Posted by Mike Hincks, Director of IT Infrastructure at Vivint Solar

Editor's note: Today we hear from Mike Hincks, Director of IT Infrastructure at Vivint Solar, a leading provider of residential solar power in North America. The fast-moving enterprise is using Google Apps, along with Dialpad, to drive collaboration and support for a workforce that's 63% remote. Register here to join our YouTube Live event on September 15 at 10 a.m. to learn more about how Dialpad, a Recommended for Google Apps Technology Partner, can modernize your IT strategy to support the anywhere worker.


Vivint Solar’s mission is to flip the switch on how the world consumes power. With millions of homeowners adopting solar for economic and environmental benefits, our workforce has rapidly grown to nearly 4,000 employees spread across 51 offices.

Much of that growth has been within our mobile workforce. Today, about 63% of our employees work remotely. Our sales professionals and technicians are constantly on the road building relationships with customers, and they need the right technology to ensure that they’re able to get their jobs done as efficiently as possible.

We turned to Dialpad to eliminate the hurdles of traditional voice technology, which can include multiple steps to reach successful deployment and ongoing maintenance challenges.

Integrating communications and productivity in the cloud with easy access to Gmail, Calendar and Docs across every device
Dialpad’s pure-cloud communications solution directly ties voice, video and messaging with Google Apps. Our mobile workforce immediately saw increased productivity once we made the switch. To get started, employees downloaded the Dialpad app, which automatically synced their meetings, emails and shared documents from Gmail, Calendar and Drive. The fact that it works across laptops, tablets and mobile devices (not just a desk phone) frees our workforce to work where and when they want.

Dialpad’s native integration with Google Apps allowed us to connect two mission-critical tools, and now our mobile workers can get their jobs done faster and more efficiently. When employees log in with their Google credentials to view recent emails, shared documents and upcoming calendar events, they get insights and rich context right from the Dialpad app.

In addition, Dialpad syncs with Google’s global company directory, so employee contact information is always up-to-date. And if an employee needs to call a colleague or customer, they can click-to-call with Dialpad straight from Gmail.

A simple deployment of scalable, high-value technology, without the overhead
Our transition to a pure-cloud communications platform with Dialpad and Google has resulted in significant cost savings and impactful productivity gains. For example, our prior telephony system needed a team of five people to manage and administer it full-time. Now, one employee spends only 5% of their time managing our new system.

Traditional IT voice systems come with hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly infrastructure and hosting costs, while modern competitors require significant professional services just to get the product up and running. Dialpad, by contrast, had no upfront capital expenditures or ongoing maintenance costs. When switching to Dialpad, we were able to get our communications network deployed in just a couple of days without the high upfront costs — and Google Apps integrated instantly.

As our business continues to grow, both tools will scale seamlessly and neither requires the purchase of new IT infrastructure.

An empowered workforce that collaborates freely

A pure cloud stack lets employees get work done from anywhere. At Vivint Solar, our customer success managers need to connect with technicians in the field, but are based in our office headquarters. Before Dialpad and Google, it was a significant challenge for these different groups to maintain close relationships or communicate at a suitable time. Now, managers can resolve issues or bridge conversations using group messaging or SMS.

By integrating our core communications and productivity tools in the cloud, Vivint Solar has enabled an agile and deeply connected workforce that can collaborate from anywhere. It has created a new kind of business dialogue. Whether employees are local or remote, Dialpad and Google Apps make it easy to bridge voice with productivity and build a connected, more efficient workforce.

Posted by Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG

Editor's note: Today we hear from Daniel Durgan, IT Business Partner at ISG, an international construction services company delivering fit out, construction, engineering services and a range of specialist solutions. Daniel explains why there’s never been a better time to digitally transform the construction industry.

The construction industry is undergoing a digital revolution. Companies that have for decades relied heavily on printed contracts, drawings and documents are now moving to online tools to save time and money and keep productivity up in a marketplace that’s more expansive and more demanding. At ISG, we’re using Google’s cloud-based tools to ensure that we’re at the forefront of this industry shift.

With Google Apps, we’re taking full advantage of technology-enhanced collaboration, productivity and mobility. Over the course of a few hours, I can use Google Drive to review a presentation on my tablet, Gmail to check emails and Google Calendar to schedule meetings on my phone while away from the office. I can also jump into a meeting with colleagues from around the world from any of the 26 Chromeboxes that are set up in one of our conference rooms. Whether I’m on a site visit, in the office or on the move, Google Apps allows me to continue working and collaborating with my team.

Projects move fast with real-time collaboration It’s essential for our business to control who has access to certain documents. Drawings must only be issued to authorised people, and each person must review the latest version as it’s being developed. Drive enables us to completely control what’s shared inside and outside of our company — the fact that our team alone has 1.5 million files in Drive speaks to our reliance on the tool for secure file storage.

Google Docs allows us to collaborate on shared documents at the same time, no matter where we are in the world. I can start shaping up a proposal in London and invite a colleague in Europe to work on it with me. There’s also more of a human element. When someone comments, you see their face next to it — it ties you emotionally to the process. We keep track of all our revisions in Sheets to monitor our progress. And we can always instant message each other with quick questions or suggestions, so we feel connected, all the time.

A lot of what we do is very visual. It’s hard to describe building plans and designs over the phone. With Hangouts, we can bring everyone together to discuss these plans and drawings as if we were all in the same room. We can move quickly from stakeholders to contractors to suppliers to make sure the right people are involved in the right conversations.

Staff expect more from an IT solution A big part of my team’s role is to help build relationships and ensure employees communicate effectively and get the support they need. When we sent out a survey using Forms to ask all our staff what they’d like to see from IT, they told us they wanted to find out more about our Google tools. We’re using Synergise Google Apps Training to help our stakeholders go beyond the basics and use the suite to its full potential.

Quality: getting it right the first time Quality is extremely important in our business, so we carry out frequent on-site check-ins to ensure teams are following the proper processes and delivering a high standard of construction correctly the first time. When we do these quality checks, we submit recommendations and observations using Forms on Android tablets. The information is imported into Sheets, and using Apps Script, we create dashboards, so employees across teams and functions can easily track the check-ins in real time.

We’re improving the way we work all the time, and that’s thanks to the support and enthusiasm of our employees. Many of our automated solutions have been suggested by them, and it’s great to see how passionate they are about Google Apps. There’s also an excitement among my team around what the future holds for us and our industry with new tools at our dispense and a new way of working for our customers.

Editor's note: Today we speak with Kyle Coleman, Director of Sales Development and Kelly Payne, Customer Programs Manager at Looker, a data analytics software company that makes deep data understandable and useable for business teams. Looker uses Google Apps and Asana to track and collaborate on all their work.

