Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Google Workspace blog.

We consistently hear from our customers that the privacy of their data is top of mind, which is why we’ve built state-of-the-art security and privacy-preserving technologies into our products — to keep customer data private and secure. We’ve put Google AI to work on behalf of our customers to automatically stop the majority of online threats before they emerge. Gmail, for example, automatically blocks more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware. These defenses, together with our unique encryption capabilities like client-side encryption (CSE), help our customers such as Groupe Le Monde, PwC, and Verizon, meet their security, privacy, compliance, and digital sovereignty requirements.

Last year, we enabled CSE for Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet, and today we’re excited to share that CSE is generally available for Gmail and Calendar, enabling even more organizations to become arbiters of their own data and the sole party deciding who has access to it. We recognize sovereign controls are important to customers and have accelerated delivery of these encryption capabilities to support our customers in maintaining control over their data and meeting their regulatory compliance needs.

Guarantee complete control of your data for the most challenging regulations

The expansion of CSE capabilities across Google Workspace helps to significantly reduce the burden of compliance for enterprises and public sector organizations. It gives organizations higher confidence that any third party, including Google and foreign governments, cannot access their confidential data. Workspace already encrypts data at rest and in transit by using secure-by-design cryptographic libraries. Client-side encryption takes this encryption capability to the next level by ensuring that customers have sole control over their encryption keys — and thus complete control over all access to their data. Starting today, users can send and receive emails or create meeting events with internal colleagues and external parties, knowing that their sensitive data (including inline images and attachments) has been encrypted before it reaches Google servers.

Users can continue to collaborate across other essential apps in Google Workspace while IT and security teams can ensure that sensitive data stays compliant with regulations. As customers retain control over the encryption keys and the identity management service to access those keys, sensitive data is indecipherable to Google and other external entities.

One key use case for CSE in this context centers on helping organizations subject to regulatory requirements, such as PwC, remain compliant, by meeting the need for the highest levels of encryption for certain types of communication.

“We have been searching for the capability to guarantee that our encrypted communications remain inaccessible to third-parties, including our technology providers, for some time. Google appears to be uniquely positioned with client-side encryption in providing us with complete control over our sensitive data, ensuring that we remain compliant as an organization in the ever changing world of data regulation. These features now being available across Google Workspace represent a pivotal moment for us. We’re enthusiastic about the ability to continue to benefit from the efficiency in working that Workspace provides us with, whilst at the same time maintaining trust with our customers that their confidential data will stay private and compliant,” said Shaun Bookham, UK Operations & Technology Director at PwC.

One of our global telecommunications customers, Verizon, is leveraging CSE to gain complete control over their sensitive data, ensuring that they remain compliant as an organization while supporting customers in highly regulated industries. This opens doors for the company to deliver an exceptional experience for its customers, by extending the level of data protection and privacy to their clients.

“At Verizon, we adhere to governance requirements related to access of our sensitive data while also providing the best experience coupled with deep trust. We have worked alongside Google to develop new encryption solutions and are excited to explore their utilization,” said Russell Leader, Director Collaboration and Mobility at Verizon.

Protecting an organization’s most important assets

The regulatory requirements for separation between an organization’s data and their cloud provider’s environment has resulted in important use cases for client-side encryption — from keeping sensitive R&D data extremely private, even from an organization’s SaaS provider, to scenarios where confidentiality is paramount to the success or failure of a mission-critical operation.

Customers, such as media giant Groupe Le Monde, rely on client-side encryption to protect their most crucial assets. By leveraging client-side encryption across Workspace, Groupe Le Monde can be assured that their communications, appointments, and files will not be subject to leaks, thus helping to keep their journalists safe.

“Client-side encryption gives us the next level of privacy, to ensure integrity within the journalistic process. This allows us to guarantee a higher level of security for our journalists, and to protect our sensitive content,” said Sacha Morard, Chief Technology Officer at Groupe Le Monde.

Another industry-leading Google Workspace enterprise customer uses client-side encryption to protect their most sensitive projects. For these projects, the customer is the sole owner of their encryption keys, thereby protecting their critical intellectual property and maintaining their data sovereignty requirements.

