How Randstad Creates Assessment Reports in Five Minutes with G Suite
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For over five decades, Randstad has matched businesses worldwide with millions of temporary and permanent workers, creating long-lasting, successful working relationships. Today, the company operates a vast multinational recruitment network, with 35,000 employees applying HR expertise in markets from Norway to Malaysia, and more than 37 countries in-between.
To give staff a more mobile, low-maintenance alternative to their previous communications solution, Randstad offered G Suite to its staff in 2012, giving them the option to switch. All of Randstad’s workforce made that choice, assisted by a Randstad “Transformation Kit” containing everything a team needs for a successful migration. Now Randstad’s global community of G Suite users are looking to unleash the full potential of the platform, moving beyond Gmail and Calendar to engineer major efficiencies across the organization.
“Technology gives us more time to be in contact with people,” says Senne Beckers, Senior Accounts Specialist at Randstad. “It means we can give more attention to the people we outsource, our colleagues, and our customers. Our administrative ability is what makes Randstad successful, and G Suite makes all our processes more efficient.”
Sharing tips worldwide to make the most of G Suite tools
“In Sheets, I can create a pivot table and then I can drop Sheets visualizations directly into Slides for presentations. In the past, we would need visual designers to do that, but now I can do it in a matter of minutes.”
– Frank van der Bijl, Business Analyst IT, Randstad
Using Google+, Randstad workers share their ideas for applying G Suite to their work. “We share tips and tricks with each other from all over the world,” says Frank van der Bijl, Business Analyst IT at Randstad. “There’s always someone you can learn from or educate, and that’s an innovation in and of itself. In the past, when we wanted to share information like this, we would contact the internal communications team for them to put something on the company intranet. Now we go straight to Google+ and post it directly.” Randstad calls this project “Google to the Max”, and the boost in collaboration and efficiency helps its staff around the globe be more productive.
Those tips range from saving time by using Calendar to book meeting rooms and check colleague availability, to minimizing unnecessary travel by replacing meetings with Google Hangouts Meet. As an HR company, Randstad handles, optimizes, and edits thousands of résumés every day. By using Google Forms to collect data for résumés and Google Docs to edit them, Randstad teams streamline that core process. “Rather than send résumés back and forth with corrections and suggestions, we work on them all together, directly in Docs,” says Frank. “It’s a collaboration, like how we centralize information in Google Sheets to give everyone on a team a single, up-to-the-minute overview on customers and candidates, maximizing the chances of a successful match.”
Many of the innovations tackle processes that used to create bottlenecks by requiring specialist knowledge. “In Sheets, I can create a pivot table,” says Frank, “then I can drop Sheets visualizations directly into Google Slides for presentations. In the past, we would need visual designers to do that, but now I can do it in a matter of minutes.”
Streamlining annual assessments with Forms and Sheets
“We have more than 1,000 people working for a global airline through Randstad, and because G Suite is so open, the airline, like other clients, uses Google tools to send us information.”
– Senne Beckers, Senior Accounts Specialist, Randstad
In addition to improving internal processes, the innovations directly benefit Randstad clients, as Senne explains: “We have more than 1,000 people working for a global airline through Randstad, and because G Suite is so open, the airline, like other clients, uses Google tools to send us information, even though they work with a different communication platform.”
That flexibility allows Senne and her team to apply G Suite technology to problems outside of Randstad. “We used to have a very old-fashioned way of collecting annual assessments on each of the people we have with the airline,” says Senne. “We would email a document to an airline shift leader, who had to go to his or her computer to receive it, print it, fill out the document, scan it, save it, and then email it back. At one point, the workload was so high that we had to stop taking feedback altogether.”
To simplify the process, Senne implemented Forms, as a fast, mobile way for shift leaders to send their assessments. “With Forms, shift leaders can be inside a plane or out on the runway, and when they want to comment on an employee they can give us instant feedback that goes directly into our system,” explains Senne. Back at the Randstad office, HR then pulls all the data they need directly from Sheets, without having to reference the CRM, chase clients, or search emails.