Can you tell us about Looker and why the company needed collaboration and productivity tools?
Kelly: Our team at Looker is building software that helps business teams find, explore and understand the data that matters to them. As a fast growing startup, we think a lot about scaling our team and processes effectively and efficiently. We need the right tools do this well.

Why Google Apps?
Kyle: We’re heavy users of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. We can easily share our work cross-functionally and always feel confident that the person we’re working with has the most up-to-date version.
Kelly: We’re constantly pulling up a Google Doc to have everyone work from the same place at the same time. There’s a huge benefit to having our work and discussions update in real time and to easily share what we’re working on with anyone in our organization.

How and why does your team use Asana?
Kyle: We use Asana for important cross-functional workflows like new hire on-boarding, sales development and for almost all of our marketing team’s work. From campaign management to launches, every piece of content we publish — whether video, customer case study or blog post — is tracked in Asana. There’s so many moving pieces involved in a complex and collaborative workflow; Asana lets us track every detail.
Kelly: With Asana, we can more easily keep track of who's doing what, and stay updated on the progress of projects. As we’ve grown, Asana has helped us identify how repeated tasks can become standardized processes. Developing process standards brings the clarity and accountability that help us work together well.

How are you using Asana and Google Apps together?
Kelly: We're always linking our docs, spreadsheets or slide decks into our Asana tasks, which is easy to do with the Asana and Google Drive integration. Asana is where we make our work actionable, so the task becomes the place where all the relevant information is stored. Connecting Google and Asana makes it easy to ensure that everyone’s working out of the right documents. We’ve added a good deal of efficiency to our workflow by not duplicating efforts across teams.

How has productivity improved on your team by integrating Asana and Google apps?
Kyle: Two things that matter deeply to us as a growing team are productivity and priorities. Having everything in the same central place saves us so much time as a team, and Google Apps and Asana have given everyone a sense of what they need to be working on and when.

You mentioned that you’re constantly working collaboratively at Looker. How does using Google and Asana side by side make working together easier?
Kelly: With these tools that we’re now using, it’s so much easier to be collaborative and build a sense of trust and empowerment within our team. Whether we’re making a comment in a Google Doc or “hearting” someone’s task in Asana, we’re having a lot more fun moving our work forward together.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about how Looker makes work fun and collaborative using Google Apps with Asana. You can learn more and enable Asana in your Google Apps account by visiting their application listing in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Posted by Robert Cheetham, Founder and CEO, Azavea


Editor's note: Today we hear from Robert Cheetham, founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based geospatial web software and analysis firm Azavea. Read about how Azavea has relied on Google for Work tools for more than eight years and recently started using Chromebox for meetings and Chromebooks so employees can work together from anywhere.

When I founded Azavea in 2000, I dreamed of creating a great work environment focused on driving social impact by applying geospatial technology. We're a certified B Corporation, and our mission-driven work includes climate change, elections, public safety, transit, water infrastructure and natural resources. Inspired by my first job working for a local government agency in Japan, where cubicles don’t exist, I designed our workspace to have an open layout, long before it became popular in contemporary offices. Today, we rely on Google Apps, Chromebooks and Chromebox for meetings to support this collaborative environment and help us work closely together on our software and data analytics projects.

In the early years, when Azavea only had a handful of employees, we installed basic workplace software from a CD-ROM and had limited server space. When we outgrew our email system in 2008, we chose Gmail. Our employees quickly started using Google Calendar, Docs, Hangouts and Sheets because they integrate so closely with Gmail. These tools helped us work effectively together on projects, so it was a natural next step.

In 2012, our software developers started asking for supplementary computers to let them work from home, when traveling for client meetings or even in the office kitchen. We looked into tablets, but they were expensive and didn’t have fully functional keyboards. As longtime Google users, our Operations team investigated options from Google.

Chromebooks are fast, affordable, secure and remarkably powerful, so we started offering them as supplementary devices for people who wanted more mobility. Our colleagues can easily switch between their main workstations and portable Chromebooks, and the long-lasting battery makes them the perfect companion for frequent travelers, office roamers and remote employees. I typically travel for a week each month myself, so I use my Chromebook on long flights as well as meetings and conferences where there may not be convenient power. It typically lasts more than nine hours, while a laptop only lasts two or three.

The company now has more than fifty people, and when we moved to a new office a few months ago, we needed a videoconferencing solution for a dozen new meeting rooms, we once again turned to Google and picked Chromebox for meetings. Like the other Google products we use, Chromebox is affordable, easy to install and integrates with our existing workplace software, like Hangouts and Calendar. Anyone can quickly set up and join a meeting. As a small firm, this ease of use is critical for us — we don’t have a team of dedicated IT staff, so we don’t have capacity to constantly deal with technical difficulties or high-maintenance updates.

I wanted to start a company that felt like a community and made an impact. Over the past several years, Google has significantly enhanced our company’s operations because their products simply work and easily scale as the company has grown. Our teams are able to work effectively together, no matter where we are.

Posted by Koen Bosmans, Senior System Administrator/Service Desk Team Lead, Tessenderlo, Belgium

Editor's note: Today we hear from Koen Bosmans, Senior Systems Administrator at Melexis, a microelectronics supplier based in Tessenderlo, Belgium. One of the world’s top producers of sensors and microchips for the automotive industry, Melexis is expanding into new industries, with great success. Spread across 11 offices in nine countries, read how this truly global company uses Google Apps for Work to build its international team.

There’s a good chance you’ve used one of our products without realising it. The sophisticated microchips we make are in everything from children’s ear thermometers, to airbags, to smartphones, to drones. And as the demand for microelectronics has grown, so has our business: Melexis shares are worth 20 times more now than when I started working here in 1999, and today we employ 1,200 staff worldwide in Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Switzerland, China, Malaysia, the Ukraine and the US. As early as 2010, we could see that this rapid expansion might lead to “silo thinking” that prevents outstanding engineers in different countries from working together effectively in a global team. That’s why Melexis management asked me to research alternatives to the open-source software we were using.

I ranked five IT solutions on 25 criteria — including web accessibility, document sharing and OS compatibility — and Google Apps for Work came out on top. We bought 500 accounts and got ready to deploy them over 13 weeks. But after the first fortnight, I realised that Google Apps training was so straightforward I could ask a student working in my department to do it. He travelled the world for three months and trained the entire company.