While each customer’s digital transformation journey is different, with all essential Google Workspace apps now being covered by CSE, companies of all sizes in all industries can benefit from these protections.

Starting today, client-side encryption is available globally to customers with Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus. To learn more about client-side encryption and how to get started today, watch our presentation from Google Cloud Next ’22 and check out the documentation.

Many executives across the globe are feeling the effects of a recent pivot to hybrid work models. This massive transition represents a significant departure from existing office culture. As business leaders look to operationalize their flexible work model infrastructure, they’re also evaluating what it takes to attract and retain employees in this new landscape. Instead of seeing these as separate initiatives, business leaders have a unique opportunity to collectively overhaul corporate culture, focusing on hybrid work and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies in tandem.

Combining DEI and hybrid work strategies provides a more inclusive culture

Focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion doesn’t mean business leaders are offering an underrepresented individual a specific role or platform because they fit a certain demographic category. Lack of job quality criteria leads to animosity and cultural inequality. Here, diversity means creating a meritocracy with equal pay and equal opportunity for all.

Organizations that thoughtfully combine DEI and hybrid work strategies will produce cultures that improve employee experience and business agility. Integrated DEI and hybrid workplace support better business outcomes by:

Increasing the total available talent pool. A business must cast a wide net for candidates by expanding how and where it searches. Adding a flexible work schedule policy expands potential talent by allowing parents, caregivers, and others to select the hours that work best for their family obligations. Remote work also holds a higher priority in job seekers’ desires. For example, a FlexJobs survey revealed that 24% of workers say the ability to work from home is so important to them that they are willing to take a 10-20% pay cut to work remotely, and 21% would give up some vacation time.

Creating a more inclusive culture. Job seekers want to work for companies that prioritize DEI. According to a recent CNBC and SurveyMonkey Workforce survey, nearly 80% of workers say that they want to work for a company that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. A DEI-centric work culture allows job seekers to feel like there’s a place for them.

Fostering innovation and profitability with broader perspectives. In general, diversity and inclusion promotes the expression of ideas from people with different backgrounds, leading to breakthroughs in creativity, innovation, and attracting new customers. Workplace DEI programs create an employee base that closely mirrors a customer base. A diverse team is less likely to miss potential market opportunities if representative of a broad range of ethnicity, race, age, assigned sex, and socioeconomic backgrounds. A 2020 McKinsey analysis found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity on executive teams were 36% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.

Hybrid work should not derail DEI efforts

While there are numerous benefits to integrating DEI and hybrid work strategies, it would be naive to think it won’t bring challenges. Businesses run the risk of creating new inequities and exacerbating existing ones as they move to hybrid models. One potential issue lies in which employees can work remotely. An HBR article shared how pre-Covid less than 30% of all workers could work from home; only 16% of Latinx workers and 19% of Black workers had remote flexibility, compared to 37% of Asian workers and 30% of white workers.

Even for employees who can work remotely, it’s essential to eliminate “proximity bias.” A study by SHRM found that 67% of surveyed supervisors admitted to considering remote workers more easily replaceable than onsite workers at their organization. Additionally, 72% said they would prefer all of their teams to be working in the office.

A successful hybrid environment strikes a balance between flexibility and inclusivity where individuals feel valued, and everyone has equal opportunities for advancement. In another study, researchers concluded that remote workers and office workers were promoted at the same rate, but found that remote workers’ salaries grew more slowly. Leading companies recognize that physically being at the office full-time isn’t necessary to produce great results.

8 steps to creating a diverse hybrid work culture

As DEI becomes a new business imperative, organizations must work to minimize unconscious bias, creating market-based salaries for all workers, and introducing educational programs that support talent development. Here are some concrete steps you can take to get started.

