For many nations, gross domestic product is the primary measure of a society’s success. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan gauges achievement by a different standard: gross national happiness (GNH).

The Royal Government of Bhutan’s GNH index measures a “holistic and sustainable approach to development,” prioritizing factors such as community, education, mental health, cultural heritage, and ecology. It’s a model that was endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly in 2011. Focus on GNH has enabled Bhutan to become a carbon-negative nation; nurture habitats for Bengal tigers, clouded leopards, and red pandas; and provide free healthcare to all of its 735,553 citizens.

One of the pillars of GNH in Bhutan, ranked South Asia’s least-corrupt country, is good governance. Yet as one of Asia’s least-developed nations, Bhutan needed to draw every last bit of value from public funds, while maximizing the potential of its civil servants. Turning to G Suite, it discovered powerful tools enabling communication, accountability, and cost-savings that have been vital to the mission of promoting a well-balanced society.

“G Suite collaboration tools are providing a framework that allows us to foster citizens’ happiness,” says Lobzang Jamtsho, Head of Application Division, Ministry of Information & Communication. “It’s the three C’s: collaboration, coordination, and communication. This has improved significantly with G Suite adoption.”

Freeing up resources for positive change

“When we started using Sites, we found a powerful yet simple tool that’s really a one-stop shop for sharing. You don’t have to know the development side; you just drag, drop, and build.”

—Kuenga Zam, Dy. Chief ICT Officer, Royal Civil Service Commission

From wildlife conservation, to keeping hospitals well-supplied, to the development of human resources, ensuring a correct balance between well-being and development demanded smooth coordination in the civil service. Meanwhile, everything from the cost of printing meeting agendas to investing in email servers and staff to maintain them drained resources from vital tasks such as sourcing medication.

G Suite marked a fundamental shift in the way the Royal Government of Bhutan pursued its mission, as tools such as Docs, Sheets, and Sites came together to provide a unified platform where team contributions could be seamlessly integrated in the cloud. It sparked a surge of cooperative vigor.

“In writing, for example, we collaborate in terms of drafting a proposal. And we collaborate with other parties,” says Lobzang. “It’s really helped us in terms of analyzing the decision-making process and promoting accountability, ownership, and transparency.”

G Suite is used today by 9,500 civil servants across all 67 government agencies. The benefits have been dramatic. In a survey of more than 800 civil servants, roughly 78% of respondents reported G Suite boosted productivity by more than 50%. About 80% said collaboration with colleagues increased more than 50%. And 85% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “my organization is more innovative.”

“G Suite has empowered both education and hospitals. We have our entire education system on the platform, all teachers and students. And processes have improved in hospitals, translating directly into an increase of happiness among citizens.”

—Lobzang Jamtsho, Head of Application Division, Ministry of Information & Communication

The Royal Civil Service Commission of the Royal Government of Bhutan organizes scholarships for civil servants to pursue long-term studies as a part of human resource development. It’s vital to the nation’s pursuit of sustainable development while preserving a unique cultural heritage.

G Suite inspired the Royal Civil Service Commission to build its own internal platform using Sites to manage scholarships, streamline processes, and boost overall HR Development Management.

“When we started using Sites, we found a powerful yet simple tool that’s really a one-stop shop for sharing,” says Kuenga Zam, Dy. Chief ICT Officer, Royal Civil Service Commission. “You don’t have to know the development side; you just drag, drop, and build. And since it’s an internal site, it helps us share from one division to another what scholarships are available for renewal.”

Human connectivity for enhancing quality of life

For the Royal Government of Bhutan, G Suite is a tool that doesn’t just facilitate better communication, it enables the whole of government to work better together. “G Suite has empowered both education and hospitals. We have our entire education system on the platform, all teachers and students,” says Lobzang. “And processes have improved in hospitals, translating directly into an increase in happiness among citizens.”

“When services are delivered better, people are happier,” adds Kuenga. “So it aligns in that way with GNH.”