Google Apps improves staff satisfaction with their work environment and rewards teamwork. In the first quarter after we switched to Gmail, the number of complaints about email dropped by 65%. No more spam or slow webmail, and Calendar has ended confusion over meeting room bookings. Expansion is much easier, too; instead of having to install servers and data lines in every new office, all we need is an internet connection. Plus, we can expand without asking engineers to relocate, since as part of a virtual team, they can talk to colleagues anywhere in the world over Hangouts while working together on a shared document in Sheets. And wherever we are, Drive saves time by letting colleagues work simultaneously on single documents — whether it’s our R&D teams collecting test data in Sheets, or the IT team preparing a presentation on Slides for our monthly meeting.

Through my experience using Google Apps within our IT team, I understand how something as simple as face-to-face contact through Hangouts can make a team so much stronger. My IT Service Desk team is made up of eight people split over six locations, and we meet every two days on Hangouts to discuss work. I noticed that seeing each other so often created a relaxed and friendly dynamic that made it easier to share advice and help each other.

At Melexis, we don’t just work hard, we play hard, too. Fun is part of our DNA, and three years ago, we invited everyone to take part in an international computer game LAN party. We’ve been doing it every year since, and it’s always a great opportunity to get to know each other across different locations.

Google Apps makes these international LAN parties possible. Staff use Forms to sign up for some of the four or five games we’ll be playing in competition, and we organise times and equipment through a community on Google+. Presentations on Slides explain what we’re doing, and we use Sheets to keep score.

The party starts at 6pm on a Friday. In each office, staff decorate a room, put on fancy dress, and set up a Hangout between all the offices, even our senior leaders get dressed up and take part! Projection screens, microphones and speakers let the offices communicate with each other while the organisers announce gaming fixtures. Our scoreboard is in Sheets, which automatically updates its graphs with all the new information from every match.

In the first year, we had 120 participants, and that number’s been going up every year since. We’ve even given out best-dressed awards for themes from Halloween to superheroes.

Now, when I travel between our offices in different countries, staff walk up to tell me how good the LAN parties are for the company and morale. But there’s no question that combining our talents and pulling together through technology, wherever we are, lies at the heart of our global success.

Posted by Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations, Travix, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations at Travix, a global online travel technology company that sells low fare flight tickets to 2.5 million passengers from 28 countries every year. Founded in 2011, Travix has rapidly built up a network of 500 staff in seven offices worldwide. Read why they chose Google Apps as the IT infrastructure behind their rapid expansion.


When Travix started out in 2011, it was through the merger of three companies. We gained strength from that diversity, but we also inherited three corporate IT systems. So the first thing the CEO asked me to do when I joined was to find one system we could use across the whole company. He recommended Microsoft Office 365, but implementing it was more demanding than anyone had expected. Months into the process, I went back to him with a realistic projection of the time and resources necessary to finish the rollout, and a recommendation that we put the project on hold. The hunt began for alternatives. That’s where Google Apps came in.

Google Apps is perfectly suited for an expanding global business. We have offices in Amsterdam, Oosterhout, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, California and London, and in all of these places, Office 365 required infrastructure modifications before implementation. By contrast, Google Apps was ready to go right out of the box.

Our corporate IT systems need to be quick, reliable and safe, with a minimum of costs and management overhead. Google Apps costs less to implement, less to maintain and allows greater contractual flexibility than Office 365. Because Google Apps is also entirely cloud based, we don’t need to install servers, as recommended in the hybrid server-cloud Office 365 solution. In fact, Google Apps allowed the decommissioning of 10 existing servers, each of which is priced at $3,000.

Rolling out Google Apps took just six weeks. g-company led training with one-on-one sessions for executives, small workshops for staff and even presentations over Hangouts for our Bangalore team. But key to our rapid deployment were the “ambassadors” – staff prepared to support their colleagues when Google Apps went live. After setting up our systems engineers on Google Apps, I sent out a Form for people to register as ambassadors and the response was overwhelming: 104 people signed up for 50 positions. This was a clear sign for us that our people were willing to embrace this change and make this transition work.

At Travix, we already worked with other Google products in particular fields, like Google Analytics and Google Adwords in marketing and Google BigQuery and kubernetes in engineering. Now we have Google Apps for everyone.

Staff here have become very enthusiastic about Google Apps, as they see how the tools fit into their working lives. Gmail, Calendar and Hangouts let staff stay on top of their work anytime, from anywhere. Rather than book meeting rooms through a separate app, now everything is on Calendar, saving time and hassle. Drive has been organically and rapidly adopted across the organisation, and Forms has been a huge success that we didn’t even plan for. Instead of starting a gigantic email thread or using a free survey tool found on the internet, we now use the simple Forms interface to get swift feedback, with answers fed directly into Sheets for analysis.

Hangouts in particular has changed the way we communicate, whether through the efficiency of instant messaging or by working more closely with colleagues abroad. Hangouts on Air allows staff in other offices to participate in our CEO’s presentations in Amsterdam, and because the stream is recorded, engineers in Bangalore and California can watch it too, despite the time difference. Collaboration between team members no longer requires a kind of “email ping pong” and stressful version control. We can just open Hangouts and Drive and go through a document together, whether an engineering design in Docs, a marketing product plan on Slides, or details of a tender on Sheets.

A growing global technology company demands an IT solution that works in any location, on any device. On top of that, it has to be cost-effective, easy to maintain and ready to use in short time. It’s my job to provide that for my colleagues. With Google Apps, that’s exactly what we’ve got.

Posted by Doug Bohaboy, VP of Marketing, Mimeo


Editor's note: Today we hear from Doug Bohaboy of Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company based in New York City. Learn how Google Apps helped Mimeo deliver at breakneck speed while keeping its employees connected.


When I first started at Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company, in 2005, we had fewer than 100 employees. I could stand up and talk to anyone in our New York office. I knew everyone.

Today, we have over 800 employees in six locations, including four international offices in the UK, Germany, India and China. Our New York office had ballooned to multiple floors. That’s why we turned to Google Apps to keep our distributed workforce productive, efficient and competitive in an evolving market. Google Hangouts, Google Docs and Google Calendar keep us organized and coordinated across multiple time zones.

To compete with other online suppliers, we need to move fast and fulfill orders quickly. Customers can place an order for a complex printed document on our website at 10 p.m. EST and expect it to be fulfilled and delivered the next day. This means people at our New York headquarters need to communicate rapidly with our global manufacturing facilities. With Hangouts, our teams can video or text chat instantly from any device, whether it’s a desktop computer or mobile phone, at any time of day or night.

We made the switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange in 2010 to give people tools to work more closely together — without wasting time on IT issues. Before 2010, our IT team had to deal with issues that didn’t add value to the company, like scheduled server maintenance and helping employees fix email problems. These minor issues added up to 1,000 hours each year. Now, our IT team spends 100-200 hours a year addressing minor issues — equating to huge financial and time savings.