As a result, it now takes five minutes to create an annual assessment, instead of one hour. Because there are 1,000 employees, a task that took 1,000 hours a year, or 140 working days, can be finished in two and a half weeks.
“Because Sheets translates information directly into graphs as it arrives, we can track the situation at a glance,” says Senne. “Streamlining the creation of annual assessments with Forms doesn’t just make the process more efficient, it also means we can spend more time properly discussing feedback with employees. That’s good for them and great for the airline’s management, which now wants to roll out this approach to more business units.”
Bringing teams together with Google Keep
“Everyone has their own approach, and we’re all sharing our experiences through Google+ and helping colleagues. Every day we find a new feature, which helps us be more efficient, and all we need to implement it is an internet connection.”
– Frank van der Bijl, Business Analyst IT, Randstad
As HR specialists, Randstad employees know that solving individual work issues is only part of the story. For teams to work effectively, solutions need to be brought together in a single place, where they can feed into each other. To make that happen, staff across Randstad use Google Keep to communicate.
“Keep really helps me to structure workflows and share my ideas directly with my team,” says Senne. “I have a lot of ideas all of the time, and Keep means I can make them known to the people I work with, at the same moment as I jot them down during a meeting. It brings Docs, Forms, and Sheets together in one place where we can arrange things intuitively and set priorities. With our to-do lists visible on that central hub, we can all check in on each other and track progress in a transparent way.”
For Senne, that functionality couples neatly with Google Cloud Search. “As a senior account specialist, it’s my responsibility to know what is happening in our teams, and Google Cloud Search helps me keep all of the information at my fingertips, ready for me to share. It’s the home screen on my Chrome browser.”
Recognizing that this agile, fast-paced way of working may be unfamiliar to new employees, Frank uses Google Keep to introduce people to the G Suite tools. “When people are new to a company, they’re sometimes nervous about asking for advice, such as how to ask for a day off,” says Frank. “To help them, I’ve created a four-step checklist of ‘Things you should do when you join Randstad’, which directs them to the information they need to on-board. With Keep I can see where they are in the process and follow up with them if I think they might need help.”
Embracing the interconnected environment
In each of the 39 countries where Randstad is active, operations are moving at their own pace towards greater G Suite integration. And though each is at a different stage in the process, the direction of travel is clear.
“Across the company, the next step will be Chromebooks, so that we fully embrace the interconnected app environment,” says Frank. “Some countries have already fully switched to Chromebooks, and some are migrating all of their data to the cloud. Everyone has their own approach, and we’re all sharing our experiences through Google+ and helping colleagues. Every day we find a new feature, which helps us be more efficient, and all we need to implement it is an internet connection.”
Held Back by Database Scalability, This Financial Services Company Switches to Google Cloud and Cloud Spanner
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Azimut Group operates an international network of companies handling investment and asset management, mutual funds, hedge funds, and insurance. Founded in Milan, Italy in 1988, Azimut Group today has branches in fifteen countries, including Brazil, China, and the USA.
“We have subsidiaries and manage funds all over the world,” explains Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager at Azimut Holding S.p.a. “That means that any technology that we put in place has to cover needs from many different countries.”
“When complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”
—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.
Azimut manages its funds with investment advisors who use information sourced from Bloomberg, Reuters and others. “They use a huge amount of data,” says Simone. “They work with spreadsheets, algorithms, formulae and they analyse data in minutes.” In finance, every second is crucial, which is why Azimut decided to develop a risk management dashboard that can process information even more quickly, then distribute it worldwide.
“When an advisor manages data, that data is used to make immediate decisions on funds, capital movements or whether to sell stock,” says Simone. “They have to be ready to make recommendations for any amount of data that comes to them. For our dashboard, that means that when additional information arrives or complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”
Generating insights at speed
Investors and investment managers make decisions based on the most accurate, up-to-date information possible. For Azimut Group, information sourced through financial data vendors such as Bloomberg and Reuters provided only part of the data that the group required.