Motivating team members to build a better future

Today, the Royal Government of Bhutan is writing the next chapter of its journey with G Suite, motivating civil servants to tap the platform’s creative possibilities through training programs that demonstrate why you don’t need to be an IT expert to be a digital innovator.

“We did a demo at a conference to show how we are using Sites. Our users then went forward and took that idea and built their own site,” says Kuenga. “After we show the possibilities, they have the motivation to go forward and explore.”

The next step for the Royal Government of Bhutan is to begin experimenting with Apps Script to create applications for automating workflow processes: “There’s so much potential that we haven’t explored,” says Kuenga.

We all experienced, first hand, how Covid-19 has impacted the world and our communities. Last year, store closures, reduced hours, and social-distancing requirements drove people to adopt more e-commerce options, which, according to eMarketer, grew 27.6% worldwide in 2020. Meanwhile, consumer desires to shop locally also grew with Google searches for “____ near me” up 100% year over year,¹ and 1 in 3 consumers having tried curbside pickup over the last year.²

As countries begin to lift Covid-19 restrictions, businesses are looking toward a post-pandemic future and asking ‘Which of these shopping trends will stick and how should I adapt?’ At Google, we expect consumers to continue demanding helpful shopping experiences that blur the line between the physical retail and digital experience, as well as help them to continue shopping locally.³ To address these changes in shopper behavior, we refreshed our retail solutions—adding a new solution, Product Locator, and updating Store Locator Plus—to help you offer the best possible online-to-offline experience and drive shoppers to your stores. 

Introducing Product Locator solution: connecting online shopping to nearby stores

Under Covid restrictions, consumers have grown accustomed to having a myriad of shopping options, from curbside pickup to same-day delivery. Increased searches for ‘along my route’ and ‘in stock’ tell us that convenience is king for today’s consumer.⁴ Retailers can increase online conversion rates and drive store visits by including product availability and pick-up options on each of their product description pages (PDP); emphasizing the speed and convenience of these options and saving on significant shipping costs. 

Our newest retail solution, Product Locator, can further help drive customers to visit by showing the exact distance stores are to the shopper and even estimated driving time, to further highlight the convenience of a store visit. A study conducted by Shopify found that showcasing local inventory boosted key store metrics including 45% of local pickup who made an additional purchase upon arrival.⁵ See the Product Locator solution guide to get started today.

Update your store locator page to address more of shoppers’ needs

Store locators allow shoppers to more easily find your stores and can be made even more helpful with our Store Locator Plus solution. Our updated Store Locator Plus solution refreshes the store locator page to be more informative and engaging by integrating offers redeemable in-store, online scheduling for appointments and services, and text me directions services. Implement Store Locator Plus today using the guide.

Build and customize Store Locator Plus for your business in minutes

At Google Maps Platform, we are always thinking of ways to make building a map easier and faster for our customers. In May at I/O we made Cloud-based Maps Styling generally available, enabling map updates to happen without touching a line of code. Today we’re excited to introduce Quick Builder, our free, low code builder which allows you to demo, customize and build a version of the Store Locator Plus solution for your website in minutes. Experience Quick Builder today.
To learn more about how you can start adopting these retail solutions, visit our retail solutions page.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

^{1 Global Insights Briefing: Getting back out there}

^{2 https://www.shopify.com/pos/future-of-retail-2021}

^{3 https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/digital-transformation/covid-trends-1-year/}

^{4 https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/pandemic-shopping-behavior/}

^{5 https://www.shopify.com/pos/future-of-retail-2021}

Google Workspace recently commissioned Economist Impact to complete a global survey (October 2021)* on the state of hybrid work, including its challenges and opportunities. We already knew that the pandemic had fundamentally changed the world of work, but the survey emphasizes the scale, reach, and longevity of those changes.. 

Over 75% of respondents believe that hybrid/flexible work will be a standard practice within their organizations in the coming three years. Given that 70% of respondents said they never worked remotely before the pandemic, it’s clear that hybrid has become the dominant model for work and that it’s here to stay. 