Google Apps, and particularly Docs, increases our efficiency. Today we create about 90 percent of our documents using Docs. Employees often collaboratively edit documents together when they’re sitting across the room from each other. Docs also makes meetings more efficient by giving us the ability to take shared notes and assign owners. The whole team doesn’t need to be in every meeting — we can tag team members who need to share their input on one small section, and they can contribute on their own time.

With offices in the UK, Germany, China and India, we use Hangouts to collaborate more meaningfully with more face-to-face time. The ease of meeting person to person also helps us appreciate the cultural diversity of our team, which contributes to our open culture that embraces diverse ideas and paths to problem solving. Whether from Memphis or Berlin, any of us could easily hop on a video chat in Hangouts while also having access to intuitive tools, making training new employees from any location seamless.

As companies like ours grow increasingly global, Google Apps is helping to create more mobile, flexible work environments. Our biggest goal is to do more for our customers while keeping our employees in sync by making Mimeo a great place to work. We know that our customers depend on Mimeo for fast, reliable service that consistently exceeds their expectations. Google Apps helps our employees make the most of their time and creativity, ensuring we retain the competitive advantage that’s made us a globally recognized company.

Posted by Courtney Osgood, Head of Communications at Paint Nite

Editor's note: Today we hear from Courtney Osgood of Paint Nite, a Boston-based events company that offers consumers a creative social experience at local bars. Learn how Google Apps helps Paint Nite maintain its close-knit company culture and keep teams connected no matter where they work.


Paint Nite offers a different kind of nightlife experience. Guided by a local artist, our customers spend a few hours sipping cocktails and painting at a local bar.

Working together to create something great is in our DNA, which is why we’ve used Google Apps since the company was founded in 2012.

As we’ve grown, Google Apps has helped us maintain our tight-knit culture while successfully scaling our business. In the past year, we’ve added more than 950 cities and towns that are now hosting Paint Nite events, and more than doubled our employees at headquarters from 40 to 100+.

Work-life balance is a big priority at Paint Nite. Our founders recognize that everyone has commitments outside of work, whether it’s spending time with family, pursuing a hobby or volunteering. Paint Nite offers unlimited vacation time and allows employees to work from home any time. Tools like Google Apps help our employees take advantage of this policy. Teams use Google Hangouts to chat about projects throughout the day, whether they’re at the office, at home or working from a coffee shop. We use Hangouts for our weekly all-staff meeting so all employees can join from anywhere and feel like they’re in the same room.

Google Apps helps teams stay organized, which is important given how quickly the company is growing. Our employees love using Google Calendar, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with colleagues who are working remotely. Calendar also lets us book conference rooms in advance, which is a small but critical feature for a rapidly growing company with limited meeting space.

Google Apps also saves us time. Our data analytics team, for example, uses Google Forms to manage dozens of data requests each day. At Paint Nite, we rely on our data to make decisions or share information — a digital marketing manager needs to know how many cities we operate in for a new advertisement, or our communications team wants to share year-over-year growth figures with the local newspaper. Before they started using Forms, our analysts spent hours each week sorting through requests manually. It was an inefficient and frustrating process. Now, if anyone at Paint Nite needs company data, he or she can submit a request using Google Forms.

As we continue to scale from a local startup to a international brand, it’s crucial that our teams stay connected, whether people are working from our main office, at home or on the road. Google Apps helps us do this while maintaining the close-knit, flexible work environment we've grown to love.

Posted by Stella Schieffer, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

Smartphones have made productivity portable. You no longer have to be at your desk to catch up on meeting notes, dial into a conference call, or send an email. But scheduling meetings on the go is still difficult, as you have to open your laptop to check everyone’s calendar and find a time that works.

Starting today, if you use Google Apps for Work or Edu, you can schedule meetings from anywhere with "Find a time" in Google Calendar for Android.

With a single tap, “Find a time” helps you find meeting times that work for everyone—even if they're in different time zones—based on their availability and the times they usually have meetings. If there are no times that work, Calendar will look at which conflicting meetings can most easily be rescheduled. Designed specifically for organizations where sharing your calendar with colleagues is the norm, here's how it works:

“Find a time” makes suggestions, but you're still in control. You can tap to see everyone's schedule at a glance—perfect for making sure the timing works for all. And if you manage someone else's calendar, you can use the feature to schedule meetings on their behalf as well.

Download Google Calendar for Android to get easy, on-the-go scheduling. And yes, we're also working on bringing “Find a time” to iPhone, as well as easier ways to schedule on the web.

Posted by Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets, Warwickshire County Council, Warwick, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets at Warwickshire County Council, the local authority for Warwickshire, UK. The council handles social care, highways, public health, the fire service, economic development, education and more for the region’s 540,000 citizens. Read how £260,000 a year is just the start of their savings with Google Apps for Work.

The best thing about the work we do is the sheer range of ways we help people. While one group works to bring broadband to small businesses, another will tackle a fire or care for children in need. So when the government cut our council budget by 20%, we knew we faced tough decisions. For IT in particular, a £2,000,000 cut to our budget meant we had to look at all options for new ways of operating, and helped drive the decision to replace our 20-year-old email system. But it wasn’t just about saving money in the short-term. We wanted to share our facilities more effectively, improve the flexibility of our IT for staff and make it easier to work with external partners. Google was a perfect fit.

 

Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information, Assets, Warwickshire County Council

Deploying 5,500 Google Apps accounts was much easier than I had imagined. With the help of Cloud Technology Solutions, who provided migration tools, advice and support, we migrated 3,000 users in just 8 weeks. Now Google Apps saves us £260,000 a year that we would have spent on our old system: £100,000 on licenses, £100,000 on infrastructure and £60,000 on support staff. But the really significant savings go deeper than that, and come from efficiencies made right across the organisation.

Saving time by working together on Drive. Instead of multiple versions of a document flying around on email, or saving documents to unrestricted servers, staff can work together on a single document on Drive, comment, make changes, choose their own access settings and even share documents with external agencies. This has also led to increased collaboration between staff and teams.

The mobility of web-based apps frees office space. We now have the flexibility to not only work from home or elsewhere, but to also work more closely with customers and partners. When working on-site with the police or health workers, council staff can essentially take the office with them.

Saving on transport costs with Hangouts. Face-to-face meetings with the citizens we serve are still important, but cutting out the financial and time costs of travelling to internal meetings generates further savings.

Cutting bureaucracy with Docs and Sheets. Taking notes during meetings on Docs eliminates the need to type notes afterwards. Everyone can leave comments, which improves accuracy and transparency, and voting with Forms gives us immediate, presentable results in Sheets.