“We looked to collect information from a range of different providers,” explains Simone, “then analyse it to develop a predictive algorithm that could work faster than an advisor stationed at the terminal. We set ourselves the challenge to try to manipulate that data to add new insights into our matrix, so that every one of our branches across the world can see risk information about the funds in real-time.”
“We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling. With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it.
—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.
The first cloud provider Azimut used to build its system struggled to scale quickly to meet different kinds of data challenges. “If we wanted to add more cores, that was fine,” says Simone. “But the previous cloud provider made it complicated to raise the amount of space in a database infrastructure and scale up to demand. Scaling up for more in-depth analysis would take a day, and our need was immediate.”
That’s why Azimut switched one year ago to Google Cloud Platform to run the 150 VMs on its risk analysis platform. “We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling,” says Simone. “With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it. Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”
The infrastructure of Azimut’s solution handles around 800TB of data per month, and Google’s global network of servers and high-speed connections ensure that it gets to where it’s most needed by the most direct route. Impressed by the speed, security and availability of Google Cloud Platform, Azimut has moved its intranet on to Google Cloud Platform, too, eliminating the need for staff to login with VPNs.
“Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”
—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.
Driving ahead with Noovle
For Azimut, migrating the risk management dashboard is the latest of many Google product collaborations with cloud consultancy Noovle. “Everything started five years ago,” says Simone, “when Noovle assisted us in migrating to Gmail from our on-premise email solution. From G Suite to Google Cloud Platform, we’ve had a great relationship. Noovle provides consultancy services, support for mobility, and external advisors who work on our premises, such as when they trained us how to broadcast our meetings on Google Hangouts. As an independent company, we know we can trust them for transparent advice. All they care about is the best way to get a job done and to help us reach our goals.”
New app, new customers
In a business case comparison, Google Cloud Platform cost Azimut 35% less to run than the previous cloud provider. Now the group is building a major new mobile application on Google App Engine to be released in 2018.
“The new mobile application will allow customers to trade directly, without human advisors, by proposing different investment solutions depending on targets the customers set,” says Simone. “So if a customer aims to make money with investments, they enter their relevant personal information and we carry out the necessary regulatory checks and suggest what they could buy. The entire project will be based on Google Cloud Platform, so customers can control their investments through the app while we manage the fund, using Google Cloud Spanner on the backend.”
2022’s First Cloud CISO Perspectives: Recap of the Megatrends, Releases and News
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I’m excited to share our first Cloud CISO Perspectives post of 2022. It’s already shaping up to be an eventful year for our industry and we’re only in month one. There’s a lot to recap in this post, including the U.S. government’s recent efforts to address critical security issues, like open source software security and zero trust architectures. We’ve also released new resources from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team like the Cloud Security Megatrends and the Boards of Directors whitepaper on cloud risk governance.
Cloud Security Megatrends
We’re often asked if the cloud is more secure than on-prem (and why) so we shared our answer in a recent blog post. At Google Cloud, security by design is our priority. We’ve long adopted zero-trust principles for our baseline security architectures and built a global network that relies on defense in depth layers to protect against configuration errors and attacks. But security is always evolving and that is why we also take advantage of the following megatrends:
- Economy of scale: Decreasing the marginal cost of security raises the baseline level of security.
- Shared fate: A flywheel of increasing trust drives more transition to the cloud, which compels even higher security and even more skin-in-the-game from the cloud provider.
- Healthy competition: The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading security technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation.
- Cloud as the digital immune system: Every security update the cloud gives the customer is informed by some threat, vulnerability, or new attack technique often identified by someone else’s experience. Enterprise IT leaders use this accelerating feedback loop to get better protection.
- Software-defined infrastructure: Cloud is software defined, so it can be dynamically configured without customers having to manage hardware placement or cope with administrative toil. From a security standpoint, that means specifying security policies as code, and continuously monitoring their effectiveness.
- Increasing deployment velocity: Because of cloud’s vast scale, providers have had to automate software deployments and updates, usually with automated continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems. That same automation delivers security enhancements, resulting in more frequent security updates.
- Simplicity: Cloud becomes an abstraction-generating machine for identifying, creating and deploying simpler default modes of operating securely and autonomically.