But it’s also clear, as we’ll see below, that hybrid has some serious gaps that need to be addressed if it’s going to be sustainable and successful in the long term.

Defining hybrid work

As part of our work on the hybrid work survey and a broader project with The Economist Group, we interviewed a group of experts across research, consulting, business, and the advocacy world to arrive at a definition of hybrid work that captures all ways work is changing.

As Brian Kropp, one of the interviewees and vice president at Gartner, puts it: “Hybrid work is not just about different locations, but also different timings and different schedules.”

Harriet Molyneaux, managing director at HSM Advisory, a future-of-work research and advisory group, adds to this notion by describing the time-location work spectrum: “At one end of the spectrum is everyone in the office, nine till five, so both restricted time and location. And then at the other end of the spectrum is anywhere around the world at any time. So no restricted time or location. A hybrid is anything that sits in the middle of that.”

I agree with Brian and Harriet’s views. Flexibility in both location and hours is a core part of our working definition of hybrid work: a spectrum of flexible work arrangements in which an employee’s work location and/or hours are not strictly standardized.

Given this definition and framework, how is hybrid work faring and what lies ahead? 

Individual wellbeing is coming at the cost of organizational connection

Early on in the pandemic, productivity remained steady or even increased for many organizations. But it came at a cost, with levels of burnout spiking as employees juggled caregiving, homeschooling, and other demands in their personal lives with work responsibilities.

Based on the survey data, wellbeing has made an upward shift, no doubt aided by things like students returning to schools in many regions and fewer demands being made of working parents. The majority of respondents said that hybrid work, based on their own experiences, can have a positive impact on the physical, mental, financial, and social wellbeing of employees.

But it appears that individual wellbeing is coming at the cost of organizational connection. The majority of respondents said they feel disconnected from their organization and co-workers (57%), that limited networking opportunities negatively impact career growth (62%), and that limited social interactions with co-workers has had a negative impact on their mental health (54%).

To be sustainable, hybrid work models must address this sense of disconnection in real and tangible ways. And it won’t happen just by increasing the number of virtual meetings. Although 72% of people say that virtual meetings improve inclusion and participation, 68% also say there are too many virtual meetings to begin with. We need new ways for people to connect spontaneously.

Hybrid workers are often using tools built for a bygone desktop era

When asked about the most important conditions needed to achieve the long-term success of hybrid work models, the number one choice globally was “new technologies that allow for time and location flexibility.” 

Naturally, it was gratifying to see this, since Google Workspace is built on a cloud-based platform that empowers collaboration from anywhere, on any device, but the survey answer also highlights how much organizations have had to scramble to meet the demands of the pandemic. Some had to take legacy, office-centric systems and make them work for a distributed workforce overnight, often leveraging less-than-ideal technologies like VPNs that introduce digital friction.

As a result, top technology concerns of respondents include:

• unreliable internet access (if only all our WiFi connections were hybrid-ready!)
• reliance on slow or outdated tools
• accessing and maintaining files in multiple places
• relying on too many applications in order to get work done

Hybrid work, it seems to me, doesn’t need more applications and collaboration surfaces. It needs deeper, more meaningful connections in the tools and surfaces we already have. 

As organizations assess their tech stacks, they should consider whether they can shape the behaviors they want from hybrid employees (e.g., real-time collaboration, ease of information sharing) with the tools they have in place. Or are the limits of the technology determining hybrid employee behavior?

The management and culture gap

In the same way that tools have often been built for a shared physical workspace, organizational culture seems to lag behind the hybrid moment. The majority of respondents said that a lack of face-to-face supervision creates a sense of distrust among managers and employees, and that they feel stressed by increased monitoring associated with flexible work. And more than 62% said that limited networking opportunities with senior employees and co-workers has a negative impact on career growth.

Strikingly, more than 70% of respondents indicated that the culture of trust between managers and employees needed improvement. Training and management best practices (60% of people want more of both) might help fill some of the gaps, but a manager can’t build trust with their hybrid teams by going through a training program. 