Google logins make working simple. We no longer waste time dealing with forgotten passwords or typing separate logins into different applications. And being able to use multiple logins on a single device saves money on hardware, too: teams going to trade shows can share a single Nexus 9 tablet and log in simultaneously instead of using one device each.

Automatic upgrades saves on IT maintenance and keep us ahead of developments. In the four years that we’ve used Google Apps, every upgrade has felt like a natural evolution, and we’ve never had to implement new training to accommodate changes.

Google Apps has improved our effectiveness, too. Our team of four roadworks inspectors use Apps on tablets to be on the road for 80% instead of 50% of their day, significantly improving compliance with timetables for roadworks. And our family social workers use Calendar to advance safety by ensuring teams know where they are.

We also use notes on Drive to improve security and save paper with digital notes. At the top of our organisation, most of our elected county councillors have other jobs and don't work in our offices. Now they use Google Apps on a device of their choice, instead of clunky remote access systems, and check in more often to keep track of progress.

Budget cuts made life complicated for everyone at the council, but satisfaction with our IT system has actually increased during this difficult period. In the year we introduced Google Apps, our staff satisfaction scores increased in all 55 categories of an independent benchmarking run by a UK society of public service IT organisations called SOCITM. And last year, we ranked number one out of 60 UK councils in the SOCITM benchmarking survey for flexible working practices. That flexibility generates real savings without compromising on quality, and it was all made possible by Google Apps for Work.

Posted by Bret Knobelauch, Senior Director at ProsperWorks

Editor's note: Today we hear from Bret Knobelauch, Senior Director at ProsperWorks, a SaaS provider of next generation CRM solutions and — along with RingCentral — a Google Apps partner in the Recommended for Google Apps for Work program. Read how this rapidly growing technology company uses Google Apps to radically simplify customer facing sales and communications. And register here to join our Hangout on Air, on March 29 at 9 a.m. and learn how ProsperWorks went all in on the cloud with Google and Ringcentral.


ProsperWorks is the world's first “zero input” CRM. Designed specifically for Google Apps, ProsperWorks helps companies sell faster by identifying, organizing and tracking sales opportunities right in Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. Our company was founded in 2011 with the vision to empower small business sales and marketing with a fantastic user experience for CRM.

Going all-in with Google Apps and the cloud When we started the company, we were already committed to leveraging the benefits of Google to run our business. After all, we build a SaaS CRM solution that is deeply integrated with Google Apps. So, in addition to choosing Gmail as our email platform, we went all in with Google technology for various aspects of our business. This included:

• Google Hangouts to interact with prospects and customers who are Google Apps customers themselves
• Google Drive for onboarding and sharing our sales assets with a rapidly expanding team of sales development reps and account executives
• Google Sheets for exporting and reviewing sales reports using the ProsperWorks integration

We soon discovered the need for not just any, but the right cloud-based, enterprise-class phone solution. There are two key features that our cloud phone solution must have:

• Ability to make and receive calls directly from within Gmail. My sales team spends 60-80% of their day at their desktop engaged in prospecting and sales calls. The ability to make and receive calls directly from a phone number within Gmail and ProsperWorks CRM keeps my team super productive. Plus users can see their communications history including call logs and voicemails, directly from within Gmail.

• Sales call analytics and reporting. From my mobile phone, I can regularly check on the call productivity of the team. For example, I can check on inbound versus outbound calls following the launch of a campaign. I can see trends and intervene if there seems to be an issue that needs to be addressed.

Why we chose RingCentral We switched from a vendor we worked with prior because RingCentral offered the enterprise business capabilities that we truly needed. I’m responsible for our sales development reps and account executives, and call activity is a key measure of productivity. RingCentral has robust call analytics and reporting that helped us gauge and increase productivity.

I didn’t want to take any risks with security and reliability, so the fact that RingCentral had been vetted by Google meant a lot. I also appreciated that RingCentral was an overall leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications in the cloud, and most importantly, the user experience and integration with Google Apps was fantastic.

ProsperWorks’ vision is about simplifying the CRM user experience. RingCentral shares this vision for business communications, and Google shares this vision for work productivity. Google Apps has proven to be a great unifying platform for partner solutions such as ProsperWorks and RingCentral. Empowered by Google Apps and RingCentral, we couldn’t be better equipped to serve and empower our own customers.

Posted by Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations, BQ, Madrid, Spain

Editor's note: Today we hear from Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations at BQ, a producer of smartphones, tablets, e-readers, 3D printers and educational robots based in Madrid, Spain. Founded in 2010, BQ now has a global team of more than 1,300 people at offices in Germany, France, Sweden, Russia, Italy and the UK. See how Google Apps for Work has played a central role in BQ’s rapid growth and unique work culture right from the start.


We don’t just want our customers to use our devices, we want them to understand what they’re using. That’s the core idea behind all of our products, whether it’s our “flatpack” 3D printer, our customisable smartphone or Zowi, our educational robot. Our goal is to get people thinking about technology, because the next great idea could come from anyone, anywhere.

With the same emphasis on engagement, we try to run BQ as a team of equals, where everyone has a voice. We know we do our best work when colleagues in design, engineering, technical, marketing and sales are free to bounce ideas off each other. But with 1,300 people at 10 offices, open communication can bring challenges. That’s why we built our business around Google Apps for Work from day one. Its forward-looking, simple and powerful tools have allowed us to shape our ideal working environment and work team.

Transparent and connected, not bureaucratic

• Drive gives us an open central platform that everyone can access. If we receive product information from a third-party, for example, we save it in Docs for anyone in the organisation who’s interested to read and leave comments or queries. That gives us oversight and transparency so that we can avoid problems before they occur.

• Instead of an email hierarchy of labels and folders, Gmail’s powerful search lets us find what we need in seconds on any device, and links directly to Docs on Drive and meetings on Hangouts. We don’t need to subdivide and separate projects and personnel, so teams develop more naturally.

Supercharged project management

• Every prototype we make is run through a series of tests by different groups before teams go back to the drawing board. With Drive, all of the information from every test is immediately available, and because we only have one version of the results on Sheets and Docs, we always know we’re working from the correct files.

• Google Apps makes it easy to coordinate teamwork. At the beginning of every project, we create a plan of action on Sheets for colleagues to keep track of progress. Rather than trade emails, now when someone wants to organise a meeting they go directly to Calendar, check someone’s availability and create a meeting, adding a link for a video call on Hangouts when they can’t meet in-person but still want that person-to-person time.