- Sovereignty meets sustainability: The cloud’s global scale and ability to operate in localized and distributed ways creates three pillars of sovereignty. This global scale can also be leveraged to improve energy efficiency.
If you’re an IT decision maker, pay attention to these megatrends that will continue to drive and reinforce cloud security and will outpace the security of on-prem infrastructure well into the future.
U.S. Federal government cybersecurity momentum
- Open source software security: Earlier this month, Google participated in the White House Summit on open source software security. The meeting came at a critical time for the industry following December’s Log4j vulnerabilities and was both a recognition of the challenge and an important first step towards addressing it. The open source software ecosystem is not homogenous, despite the fact that the industry often thinks of or treats it this way. Some of it, like Linux, is highly curated, while other critical software is supported through diffuse communities including technology companies and other stakeholders. There is also a long tail of many other critical projects driven by a dedicated community of maintainers around the world, including Googlers. In light of this reality, we welcomed the chance to share our recommendations to advance the future of open source software security. Some work we’ve done includes founding the Open Source Security Foundation, which has been instrumental already in making security improvements. We’ve also helped drive a number of key security initiatives within the open source community including security scorecards, the SLSA framework to improve the security and integrity of open source packages, and Secure Open Source Rewards to financially incentivize improvements to critical open source security projects.
- OMB’s Federal zero trust strategy: The publication of the Office of Management and Budget’s zero trust architecture strategy marks an important step for the U.S. federal government’s efforts to modernize under Executive Order 14028. Google Cloud supports this approach, which recognizes the immense security benefits offered by modern computing architectures. For the past decade, Google has successfully applied zero trust principles through our BeyondCorp and BeyondProd frameworks for providing end-user access and securing our cloud workloads. And we’ve brought these best practices from our own journey to global governments and businesses of any size through solutions like BeyondCorp Enterprise and capabilities like Binary Authorization and Anthos Service Mesh, which are embedded in Anthos, our managed application platform. For Federal agencies embarking on this zero trust journey, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will offer our expertise by conducting Zero Trust Foundations strategy workshops, which can help organizations in the public and private sectors develop actionable and achievable strategies and plans for zero trust implementation.
Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights
Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources across our security teams this month:
Security
- Democratizing security operations: We recently announced that Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider, is joining Google Cloud to help companies better manage their threat response. Providing a proven SOAR capability with Chronicle’s approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision to advance invisible security and democratize security operations for every organization.
- Security by design: The Highmark Health security team is using “secure-by-design” techniques to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of its Living Health solution with Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO). Google has long advocated for and followed security by design principles, which is why we’re continuously building enhanced security, controls, resiliency and more into our cloud products and services.
- Secure collaboration for hybrid work environments: The Google Workspace team shared its recommendations for businesses as they prepare for the future of work, where the hybrid/flexible work model is becoming standard practice and a new approach to security is essential.
- Anthos Policy Controller CIS Benchmark enforcement: A big part of our shared fate philosophy is to build secure products and not just security products. A recent example of this in action is embedding CIS benchmark policy conformance in the Anthos Policy Controller. We believe the more we embed approaches like this into our products, the more application and infrastructure teams can intrinsically embed security at the start and reduce toil for the security team.
- DevOps for technology-driven organizations and startups: A key success factor for many security programs is the partnership and integration with development teams, and there are some great resources and lessons in our DORA research.
- Security by design with Chrome OS: ABN AMRO’s Asia-Pacific region team recently shared how they are using Chrome OS and CloudReady to work securely in the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership, and add flexibility for employees. This is a great example of secure by design principles in the use of Chromium.
Risk & Compliance
- Boards of Directors summary guide to cloud risk governance: The latest whitepaper from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team outlines how boards of directors can prioritize safe, secure, and compliant adoption processes for cloud technologies within their organizations.