• Educate current and future leaders on DEI and hybrid work issues. As you build hybrid work strategies, it’s crucial to discover and understand unconscious biases. According to Deloitte, companies need a holistic DEI learning strategy, including unconscious bias training and developing the conditions for long-term behavior changes.
• Embrace tools that support DEI and hybrid workplaces. Organizations can leverage technology and AI-enabled HR software to support their efforts. Collaboration tools provide everyone with a voice regardless of where they are (for example, using Spaces for team chats in Google Workspace so that everyone has access to the same information). Video call features such as transcriptions and translation can help the hearing-and-vision-impaired and employees who speak different languages. It’s also possible to purchase recruiting solutions with AI technology to reduce the chance of bias or discrimination when reviewing candidates.
• Strengthen culture by marrying DEI with meritocracy. There should also be explicit guidelines to ensure the systems and processes for hiring and promoting individuals are both transparent and equitable. One method for accomplishing this goal is to define detailed job requirements and metrics per role to understand what skills are associated with specific functions. It’s also essential to ensure you’ve designed these processes in a way that screens out bias. Leading companies will deploy analytics tools to evaluate the systems’ fairness and track if the systems are progressing against diversity targets.
• Create upskilling programs to train employees. Many organizations struggle to find talent with the right skill sets. One solution to this problem is to invest in educating existing employees. Companies must develop diverse talent at every level to create a pipeline of candidates that progresses into senior management. Similar to the way companies offered management training programs to college graduates, organizations should design programs that provide skills enhancement for entry and mid-level employees. Almost every job will require a certain level of technical skill—organizations must upskill existing talent.
• Restructure compensation before employees leave. It’s easier to retain an employee than to onboard and train a new hire. According to the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s wage growth tracker, wages for people who have switched jobs have outpaced those who’ve stayed at one employer since 2011. One way to retain talent is to right-size salaries to a competitive market rate.
• Remember that money isn’t everything. While individuals may switch jobs for money, they often stay in a position for the culture. Creating a leading employee experience helps organizations keep talent. Work from home programs, flexible work schedules, and advanced programs such as childcare benefits help build the foundation. But increasingly, individuals are looking for a sense of belonging. According to research from McKinsey, employees who feel included are three times more likely to report being excited about working for their organization and committed to its success. Another McKinsey report focusing on attrition shows that employees primarily leave companies because they don’t feel valued or don’t have a sense of belonging.
• Don’t forget to commit the resources. Most organizations built their cultures before DEI and hybrid work were requirements. These companies must invest in new work tools and educational programs, and create new hiring and talent management practices. A business can make a more significant impact with fewer resources by ensuring purchases and processes support flexible and inclusive work cultures.
• Make sure actions are backed up with DEI transparency measurements. The pressure to support DEI could lead to situations where activities are celebrated over results. While it’s not easy to be vulnerable and transparent about where the problems exist, employers should take stock of where they are today. They should present this authentically, create goals for the future, and design a measurable action plan to track its progress. With so many variables and unknowns, it’s crucial for talent leaders to track the way that hybrid work and DEI efforts advance.

Diversity should be part of your efforts because it’s the culture you want to create. However, ignoring diversity efforts can also come with ramifications. For example, Goldman Sachs announced in 2021 that the firm would only underwrite IPOs in the United States and Europe for companies with at least two diverse board members. Meanwhile, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules this summer that require Nasdaq-listed companies to have at least two diverse directors – including one woman and at least one member of an underrepresented community.

In order for the benefits of diversity to emerge in the workplace, companies need to enact cultural and behavioral change. As stated in the ICSM report, “Never become too comfortable with your efforts, as there is always room for improvement with diversity at your organization, whether you see it or not.” It’s clear that what organizations have done to attract talent in the past isn’t resonating the same way today. A diverse workforce delivers better ideas and stronger communities, building deeper relationships with customers along the way. Moving forward, it’s expected that a company’s investment in a diverse, inclusive, and hybrid work culture will set it apart from its competition, leading to increased business agility and better financial outcomes.

In the past two decades, Discovery has moved from a purely cable business based in the U.S. to a global media and entertainment powerhouse. Like many other businesses in the industry, we’ve had to adjust to the unique shifts in people’s behaviors and preferences, almost all of which result from the rise in streaming.

We have always been consumer-obsessed at Discovery, with a corporate culture built on the desire to entertain and inspire people of all ages and backgrounds with exceptional content. As we’ve grown, we have also learned just how important it is to be staff-obsessed, giving our employees the best possible experiences so they can continue to innovate and deliver the world-class content our customers expect.