One tight team

• Hangouts allows employees hundred of miles apart to feel that they work in one office. We use Hangouts daily to ensure maximum staff contact while saving on travel costs, video conferencing hardware, telecom bills and even time spent looking up phone numbers.

• We keep minutes of meetings in Docs so that staff can add to the same document simultaneously and leave comments on the public document after the event.

• Intuitive interfaces and simple administrative setup mean that when we bring on someone new, we can swiftly integrate them with our team. We even give them a Form asking where they will sit and what materials they need, so that we’re ready for their arrival ahead of time.

Our work at BQ is part of a long-term project. When we teach children how to program and design their own Zowi the robot, we’re not just teaching them basic robotics, we also want to prepare them for a future in which technology will play an ever greater role. Google is the perfect partner for that mission, with its understanding of the fast-evolving tech landscape and the constant updates to its Apps. Ultimately, our goals are aligned: we both want to give people the tools to empower themselves.

Posted by Matt Charman, Senior Product Marketing Manager


Today we’re launching the #maketime website, which builds on the movement to hold uninterrupted time on our calendars during the hours when we’re most creative. The website helps you prioritize time for the things that keep you inspired, over the things that just keep you busy.

Did you know that we spend 2.25 hours a day on average answering emails and 86 hours a month on average in meetings? The workplace is changing. We have the freedom to work and collaborate across any device and the flexibility to finish tasks and create from wherever we are. But we’re also more accessible.


Use the #maketime website to look at how you spend your work hours, so you can stamp out needless time takers, and not just save time, but #maketime for the things that are important to you.

Here are a few ways you can save time to #maketime with Google Apps.

Save time with Reminders in Google Calendar
Use Reminders in Google Calendar to combine an evolving and editable to-do list with your scheduled events. See the items on your list that you haven’t “checked off” yet at the top of your calendar each day, until you give them that triumphant swipe “complete!”

And Reminders sync with your contacts, so you can add phone numbers and addresses. When it’s time to call in dinner reservations at a favorite restaurant, dial directly from the Reminder.


Save time with machine learning and Inbox
From Inbox, use Smart Reply to respond to emails without typing out the reponses yourself. Machine learning recognizes emails that can be answered with short replies and creates natural language responses instantly — often with a few versions to choose from.

Save time by researching and collaborating in Docs
Switching between tabs and tools costs incremental time that adds up. In Docs and Slides, you can use the Research tool to do a quick Web and file search for terms you need to gather more info on. And now you can do the same on the go within the Docs app on Android.

From Docs, Sheets and Slides, you can also use the instant comments feature on the Web or your Android or iOS device to add teammates to the conversation by simply adding their names (just start typing names and contacts will appear in the comment box). So when you’ve got some great feedback on a line of text or a table of data, you can add a note right next to it that sends an email. No need to go back into Gmail to draft an additional note.

Also in Sheets, Explore deciphers your data for you and automatically creates charts and insights that illustrate trends. The time cost on your end: seconds.


Save time by converting image text
One of the coolest recent innovations in Drive for Work is the Optical Character Recognition that converts text in images into text documents to collaborate on. You can take a photo of a whiteboard brainstorm or an inspiring message on the other side of the subway window and turn that photo into a shared doc.

We can’t stop the clock — or to a large degree control the number of emails that flood our inboxes or the amount of traffic that slows our work commutes. But we can find ways to make more minutes meaningful.

Posted by Rene van Gelderen, CIO at Deli XL

Editor's note: Today we hear from Rene van Gelderen, CIO at Deli XL, a wholesale food supplier and distributor based in Ede, The Netherlands. Deli XL’s 2,000 employees work round the clock, seven days a week to deliver fresh groceries to the country’s restaurants, hospitals, retirement homes and company canteens. Read how Deli XL is using Google Apps for Work to lead change in their business and connect their nationwide team.

At Deli XL, what you order today, we deliver tomorrow, whether it’s fresh fish, purple mustard or any of the other 70,000 items we have available for ordering. With 700,000 order lines each week from 20,000 customers nationwide, we need to work together efficiently to keep this 24-hour promise.

And when we decided to focus even more on hotels and restaurants and shift to the ecommerce model to adapt to client demands and changing business needs, we needed the tools that could help us do that even better.

Google Apps helped us overhaul our business model with minimal disruption. Our old email system was functional, but too slow to satisfy the demands of ecommerce. Gmail is fast, remotely accessible, and, along with Calendar, makes it simple to work together across our 15 sites. Google+ was also invaluable during this time. We knew rolling out complex new structures in our financial- and warehouse-management systems was going to cause significant stress. So as we deployed new systems, we posted constant updates on Google+ so everyone could keep track and discover the new tools together.

Now we use Google+ to solve problems in all areas of Deli XL, business and IT problems alike. For example, one Saturday morning, an account manager reported an issue with our ecommerce system. Previously, she would have called the weekend service desk and waited until Monday morning for a response. By posting the issue on Google+, I could immediately see that it was serious and brought our offshore developers in India into the discussion. Using Google Translate to interpret our Dutch, they had a solution ready for Monday morning, saving 1,000 customers from experiencing major disruption.

Google+ is far more effective than spending time on the phone: basic IT problems can be solved in seconds by non-IT staff; account managers share advice on how to fill unclear customer orders, and employees air difficult questions that might otherwise never be asked. After one major problem, during which we posted frequent updates on Google+, I carried out a survey. In the past, similar situations would always elicit complaints about communication, but for this survey, 97% of respondents expressed strong satisfaction with how we communicated during the incident.

Each of our 1,000 desk workers has a Google account, and now we’re connecting our 500 drivers and 500 order pickers, too. This opens up tremendous new possibilities for us. On every job, drivers keep track of the crates used to carry goods. Rather than do this by hand and deliver the slips to the Finance department, they’ll be able to keep track of the crates in Forms and eliminate the paper trail. Also, by having drivers check in and out of destinations on Forms, we’ll be able to tell customers where their delivery is and if it will be late, at a fraction of the cost of a GPS solution.

Over ninety percent of our order lines now come from online business, and we’ve made the transition into the hotel, restaurant and cafe market without any loss in revenues. In addition to savings due to faster troubleshooting, stronger cross-team communications and delivery tracking, our CFO calculates that using Drive storage will save up to €100,000 a year, once we retire our old file servers. And behind the numbers, all the extra communication is making us more of a team: with a Hangout group on each company site, no one needs to miss out when we share birthday cake.

Posted by Frank Febbraro, CTO, Phase2 Technology

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is by Frank Febbraro, CTO of Phase2 Technology, which helps clients such as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer and Harvard Business School manage the way content is created, shared and experienced online. See how Phase2 Technology saves $3,000 a day and more than 100 hours a week by using Chromebox for meetings.