- TruSight Risk Assessment of Google Cloud: TruSight recently released a comprehensive
risk assessment report on Google Cloud. Our Enterprise Trust team collaborated on this robust assessment of Google Cloud services to validate the design and implementation of controls. TruSight’s risk assessment of our security controls will help customers accelerate and complete their risk management due diligence. - Data governance: Check out this new blog series on data governance where our teams explain the role of data governance, its importance, and the necessary processes to run an effective data governance program. Implementing data governance will help maximize value derived from business data, build user trust, and ensure compliance with required security measures.
Controls and Products
- Encrypting Data Fusion: To help meet the security, privacy and compliance requirements of customers in regulated industries like finance or public sector, we announced the general availability of Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) integration for Cloud Data Fusion, which enables encryption of both user data and metadata at rest with a key that customers can control through our Cloud Key Management Service (KMS).
Don’t forget to sign-up for our newsletter if you’d like to have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox. We’ll be back next month with more updates and security-related news.
Accelerate Developer Productivity with Google Workspace
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The software development process requires complex, cross-functional collaboration while continuously improving products and services. Our customers who build software say that they value Google Workspace for its ability to drive innovation and collaboration throughout the entire software development life cycle. Developers can hold standups and scrums in Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces, create and collaborate on requirements documentation in Google Docs and Sheets, build team presentations in Google Slides, and manage their focus time and availability with Google Calendar.
Development teams also use many other tools to get work done, like tracking issues and tasks in Atlassian’s Jira, managing workloads with Asana, and incident management in PagerDuty. One of the benefits of Google Workspace is that it’s an open platform tailored to improve the performance of your tools by seamlessly integrating them together. We’re constantly expanding our ecosystem and improving Google Workspace, giving you the power to push your software development even further.
Make software development more agile
Google Workspace gives you real-time visibility into project progress and decisions to help you ship quality code fast and stay connected with your stakeholders, all without switching tools and tabs. By leveraging applications from our partners, you can pull valuable information out of silos, making collaborating on requirements, code reviews, bug triage, deployment updates, and monitoring operations easy for the whole team. This allows your teams to stay focused on their priorities while keeping everyone aligned, ensuring collaborators are always in the loop.
Plan and execute together
When combined with integrations, Google Workspace makes the software development planning process more collaborative and efficient. For example, many organizations use Asana—a leading work management platform—to coordinate and manage everything from daily tasks to cross-functional strategic initiatives. To make the experience more seamless, Asana built integrations so users can always have access to their tasks and projects with Google Drive, Gmail, and Chat. With these integrations for Google Workspace, you can turn your conversations into action and create new tasks in Asana—all without leaving Google Workspace.
“We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana
To date, users have installed the Asana for Gmail add-on over 2.5 million times, as well as over 3.8 million installs of the Asana for Google Workspace add-on for Google Drive.
Start coding quickly
Google Workspace makes it easy for product managers, UX designers, and engineers to agree on what they’re building and why. By bringing all stakeholders, decisions, and requirements into one place—whether it’s a Gmail or Google Chat conversation, or a document in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides—Google Workspace removes friction, helping your teams finalize product specifications and get started right away.
Integrations like GitHub for Google Chat make the entire development process fit easily into a developer’s workflow. With this integration, teams can quickly push new commits, make pull requests, do code reviews, and provide real-time feedback that improves the quality of their code—all from Google Chat.
Speed up testing
Integrations like Jira for Google Chat accelerate the entire QA process in the development workflow. The app acts as a team member in the conversation, sending new issues and contextual updates as they are reported to improve the quality of your code and keep everyone informed on your Jira projects.
Ship code faster
Developers use Jenkins—a popular open-source continuous integration and continuous delivery tool—to build and test products continuously. Along with other cloud-native tools, Jenkins supports strong DevOps practices by letting you continuously integrate changes into the software build.
With Jenkins for Google Chat, development and operations teams can connect into their Jenkins pipeline and stay up to date by receiving software build notifications directly in Google Chat.
Proactively monitor your services
Improving the customer experience requires capturing and monitoring data sources to improve application and infrastructure observability. Google Workspace supports DevOps teams and organizations by helping stakeholders collaborate and troubleshoot more effectively. When you integrate Datadog with Google Chat, monitoring data becomes part of your team’s discussion, and you can efficiently collaborate to resolve issues as soon as they arise.