The role of manager must itself evolve to meet the demands of a hybrid model. How can we empower managers to be the bridge between the “office of one” and the “office of many”? And as I discussed previously on Forbes, driving towards impact rather than output is a more sustainable metric for team engagement and productivity. It also dispenses with monitoring as a core part of a manager’s role, freeing them up to be a coach-and-connector.

How Google Workspace can help bridge the hybrid work gaps

No one has all the answers for how to make hybrid work successful, and I suspect we will see iterations of the model into 2022 and beyond as organizations—including Google—experiment with the right mix of location, culture, processes, and tools. 

On the technology front, Google Workspace is uniquely positioned to bridge many of the emerging hybrid work gaps. Over the last year, we’ve delivered a set of innovations that are designed to deepen collaboration experiences while strengthening social connections within and across teams. 

For example, we launched smart canvas to bring new collaboration capabilities to the places where people are already working together, helping to keep them connected, rather than having them switch tabs or open new apps. And we delivered Spaces as a central place for collaboration, where teams can share ideas, work on documents together, and manage tasks from a single place. Because all their work is preserved for future reference, team members can easily jump in and contribute at a time that works best for them, seeing a full history of the conversations, context, and content along the way. Spaces helps people maintain individual wellbeing while preserving the health of a group project.

In Google Meet, we’ve introduced real-time captions in multiple languages (in preview now), the ability for people to customize their video tiles, including being able to turn off their own to help with meeting fatigue, and we’ve implemented automatic light adjustments and noise cancellation. These changes help ensure that everyone can be seen and heard.

Meanwhile, features like hand-raise, Q&A, and polls have helped make meetings more inclusive and companion mode (in preview) can bring these to life in hybrid settings, to help ensure that there’s one cohesive conversation between the people in the office and their colleagues working somewhere else. We view companion mode as a bridge between the office and “somewhere else.”

On the personal wellbeing front, we launched Focus Time, which lets people block out their calendars for uninterrupted focus work, and Time Insights in Google Calendar, where employees can look at how they’re spending their time and adjust as needed.

As hybrid work continues to evolve, Google Workspace is committed to supporting wellbeing and seamless collaboration with tools that can remove digital friction and help people maintain connections—to each other and the organizations they work for.

^{*Survey details: The survey, completed in October 2021, polled a total of 1,244 employees and managers in four regions (North America, Europe, APAC, and Latin America), from more than 15 industries, in every age group, and from both small and large organizations. The focus was on knowledge workers, though it’s important to note that some of those people have been working on the frontlines; 20% of respondents indicated they haven’t worked remotely at all during the pandemic. This includes people in hospitality, retail, transportation and logistics, and healthcare.}

As a family supermarket chain since 1939, Schnuck Markets Inc. depends on driving efficiency and volume sales to achieve its mission, identifying customer service and community partnerships among its key differentiators.

In order to commit its maximum resources for success, Schnucks continues to focus on streamlining operations and achieving greater efficiency. Management and administrative staff throughout the company’s 100 stores in five states need to be able to collaborate effortlessly while enjoying an accurate, centralized information exchange platform. These efficiencies have the potential to impact productivity, customer service, and employee engagement.

Fast-tracking data sharing

Before adopting G Suite, Schnucks found collaborative workflows to be a challenge. Managers from different stores, often in different states, had to provide data that could be compiled and shared. Collaborative documents on traditional platforms faced challenges at Schnucks, where limits of simultaneous users would result in user lockouts. Schnucks managers often exchanged many different versions of the same documents and spreadsheets. However, reconciling all those versions was time-consuming and limited real-time collaboration.

“When we share a Google sheet and request data, 200 people can add their responses immediately at the same time from any device. They don’t walk away and forget and need a reminder. The result is near-effortless compliance,” says Kim Anderson, Director of Procurement and Replenishment at Schnucks.