From the day we launched, we designed Phase2 Technology as a company that welcomed people who didn’t work on-site. In fact, we like to say we have five locations: New York, Washington, D.C., Portland, San Francisco and “everywhere” — a solid 25 percent of our employees work remotely. Because of this, we build our teams without worrying about where people are. A project lead in Portland might team up with people in Austin or Oklahoma City.

The most talented people don’t necessarily live near our offices, but that shouldn’t stand in the way of giving clients our best work. We rely on technology like Chromebox for meetings to bring down the barriers that get in the way of distributed teams working together.

Before we discovered Chromeboxes, the audiovisual situation for our meetings seemed like an insurmountable barrier.

Every video conference began as a comedy of errors: if we scheduled a half-hour meeting, we had to build in 10 minutes to struggle with the AV setup. We tried cobbling together configurations of cameras and mics, but nothing created the one-click system we needed. There were too many settings for employees to manage and too much tinkering around to get the meetings going. Plus, every room had a different system and settings. With five or so people in every meeting losing ten minutes on AV setup struggles, and those people meeting with others several times a day, we wasted dozens of hours every week. Over the course of a year, this translated into tens of thousands of dollars of lost time spent not delivering value to our clients.

All this changed when we brought Chromebox for meetings to eight conference rooms among our four offices. There’s no learning curve: people walk into a room and click one button on the Chromebox remote to start the meeting. We already use Google Hangouts and Google Calendar, so Chromebox fits in with the tools we know. We now work more fluidly, since we can start ad hoc meetings without worrying about cameras, mics and settings.

Chromebox for meetings saves time for our teams as they meet and also benefits our IT team. The management console lets us choose how the Chromeboxes operate, and those settings apply to every room and every meeting. Compared to conferencing systems that cost several thousand dollars per room, Chromebox for meetings costs much less and is much easier to set up and use. Achieving this ease at scale is critical for us — each employee might do as many as 10 Hangouts a day; multiply that by 140 people, and we’re spending about 450 hours on Hangouts daily.

Efficiency and time management are especially critical for a business like ours, which makes money by billing hourly and delivering excellent, efficient client service. We’ve reduced our IT costs for maintaining meeting rooms to just about zero. We used to spend about four hours a month per room on maintaining our old AV setups. We now spend about one hour per month total on all rooms — from 32 hours a month on maintenance down to just one hour.

We can do more with so much less now. Better meetings help us get rid of distractions so we can get right down to business, no matter where in the world our teams are.

Posted by Christoffer Lorang Dahl, Digital Director, SMFB, Oslo, Norway

Editor's note: Today we hear from Christoffer Lorang Dahl, Digital Director at SMFB, an advertising agency based in Oslo, Norway. In the 14 years since it was founded, SMFB has delivered award-winning campaigns for local and international clients including Geox, Ikea and Statoil. Read how SMFB created a whole new work environment around Google Apps for Work and made its clients, collaborators and 65 staff happier in the process.

It’s hard to be a 21st century creative agency when we’re bogged down with a 20th century-like IT platform. As SMFB’s Digital Director, I work with creatives and account managers to make digital ideas happen. With at least five projects on the go on any given day, my hands are full, but I always make time to help out with IT, too. One year ago, this informal role took up at least three hours of my work week, while the rest of the team collectively lost 10 working hours a day to spam and a calendar system so clunky it was almost unusable. It was time for a change, so we trialled two possible solutions and chose Google. Not only did we see huge potential in Drive, we guessed that staff would be familiar with Gmail and adapt quickly. We were right.

Google Apps solved the core problems we wanted to address. Gmail fixed our issues with spam, and Google Calendar is exactly the synchronised, reliable and easy-to-use calendar we were looking for. Because of its straightforward interface, everyone can use it to book meeting rooms and tell designers which teams to work with on which days. We used to run everything through a server in Sweden, and when it crashed, none of us could work. We’ve never experienced any downtime since switching to Google.

As well as fix the problems we knew we had, Google Apps for Work has rejuvenated our creative process. It’s hard to put someone in an office and tell them to “be creative.” That’s not how creativity works, but it’s exactly what we used to do. A typical day at SMFB used to begin with a briefing from the account director to the creatives. After that, the creatives would head to their offices to come up with ideas, which they would share by late afternoon so that they could get feedback by the next day. Now creatives start every morning with a Hangout, spend the day in a cafe, under the sun or wherever they like, and share their ideas on Docs. The account director and account manager — even the clients — can pitch in on the process, concepts and copy, which constantly evolve. And we never experience the confusion that results from multiple drafts and versions floating around. Film scripts do change, but if the wrong draft is sent to an animator or a director, the consequences can be dire.

Once we have a project concept, we compile a budget together in Sheets and contact external production companies. We handle at least five of these at a time, and they change from one day to the next, but because Drive documents can be shared with anyone, we can send these external companies briefs, handle agreements and manage the whole process on one platform. Anyone can immediately see how a project is progressing by looking it up on Drive — something that’s vital for running campaigns on social media, where every second counts.

I like to help my colleagues, and Google’s simple administration interface makes it easy. When a workmate accidentally deleted crucial files, I retrieved them from Drive, which lets you recover documents from up to 10 users for up to 25 days. And rather than just react, I suggest better ways of doing things — like creating a group email account for a new project, which I can have ready in two minutes. It’s a whole new way of working. So much so, in fact, that I recommended Google Apps for Work to our partner agency, Forsman & Bodenfors. Now they’re on it, too.

Posted by Vijay Umapathy, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Official Gmail Blog.)

Our calendars should help us make the most of our time — scheduling meetings at work, remembering brunch with friends, and keeping track of all our other commitments. But often our to-do list is elsewhere, separate from the Calendar that organizes our day, and we end up overcommitted or miss something important because we forgot to check our list.

Now there's a single way to manage your day: starting this week, you can create Reminders in Google Calendar to keep track of your to-dos alongside your scheduled events.

Reminders stick around
You might already create calendar entries to remind you to call the doctor or pick up groceries on the way home. But while those entries come and go, Reminders stick with you over time so you can track them until they are actually done. If a Reminder isn't completed, it will appear at the top of your Calendar the next day. And the next. When you do finally call the doctor or pick up those necessities, just swipe the Reminder away ... and you're onto the next to-do.

Reminders help with the details
Another way Reminders are more useful than events is that Calendar adds things like phone numbers and addresses automatically. So if you add a Reminder to make call or run an errand, the number or address will be right there when you need it. Just like Inbox by Gmail, Calendar uses information from your contacts, as well as Google's knowledge graph to provide this extra bit of help.