In 2019, we decided one way to fuel innovation and collaboration among employees was to bring in Google Workspace. Selected for its intuitive, easy-to-use, and constantly evolving tools, Google Workspace enables teams to seamlessly create, connect, and collaborate anywhere, anytime.

Given the scope of our ambitions, and recognizing the challenges of migrating 16,500 global employees to a new collaboration solution, we worked with Google Cloud premier partner SADA to get the job done.

Change management amid a massive migration

We began the move to Google Workspace by migrating our document storage system from a legacy cloud provider to Google Drive. This included 86 million items amounting to about two petabytes of data migrated with minimal disruptions. A few months later we completed our move to Google Workspace by migrating 1.2 million calendar invites and 20,800 mail accounts, including thousands of collaborative inboxes and delegated accounts.

In addition to the technical support and Google Workspace expertise that SADA provided, they also partnered with our project team on the change management strategy. Despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, our training team and SADA were able to offer outstanding educational opportunities to assist our workforce in the transition and to get the most out of Google Workspace.  This included collaborating on over 240 global webinars in seven languages.   

Discovering the power of transformative tools

Discovery has many types of end users, from finance professionals and marketing teams to producers and content developers. The fact that Google Workspace has been well-received across the company is a testament to the power of the solution.

Many of our teams have taken advantage of collaborative Gmail accounts and shared drives, providing them with a centralized location to seamlessly communicate and work together on team-focused projects. Our internal communications team is especially happy with the real-time collaborative editing experience within Docs as they work on company-wide emails, announcements, and other projects. 

These collaboration tools have allowed us to stay agile amid global lockdowns and will continue to do so as we adapt to a more flexible working environment.

The value of partnership

While we were comfortable with our legacy collaboration suite, one of the biggest benefits of switching to Google Workspace has been Google Cloud’s and SADA’s partnership. They provide us with regular updates on product roadmaps, upcoming features, and more.

This is just the beginning as we plan to grow, deliver new content, and lead the media and entertainment industry with the help of these two great partners and their solutions.

To learn more about Discovery’s journey with Google Workspace, read the full case study.

We are excited to announce that Google has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 report. Thank you to our strong community of customers and partners for working with us to deliver a customer focused product. We believe Forrester’s recognition is an acknowledgement of our leadership across an integrated set of capabilities that rely on data to drive transformation. We were also honored to be named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021. 

Forrester gave Dataflow a score of 5 out of 5 across 12 different criteria and according to the report: “Google Cloud Dataflow has strengths in data sequencing, advanced analytics, performance, and high-availability. Google Dataflow’s sweet spot is for enterprises that have a preponderance of real-time data generated on Google Cloud Platform or wish to simplify all data processing by using a single platform that unifies both streaming and batch jobs.” 

Harnessing the power of real-time data

The speed with which businesses are able to respond to change is the difference between those that successfully navigate the future and those that get left behind. In order to accelerate their digital transformation, reimagine their business and leverage the power of real-time data,  today’s data leaders require a streaming analytics platform that provides both depth and breadth.  

Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow, based on more than a decade of experience in internet scale systems for Google’s own needs, provide customers with a reliable, scalable, performant platform. In addition, we’ve designed these products for ease of use to make streaming analytics accessible to more users, which is why customers such as Sky and others from across all industries use Dataflow to run streaming analytics workloads.

5 out of 5 across key streaming analytics criteria

While Forrester gave Dataflow a score of 5 out of 5 in 12 criteria, the product achieved the highest possible scores in areas that are top of mind for our customers.

We continue to be focused on solving problems that matter to you. For example, just in the last month we announced Dataflow Prime and  Auto Sharding for BigQuery – two new auto tuning capabilities that bring efficiency and simplicity to your streaming pipelines. 

Dataflow achieves highest score possible in strategy 

With Google, organizations gain an industry leading product and a partner that has the vision and strategy to help you tackle new business challenges and provide delightful experiences to your customers.

In summary, we are honored to be a Leader in The Forrester Wave™, Streaming Analytics, and look forward to continuing to innovate and partner with you on your digital transformation journey. 