The integration makes it easy to start a discussion with all the relevant teams by sharing a snapshot of a graph in any of your Chat spaces. When an alert notification is triggered, it allows you to notify each Chat space independently, precisely targeting your communication to the right teams.
Improve service reliability
Orchestrating business-wide responses to interruptions is a cross-functional effort. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, it’s important to proactively manage service-impacting events. Google Workspace supports response teams by ensuring that urgent alerts reach the right people by providing teams with a central space to discover incidents, find the root cause, and resolve them quickly.
PagerDuty for Google Chat empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for an exceptional customer experience—all from Google Chat. See and share details with link previews, and perform actions by creating or updating incidents. By keeping all conversations in a central space, new responders can get up to speed and solve issues faster without interrupting others.
Accelerate developer productivity
Integrating your DevOps tools with Google Workspace allows your development teams to centralize their work, stay focused on what’s important—like managing their work—build code quickly, ship quality products, and communicate better during service impacting incidents. For more apps and solutions that help centralize your work so you and your teams can connect, create, and get things done, check out Google Workspace Marketplace, where you’ll find more than 5,300 public applications that integrate directly into Google Workspace.
In sync for better efficiency: Effective collaboration strategies for distributed workforces
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Workplace collaboration continues to evolve as hybrid work expands its footprint. While both “same-time” and “staggered-time” (or asynchronous) collaboration modes each have their place in the hybrid work environment, organizations and teams sometimes overuse one mode over another. That’s probably because in-person meetings or collaborating in real time have been the default for many organizations, leading to a “same-time” bias, even as new tools make working across time zones and locations seamless. Ultimately, the key for making collaboration scalable and to support employee wellbeing is choosing the right method and tool for the task at hand. With that in mind, here are some ways to get the most out of same-time and staggered-time collaboration in your organization.
Making same-time collaboration more valuable
Historically, many organizations have valued same-time interactions for the fast, direct exchange of information and feedback. They also bring teams together and build human connections. While all these outcomes are powerful and important, same-time collaboration also has some drawbacks — especially in a hybrid environment.
First, same-time interactions can be difficult to arrange. Coordinating schedules requires advanced planning, especially when employees are distributed across time zones or working outside of traditional business hours. Second, back-to-back scheduling can contribute to meeting fatigue. In our recently commissioned global hybrid work survey with Economist Impact, 72% of respondents acknowledged that virtual meetings improve inclusion and participation. At the same time, 68% said there are too many virtual meetings in general, suggesting that even though employees value same-time collaboration, they want it in moderation.
To address these challenges, organizations should consider the collaboration scenarios in which same-time interactions can make the greatest impact. It’s particularly useful when consensus or immediate action is needed, as in briefings, decision-making, and crisis management.
For effective same-time collaboration in a hybrid environment, your employees need tools that help them coordinate real-time interactions and minimize time spent switching apps and context. With Google Workspace, teams can create and access a shared agenda or Google Doc inside a Google Calendar invite, helping align expectations and goals before, during, and after scheduled same-time work sessions. And, the more integrated your collaboration tools are, the easier it is for employees to get right to work when inspiration strikes or a quick decision is needed. For example, team members can initiate spontaneous work sessions by starting a Google Meet directly from Docs, Sheets, or Slides.
Additionally, consider how you can bring real-world collaboration activities into virtual environments to enhance same-time collaboration for distributed teams. For instance, digital whiteboard tools, like Jamboard and Miro in Google Meet, allow people to brainstorm, ideate, and problem-solve in real time from anywhere. Interactive solutions like these empower employees to work together in new ways.
Expanding what’s possible with staggered-time collaboration
Widespread adoption of hybrid work has prompted organizations to turn more frequently to staggered-time collaboration — where team members are free to share and respond to information in their own time. A key benefit of staggered collaboration is improving the experience and wellbeing of employees — specifically, by promoting participation across the team and support for flexible work habits. Allowing team members to engage when they’re most productive, or when it doesn’t interfere with their scheduled focus time, supports their wellbeing. It can also help employees feel heard, valued, and empowered. Staggered-time collaboration can also give team members who may feel uncomfortable or vulnerable speaking up in real time, or who just need time to think about their feedback, a more inviting way to share their perspectives.