Reminders work across Google
You can also create Reminders from Inbox, Keep, and Google Now. This means you can create a Reminder when you're checking your email and it will show up on your calendar right away. Plans change? Just move the Reminder to a better time. Or if your hands are full, you can record your Reminders in Google Now 一 like, "Ok Google, remind me to buy birthday candles" 一 then mark it as done later in Calendar.

Reminders will be rolling out this week with the latest versions of Calendar on Google Play and the App Store. And don't worry, we're working on bringing Reminders to the web as well.

Posted by Per Jakobsen, CIO, Narvik Kommune, Norway

Editor's note: Today we hear from Per Jakobsen, head of IT operations and development at Narvik Kommune, a Norwegian municipality 343 kilometres north of the Arctic circle. Read how Google Apps for Work is being used at Narvik Kommune to make life simpler for staff, so that they can spend less time doing paperwork and more time managing healthcare, childcare, schools, transport and housing services for the people that depend on them.

Norwegians value the human touch in social services. We call this “warm hands,” and we know nothing can replace it. But as a municipality, we need cool efficiency to make sure that our carers, teachers and medics are in the right place at the right time for 20,000 citizens across more than 2,000km².

Photo by Pål Jakobsen

Every day, Narvik Kommune coordinates 1,600 employees across 58 locations — but our old email system was holding us back from doing our best work. An obsolete user interface made it difficult to navigate, spam was a chronic problem, and we depended on expensive consultants for maintenance. Buying 750 Google Apps for Work accounts hasn’t just resolved these issues at a reasonable and predictable price; it’s made Narvik Kommune more efficient, more reliable and more mobile. We worked with Avalon Solutions, a Google Apps Premier Partner in the Nordics, who contributed to the successful migration.

We’ve gained several hours each week now that we use stable and secure Google servers, instead of wasting time servicing a spam filter and antivirus software and troubleshooting email instability. And the minimal training necessary to use Google Apps tools means departments throughout Narvik Kommune are discovering creative and productive ways to use them — all on their own:

• Working together under tight deadlines in Sheets: Our economy team uses Sheets instead of Excel, so they can update documents simultaneously during hectic periods and avoid the delays and confusion caused by multiple copies when union representatives and others are involved in compiling records.
• Collecting and sharing information across teams with Sites: HR uses Sites to reach out more effectively through the organisation when collecting and presenting information on large internal procedures.
• Staying on top of meetings with Calendar: All teams use Calendar on our smartphones to organise meetings (and receive SMS notifications before they start).
• Digital discussion notes on Docs: All teams use Docs to take notes during discussions, which keeps everyone better aligned and saves time and cost on printing.
• Building budgets on Drive: Our councilman and managers across the administration used Drive to compile our last annual budget, saving time on a joint task that we would previously handle with fileshare documents that could only be opened and edited by one person at a time.

Most importantly, Google Apps for Work keeps our internal data secure. We have the added peace of mind knowing that our information is protected on one of the most secure infrastructures in the world.

With the flexibility of Google Apps tools, we can prepare for a smooth relocation while the Narvik town hall shuts down for two years of renovation and our core team spreads across three locations instead of one. We’ll use Hangouts on five Chromeboxes to meet and collaborate face-to-face, so we don’t lose that important personal interaction among teams.

We’ve been so impressed by the power of Google Apps, that we’ve extended the advantages of Google Apps tools to local students. We implemented Google Apps for Education accounts for each of the 2,000 pupils at our nine primary and lower secondary schools, and we’re trialling Chromebooks and Classroom. Digitizing public services with Google hasn’t just brought us national attention — it has freed up resources to invest in our future.

Posted by Jason Stockwood, Chief Executive Officer, Simply Business, London and Northampton, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jason Stockwood, CEO of Simply Business, the UK’s biggest business insurance provider and the top-ranked company on The Sunday Times’ list of 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015. See how Google Apps strengthens the Simply Business team’s valued company culture and gives employees the freedom to explore new ways of working.

Jason Stockwood, Simply Business CEO

Working at five online companies in the last 15 years has taught me that a company’s culture resonates in all things that it does, and that an attractive internal culture will ultimately attract customers as much as it attracts talent. So when our systems administrator, Martin Golder, proposed that we switch Simply Business to Google Apps for Work, I needed to understand how the change would affect our company culture, and feel confident it would have a positive effect on both our people and our business.

Martin Golder, Simply Business Systems Administrator

I quickly gained that confidence as I tested Google Apps out for myself. Gmail and Calendar transformed my work in ways I hadn't expected. For example, over the past twenty years, I’d created a complicated, time-consuming filing system for my email, but I gave it up as I discovered Gmail’s incredibly powerful search function. And the ability to log into a web browser and have full use of my account without going through clunky webmail servers was massively impactful.

Then there was the financial bonus: it cost us £26,000 to implement Google Apps for Work, less than half the price of its competitors.

With our pilot complete and our decision made, we rolled out Google Apps for Work in March with help from Cloud Technology Solutions and a group of our own production champions, including both myself and the staff of our contact centre in Northampton. The buzz that evangelists created really pulled everyone on board, and when we finished our full deployment in May, we could rely entirely on the product champions to step in when questions came up from people across the team.

The time and cost savings of Google Apps goes far beyond the deployment. Our IT team no longer wastes four hours a week maintaining our old email servers, which translates to over £4,000 a year that goes back to the business. They also spend 70 percent less time on helpdesk requests. And the wider team saves nearly 20 minutes each meeting merely by replacing our old meeting room booking process — using phones around the office to check availability of a room — with Calendar.

Using simple but powerful work tools gives our staff the freedom to create new ways to be efficient for our customers. At our Northampton contact centre, two hundred of our staff speak directly to customers every day. In the past, they would take a query, put the customer on hold, ring around to find someone who could help, then go back to the call. Now they use Hangouts to ping each other while customers share their queries, comments and concerns, which is simpler and faster and doesn’t put anyone on hold. The System Administration team, split between London and Northampton, also uses Hangouts for daily discussions, while remote consultants use Hangouts for weekly tech tutorials by streaming video through a Chromebox-linked projector in London.

One month after the rollout, we used Google Forms to survey staff reactions to the new system, and received an overwhelmingly positive response. More than two hundred of our staff have already started to use Drive of their own accord, and next year we’ll make the transition official by moving all of our 1.25 terabytes of files and secure spreadsheets onto the cloud. My advice to anyone considering the switch to Google Apps for Work is just to try it out. You’ll see the benefits immediately. It’s a new, lighter, easier way of working.