a key role in our transition to a hybrid work model. Because Chrome OS devices can easily be shared, more flexible working models and spaces are now possible. And with user profiles stored in the cloud and collaboration solutions like Google Workspace, employees can log in to any Chrome OS device, access what they need and pick up where they left off.
Here are just a few ways we are using Chrome OS and its tools to support the return to the office:
- In select office locations, Googlers can reserve desks through an internal booking tool set up with a high-performance Chromebox, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Employees can log in to the Chromebox which syncs their cloud profile, and start working with the same environment they have on all their Chrome OS devices.
- We’re announcing new docking stations that are designed for Chrome OS devices and allow employees to bring in their Chromebook from home, connect to the dock with one USB-C cable, and use a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for a full desktop experience.
- Every Chrome OS device enables a zero-trust security working model with BeyondCorp Enterprise providing our workforce with simple and secure access to applications while providing additional security controls for IT.
- We’ve deployed the new Chrome OS Readiness Tool to our extended workforce to identify employees that are able to switch to Chrome OS. This allows us to expand the latest security, deployment, and manageability benefits to more of the workforce.
Additional ways Chrome OS is helping organizations with return to office
We aren’t the only ones supporting our return to office and hybrid work strategy with Chrome OS. We’ve heard more ways our customers are using Chrome OS to make the transition as smooth as possible. These include:
- Streamlining deployment and management of Chrome OS devices using zero-touch enrollment which allows devices to automatically enroll into a corporate domain without IT configuration.
Grab & Go Chromebooks being used for frontline and hybrid information workers, allowing employees to grab a Chromebook from a cart and get to work right away. - Parallels Desktop for Chrome OS being deployed to allow employees to access Windows or legacy apps locally on their Chrome OS devices.
- Existing Windows and Mac devices being modernized and repurposed to run a Chrome OS experience using CloudReady. (Google is currently offering a CloudReady promotion. Learn more here.)
While the Chrome OS team has been working towards making remote working as seamless as possible for IT, we’ve also made advancements in supporting traditional technology that’s required in the office.
- In October, we announced Chrome Enterprise Recommended: a collection of identity, printing, productivity, communications, and virtualization solutions that are verified to run great on Chrome OS.
- With the increased usage of video conferencing on Chrome OS devices, we’ve made improvements to Google Meet and Zoom performance including camera and video improvements to reduce any unnecessary processing and features that intelligently adapt to your device, your network, and what you are working on.
- For improved access to Windows and legacy apps, VMware Horizon introduced multi-monitor support and USB redirection and Citrix Workspace released a tech preview with webcam enhancements and Microsoft Teams optimizations.
- We integrated with the Okta Workflows platform, so IT administrators can include Chrome OS in it’s access logic and deploy quickly without code. Recently, we’ve added the ability to require users to reauthenticate on their Chrome OS device once Okta has detected that the user has changed their password. Try out this new capability by signing up for our Trusted Tester program.
- We’ve increased our support for direct IP printing with additional printer models since the beginning of 2020. In addition, we have made improvements to management features, including support for multiple print servers and launched policy APIs to provide a better IT admin experience.
Join us for a digital event with Modern Computing Alliance and its newest member HP
Last year we announced the launch of the Modern Computing Alliance—a collaboration of industry leaders including Box, Chrome Enterprise, Citrix, Dell, Google Workspace, Imprivata, Intel, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMware, and Zoom aim to create the pioneering solutions that businesses need. We are thrilled to introduce HP, who brings their innovative hardware and enterprise hardware expertise to the Modern Computing Alliance and has been working closely with the alliance to ensure true silicon-to-cloud innovation.
As an alliance, we’ve been deeply engaged in the hybrid work shift. We invite you to join us for a digital event where we discuss questions about returning to work. Like how product design can encourage participation and collaboration regardless of where employees are, important security issues to keep in mind, and what factors businesses should consider to support a safe, working environment.
Home. Heading back. Hybrid.
Hear from the experts on hybrid work and return to office.
Date: May 20th, 2021
Register here.
If you are ready to try Chrome OS today, it’s easy to get started. You can contact us to get connected to a partner, sign up for a free 30-day trial of Chrome Enterprise Upgrade to start managing Chrome OS devices, or deploy the Chrome OS Readiness Tool to identify employees that are ready to switch to Chrome OS.POSTED IN:
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A Quick Guide to Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Monitoring is a tool that allows you to gain visibility into the performance, availability, and health of your applications and infrastructure. In this video, we show you what Cloud Monitoring is and how you can use it to custom define service-level objectives (SLOs), monitor application metrics, and the overall health of your applications infrastructure. Watch to learn how you can use Cloud Monitoring!
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