Schnucks has been successful using the entire range of G Suite tools, with Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Forms contributing to enhanced collaboration. Google Keep is a popular productivity tool for meeting notes and tasks and creating reminders. Schnucks also uses Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat to reduce time and costs spent in face-to-face meetings, and Calendar as the central source for scheduling company events and meetings.

The partnership between Schnucks and Agosto helped with a successful G Suite deployment for the retailer. Agosto helped coordinate the logistics of the move and tackled the G Suite migration with a three-part strategy: IT staffers would move to Google first before employee “Google Guide” experts came in who could help answer teammate G Suite questions.

“Agosto’s deployment plan helped our G Suite deployment run smoothly,” says Dave Steck, Schnucks Vice President of Development and IT Infrastructure. “Their thorough planning helped mitigate the inevitable disruption a change of this size would make.”

Enhanced security and reliability

Previously, Schnucks relied on email to exchange information and any outages added even more lag time to its operations. With Gmail and the entire G Suite, Schnucks now experiences virtually no downtime, allowing for effective communication with enhanced levels of reliability and security.

“We were able to take advantage of the security benefits of G Suite right away,” says Joey Smith, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Schnucks. “Our administrators are able to quickly configure, test, and manage our G Suite security settings to fit the security needs of our business while maintaining compliance with all regulatory obligations.”

On top of the CapEx and OpEx savings with Google providing infrastructure for its office productivity software, Schnucks has gained increased security and high availability, as well as robust disaster recovery. These features are included in G Suite, without any need for IT intervention.

“G Suite automatically encrypts our data with a unique encryption key for each piece and distributes it across multiple data centers for performance, security, and reliability,” says Joey. “This saves us a significant amount of time and money while achieving top notch security.”

Another way Schnucks benefits from Google security is the availability of data loss protection (DLP) features native to Gmail. With DLP, Schnucks can automatically audit outgoing emails for Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and other information the store requires.

“DLP is very powerful because it provides detailed visibility,” says Joey. “We can isolate emails, analyze patterns of false positives, and follow up with education or enhanced restrictions to increase security.”

Spam reduction

An unexpected advantage of adopting G Suite was an instantaneous reduction in spam emails. That’s more administrative time saved for employees. In fact, Gmail native spam prevention is so effective that Schnucks was able to replace its third-party spam filter with a simpler technology that costs 80% less.

Savings on hardware and software

Converting to G Suite saves Schnucks the operational costs of an infrastructure for office and communications solutions, but its web interface also provides substantial savings on application maintenance, anti-virus software, and hardware.

With G Suite files and applications residing in the cloud, the need for employees to use heavyweight installable applications is increasingly rare. As laptops age, Schnucks is replacing them with Chromebooks, saving approximately $1,250 per computer. Because Chromebooks don’t require additional anti-virus software or many other endpoint security measures, the need for software licenses and other security and maintenance costs are simultaneously reduced.

Schnucks also finds that Chromebooks instantly increase productivity. “What’s great about the Chromebook is the productivity savings we get from the speed and ease of use and management,” says Dave Steck, Vice President of Development and IT Infrastructure at Schnucks. “You’re not waiting for applications to start up. As a result, Chromebooks are the only laptops we need for the majority of our teammates.”

Aligning the company across sites

More than just providing a common set of office tools, intuitive collaboration in G Suite enables the grocery chain to provide consistent messaging and a central information hub across all store locations. With posters, presentations, and communications, Schnucks worked hard to help ensure that the entire company understood the value of the tools. The Operations and IT teams rolled out the changeover in three phases, using Google Guides to show the benefits of adoption and then rolling out to larger groups over time.

“Adopting G Suite as a collaborative platform helped us to integrate individual store activities and increase operational efficiency,” says Dave.

Investing in the future

Employees who were already familiar with G Suite because they used it in school or in their personal lives have found the move eases communications company-wide, and Schnucks believes that the move will also help attract prospective employees who already use G Suite.

“Knowing that more and more prospective employees are already familiar with G Suite is a big win for us,” says Joey. “To them, it helps demonstrate our commitment to innovation.”