Download the full report: The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 and check out these smart analytics reference patterns. To learn more about Dataflow, visit our website and get to know the product by taking an interactive tutorial. You can also watch recordings from the Data Cloud Summit event (May 2021), where we provided an in-depth view of new product innovations in Dataflow and other data analytics products.

After more than a year of remote collaboration, many people are showing signs of digital fatigue. Throughout the pandemic, millions of employees bridged the physical distances with their colleagues by making themselves more available, joining a deluge of virtual meetings, and leaning into a dizzying array of tools and applications. As part of our mission to build the future of work, we’re addressing these challenges in Google Workspace.

As we announced today at I/O, we’re launching smart canvas—a new product experience that delivers the next evolution of collaboration for Google Workspace. Between now and the end of the year, we’re rolling out innovations that make it easier for people to stay connected, focus their time and attention, and transform their ideas into impact.

Specifically, we’re enhancing the apps that hundreds of millions of people use every day—like Docs, Sheets, and Slides—to make them even more flexible, interactive, and intelligent. With smart canvas, we’re bringing the content and connections that transform collaboration into a richer, better experience in Google Workspace.

When we launched Google Docs and Sheets 15 years ago, these apps introduced the world to a new way of working. They enabled anytime, anywhere teamwork—a stark contrast to the legacy tools that were designed for an era of individual work on office desktops. For over a decade now, we’ve been pushing documents away from being just digital pieces of paper and toward collaborative, linked content inspired by the web. Smart canvas is our next big step.https://www.youtube.com/embed/SDBbFETGiA4?enablejsapi=1&

Making collaboration more flexible and helpful

The evolving hybrid work model gives new urgency to existing collaboration challenges. How do teams stay focused and connected as they work together, regardless of where people are located? With smart canvas, we’re building deeper connections across Google Workspace to transform collaboration anywhere it happens. 

For example, we’re taking something that people already use every day—@-mentions—to open up new, powerful collaboration capabilities. New interactive building blocks—smart chips, templates, and checklists—will connect people, content, and events into one seamless experience.

Already available, when you @ mention a person in a document, a smart chip shows you additional information like the person’s location, job title, and contact information. And starting today, we’re introducing new smart chips in Docs for recommended files and meetings. To insert smart chips into your work, simply type “@” to see a list of recommended people, files, and meetings. From web or mobile, your collaborators can then quickly skim associated meetings and people or preview linked documents, all without changing tabs or contexts. Smart chips will come to Sheets in the coming months.

Additionally, we’re making it easier to drive projects forward by streamlining common team workflows. Starting today in Docs, checklists are available on web and mobile, and you’ll soon be able to assign checklist action items to other people. These action items will show up in Google Tasks, making it easier for everyone to manage a project’s To Do list. 

We’re also introducing table templates in Docs. Topic-voting tables will allow you to easily gather team feedback while project-tracker tables will help you capture milestones and statuses on the fly. And a new document template for capturing meeting notes will automatically import any relevant information from a Calendar meeting invite, including smart chips for attendees and attached files.

With our new pageless format in Docs, you’ll be able to remove the boundaries of a page to create a surface that expands to whatever device or screen you’re using, making it easier to work with wide tables, large images, or detailed feedback in comments. And if you want to print or convert to PDF, you’ll be able to easily switch back to a paginated view.

Meanwhile, you’ll be able to toggle between new views in Sheets to better manage and interact with your data. Our first launch will be a timeline view that makes tracking tasks easier and faster. This flexible view allows you to organize your data by owner, category, campaign, or whichever attribute fits best. Using a dynamic, interactive timeline strengthens your ability to manage things like marketing campaigns, project milestones, schedules, and cross-team collaborations.

Fostering human connection—wherever people work

With smart canvas and innovations in Google Meet, we’re making it easy to bring the voices and faces of your team directly into the collaboration experience, to help people share ideas and solve problems together from anywhere. As part of that, we’re building tighter integrations between our communication and collaboration tools so you can pull content into conversations and conversations into content. 