Staggered-time collaboration can enhance a range of collaboration scenarios, including assigning tasks and action items, knowledge- and resource-sharing, brainstorming, and giving feedback. To make these interactions successful, employees need secure, intuitive tools that give them the information they need to do their jobs from anywhere, at any time. For example, in Spaces, team members can initiate and take part in group chat threads devoted to project- and topic-based discussions, as well as access files and tasks, to stay in the loop whenever they’re able to participate. For people working on a task or project at varied times, creating a dynamic, single source of truth makes all the difference.
When collaborating on shared documents, a feature like smart canvas enables teammates to assign tasks, build checklists, and share files using @-mentions for easy information access. Meanwhile, automated, built-in summaries in Docs help the team get up to speed without losing focus. Features like these help everyone stay on the same page (literally), even if they’re contributing to a project at different times.
Flexibility and collaboration are not mutually exclusive
Helping people know which tasks call for real-time collaboration and which tasks are better done on their own time is critical for sustaining productivity and wellbeing in a hybrid work world. Employees who are empowered to work in ways that complement their needs, preferences, and schedules typically reward their organization for that flexibility. As Holger Reisinger, Paul Sephton, and Dane Fetterer wrote for the Harvard Business Review, “When leaders give employees the freedom to choose where and when they work, it signals they trust them to do the job they were hired to do. The data shows that that trust is then paid back…at a very high rate, building a tight-knit culture of inclusivity and belonging.”
When you create team norms around same-time and staggered-time collaboration, you can help your employees stay productive and connected — to each other and the broader organization. And by giving them tools that support seamless, secure collaboration experiences from anywhere, the impact on productivity, employee wellbeing, and morale can be transformational.
Why I Moved to the G Suite: Rentokil CIO
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Whether it’s getting rid of pests, cleaning up a crime scene or tending to office plants, Rentokil Initial is a service business whose primary aim is to offer customers the best possible standard. This can only be achieved if teams work closely together, sharing expertise and ideas and communicating constantly.
We used to have 180 email domains and 40 mail systems in place, so finding contact details and responding quickly to colleagues was a challenge. To tackle this, in 2009, we moved 0 business users, including our ‘on the road’ service technicians and salespeople onto a single communications platform, G Suite.
Since switching to G Suite, we’ve saved millions of pounds (£) on IT maintenance and several hundred thousand pounds by cutting the time spent on administrative tasks through using tools such as Google Docs, Sites and Forms. For senior management, Google Hangouts Meet has also proved its worth, saving roughly 54 hours of the senior management’s time a week – that’s over 2,000 hours a year. In addition to maximizing productivity, online sharing through G Suite products has enabled us to spread knowledge and ideas organically across countries and divisions.
Individual teams have fully embraced the opportunity to share knowledge, using the group intranet, powered by Google Sites, to post training videos and access technical images. But it’s not all about official documents and meetings: online sharing is helping us to become a more personal, sociable organization, which is important for staff retention and working culture. Colleagues use our intranet to share personal achievements, from sleeping on the streets for a homeless charity to boxing in international championships, giving a true flavor of the diversity within the company.
Employees at all levels are embracing G Suite to connect with colleagues. For example, our UK Managing Director uses Google+ to post updates and pictures of his ‘road trips’ across the UK and his encounters with colleagues, from the CFO to our longest standing pest control technicians, providing new insight into his role in the business. The ability to connect directly with our executives and create communities amongst our new employees is radically changing and modernizing the culture of our company.
All in all, we’ve been amazed by the journey which G Suite has taken us on, connecting our teams no matter where they are and no matter what they’re doing and making a difference in almost every corner of our business. Thanks to Google we see ourselves as better connected, able to offer a better service to customers and more competitive on a global scale.
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