As virtual meetings, remote collaboration, flexible hours: it’s becoming clear that these new ways of working with customers and business leaders since the onset of COVID-19, workplace transformation go from an almost theoretical long-term goal to an urgent priority. Employers and workers want more flexible ways of working, and delivering on this requires the right technology.
Remote working has significantly increased the demands from many directions — in both our professional and our personal lives. People have the tendency to feel overloaded with too much information and too many tasks across too many different tools. Instead of learning another tool, people need the tools we already use to be even more helpful, and work together, in an integrated, intuitive way.
Google is introducing a better home for work showcasing how G Suite is now intelligently bringing together the people, content, and tasks you need to make the most of your time. Core tools like video, chat, email, files, and tasks are now integrated and making them better together so that you can more easily stay on top of things, from anywhere.
Customers like Colgate-Palmolive and ATB Financial, who’ve previewed the new product experience, are giving Google great feedback about this integrated workspace. According to Gene Molloy, VP IT End User Technology at Iron Mountain, “seamlessly brings together the best of G Suite to make us more efficient with less context switching, allowing us to focus on the task at hand with fewer distractions.”
Bringing Things Together
As Google looked at ways to deepen the integration between email, chat, and video — three core pillars of communication — they started where most of us begin our workday: the inbox. It is now easier to join video meetings straight from your inbox as Meet is brought into Gmail on the web, Android, and iOS — and made it free for everyone. And last month, the search giant brought Google Chat into Gmail on the web to help you communicate more seamlessly, without the disruption of switching tabs. Soon, Chat will join Gmail on Android and iOS, making it even easier to do more from one place, wherever you are.
The tech company also promised of enhancing the collaboration features in Chat rooms by adding shared files and tasks, making rooms an even better solution for longer-term projects. With quick access to shared chat, important documents, and to-dos in one place, it’s easier for everyone in a group to stay on the same page. Plus, Chat lets you create rooms that include people outside your company, like contractors or consultants, so your group can be not only cross-functional but also cross-organizational.
To make rooms even more useful, Google is infusing them with real-time collaboration by adding the ability to open and co-edit a document with your team without leaving Gmail. This makes it easier for you to collaborate directly within the context of where you’re doing your work in the moment — so, for example, you can chat about the changes you’re making to a document in real-time, or assign a new task (or mark one complete!), without switching between screens.
This new integrated workspace also makes it easy to access your favorite third-party apps, including DocuSign, Salesforce, and Trello, so you can get updates and take action within any kind of conversation—across Gmail, Chat, and rooms.