Starting today, we’re rolling out the ability to present your content to a Google Meet call on the web directly from the Doc, Sheet, or Slide where you’re already working with your team. Jumping between collaborating in a document and a live conversation without skipping a beat helps the project—and the team—stay focused. And in the fall, we’re bringing Meet directly to Docs, Sheets, and Slides on the web, so people can actually see and hear each other while they’re collaborating.

Live captions and translations in Google Meet will also play a crucial role in keeping people connected as they work together in distributed teams. We currently offer live captions in five languages, with more on the way. And we’re introducing live translations of captions later this year, starting with English-language live captions translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, or German, with many more languages to follow.

With recent enhancements to Google Meet, we’re also giving people more control and flexibility over the meeting experience, including more space to see people and content, plus the ability to pin and unpin content and video feeds. And to help with meeting fatigue, you can now turn off your self-feed entirely.

Because we know that collaboration is fluid and fast-moving, we’re making it easier for teams to give feedback on the fly and to move seamlessly between conversations and building content together. Teams can now jump from a discussion in Google Chat directly to building content together. Creating and editing Sheets and Docs from Google Chat rooms is already live in our web experience, and we’ll enable it for Slides in the coming weeks. And to gauge the team’s reactions along the way, we’re introducing emoji reactions in Docs in the next few months.

Working smarter and safer

Google Workspace is already infused with powerful intelligence that enables people to make the best use of their time and attention. Whether it’s with the two billion grammar suggestions we surface in Docs every month, or the intelligent file suggestions in Drive’s Priority and Quick Access features that cut file finding time by 50%.

To help everyone work smarter, in the next few months we’re introducing additional assisted writing features in Docs on the web. This includes warnings about offensive words and language, as well as other stylistic suggestions that can speed up editing and help make your writing more impactful. We’re also adding more assisted analysis functionality in our Sheets web experience, with formula suggestions that make it easier for everyone, not just analysts, to derive insights from data. Sheets intelligence helps you build and troubleshoot formulas, making data analysis faster and reducing errors.

As smart canvas evolves, we’re making it easy for businesses to connect the apps and tools they rely on to Google Workspace. This builds on our history of supporting a variety of add-on features that take the friction out of collaboration—from adding e-signatures directly in Google Workspace with DocuSign to the Salesforce connector that integrates with Sheets. To help people work even smarter, we recently announced that AppSheet Automation is generally available, so that you can automate time-consuming tasks—like approving invoices and onboarding new hires—without having to write a single line of code.

Looking ahead, we’re planning to build additional APIs so you can bring the information and actions you need from third-party tools directly into smart canvas elements like smart chips, checklists, and table templates.

And because trust is at the center of all collaboration within Google Workspace, today we’re also launching advanced capabilities that help protect users against security threats and abuse as they work together.

Transforming how people work to deliver real-world innovation

While there’s no one way to collaborate, we know from our customers that transforming how people work results in real-world innovation.

Google Workspace fuels a new way of working together. It lets our teams around the world—whether they’re in the office, at home, or in the grocery store aisle—work more flexibly and translate their ideas into new ways of delighting customers.
—Thibaud Cainne, Global Head of Tech Infra and Digital Workplace, Carrefour

Transformation happens at all levels, and often in every tool. We were able to get 17,000 of our people to make the shift from Excel to Google Sheets in just six months by demonstrating how we could optimize, automate, and connect spreadsheets and their data. That kind of collaboration leads to real-world innovation for our clients.
—Monica Andrea Diaz Pinzon, Chief of Digital Transformation (Special Projects), Banco Davivienda

We built a digital hub on Google Workspace to transform the way we connect with employees and partners across multiple locations and organizations. It allowed us to spin up major research projects in days instead of months, including delivery of major COVID-19 vaccine studies.
—Justin Riordan-Jones, Head of System and Information (Research), Department of Health & Social Care, National Institute for Health Research (UK)

As smart canvas drives the next era of collaboration in Google Workspace, we remain committed to providing a solution that’s flexible, helpful, and that fuels innovation for organizations in every industry. On the frontlines, in corporate offices, and across the countless workspaces in between, Google Workspace will continue to transform how work gets done.