DREW ROWNY: Welcome to the session
on increasing productivity with our latest integrated solutions
for distributed teams in Google Workspace.
Hi.
I'm Drew Rowny, and I'm a group product manager,
and lead the teams responsible for Gmail, Google Chat,
and Spaces, driving forward our shared
vision of a deeply integrated home for productivity
at the heart of Workspace.
As millions of people and organizations
emerge from more than a year of remote work,
a hybrid work model is rapidly becoming the new normal.
We know that 83% of executives expect
to support some level of hybrid work or all remote work,
but hybrid is about more than just where you work.
It's also about how people work together.
As a team manager, I'm thinking about how
my team members working from Australia or Zurich
stay equally connected with those who are in a California
office or working from home in the New York City
area, how I've watched us rapidly adopt new tools
and evolve the way we use familiar ones.
And I know I'm not alone, with the average person reporting
switching between business apps and tools over 25 times
each day, and how, as a parent balancing child care
and working from home myself, it's
critical that we deliver tools that help people manage
their time and attention effectively
so they can better maintain well-being
and achieve their full potential.
On the Workspace team at Google, like many organizations
that we support, we've adapted to the hybrid work model
by focusing on helping teams stay
productive and collaborative from anywhere.
That's where we can really deliver something unique,
a home for personal productivity that covers everything
you need to do.
Google Workspace is uniquely positioned
to solve the hybrid work challenges that we face.
For more than a decade, we've been building products
to help people transform the way that they work.
Last year we kicked off a multi-year strategy
for more impactful collaboration by bringing email, chat,
video meetings, calendar, and more together.
With everything in one place, people
can collaborate and communicate seamlessly
across different tools, spend time on what matters most,
and foster human connections, no matter where they are.
We're building this home for productivity
with four core pillars in mind.
First, we're providing a unified solution,
with the right tools for everything
you need to get things done all in one place,
with the most important things prioritized for your attention.
Second, we're improving collaboration
while making it more flexible and equitable,
giving people in teams more ways to fuel knowledge
sharing by having topic and project-focused spaces, which
we see as the home for group collaboration.
And third, we're connecting workflows
directly into the communication tools
that we provide to increase productivity and minimize
contact switching.
Fourth, we're providing powerful enterprise grade controls
to help customers succeed and meet
their regulatory and compliance requirements.
Let's start with the first pillar.
In the hybrid work environment, interactions
that used to take place in person
are being rapidly digitized.
Impromptu conversations that used to happen face-to-face
are now happening online.
As a result, people are feeling increasingly overwhelmed
by the volume of communications they have to manage.
In some cases, chat traffic has increased over 65%.
So how can we help people manage communications
and not have to bounce back and forth between tools,
which disrupts workflows and decreases productivity?
That's why we unified our collaboration and communication
tools in Google Workspace.
So today you get email, video, chat,
meetings all together in one place while we are rolling out
an organized tab navigation, with the ability
to switch between modalities and have
a focused full-screen view.
Alongside the new tab navigation,
we are rolling out a thoughtful notifications experience
that will help customers multitask when they need to,
and focus when they go.
And in the future, an activity feed
is the next step in our vision to help people
stay on top of what's important, giving you greater control
and peace of mind.
Our second pillar is about helping teams collaborate
in a hybrid work environment, where we recently evolved Rooms
in Google Chat to become Spaces, a dedicated place
for topic-based discussion.
My team uses Spaces to engage in focused conversations
on projects, share files easily, and assign tasks.
With Spaces, team members can contribute equitably
and maximize participation from anywhere.
We know that sharing information can
be overwhelming across multiple work streams.
With side-by-side docs, sheets, and slides,
and powerful search, Spaces helps everyone collaborate
and catch up effortlessly.
And in the coming months, we'll be adding more key features
to help teams of all sizes better organize around
a project, facilitate conversations
on a topic of interest, and more easily share
knowledge and learnings.
In-line topic threading, for example,
will allow users to reply to any message within a space,
allowing for even deeper discussions and collaboration
among team members.
We believe this real-time canvas for collaboration
is foundational to the way groups of people come together,
to share information on topics, make progress on projects,
and build community as teammates.
Please join the Spaces session for a full deep dive
on our vision, and how we are evolving Spaces this year
and into the future.
Our third pillar is connecting workflows right
into the flow of communication.
To help organizations and teams be more productive,
we've integrated top apps from companies like DocuSign, Adobe,
and Atlassian with Google Workspace
to create an enhanced user experience.
For example, with the Atlassian Jira bot,
people can have an even more interactive
in-line, contextual, and integrated experience.
Using the Jira bot, you can create new issues quickly,
see updates to issues in real time in chat,
and monitor issues as they come in.
We've also developed a set of admin controls and information
flows that make it easy for admins
to deploy these integrations confidently
for their organizations.
And underlying these integrations
is an expansive set of core capabilities
that allow for the creation of truly immersive app
experiences.
Fourth, and finally, Google Workspace
was built in the cloud with enterprise-grade security
at the core.
Safety is and has always been our top priority,
with our tools being secure by default and private by design.
Every day Gmail keeps over a billion people
safe, and blocks 99.9% of spam.
And we continue to work with customers of all sizes,
from small businesses to large enterprises around the world,
to prevent malware and dangerous links from ever
reaching your inbox.
We are building additional tools to further protect
you and your data.
In March, we launched Access Management,
enabling customers to geographically limit
Google staff support actions to US persons.
This launch, along with data regions and access
transparency, are important examples
of how we are giving you control over your data.
We're also working towards S/MIME-based client-side
encryption for Gmail next year for our enterprise customers,
allowing our customers an extra level of security and privacy,
while meeting a variety of data sovereignty and compliance
needs.
And today admins have the ability
to monitor for and block sensitive content in Gmail
and Drive with data loss prevention.
We're excited to announce data loss prevention for chat
to further ensure proprietary company information doesn't
fall into the wrong hands.
You can sign up for the private beta today.
To wrap up, we've spent the past year and a half
solving for the unique hybrid work world for ourselves
and for our customers.
We're excited to share our latest Google Workspace
experiences and a peek at where we are going to help teams
increase productivity, enhance collaboration equity,
and strengthen human connection.
To help better prepare your organization or team,
please take a look at our handbook
for navigating hybrid work, and visit our future of work site
to stay on top of industry trends and insights.
Please also remember to check out our deeper dive into spaces
and our other great Google Workspace sessions
to deepen your understanding of how Workspace
is enabling hybrid work and new patterns of collaboration.
You can explore our Workspace website and Learning Center
to learn about specific products,
and how you can ready your team and organization
to adopt Workspace.
And lastly, you can stay on top of all the great Workspace news
on the Google Cloud blog as well as the Workspace updates blog.
Thank you for listening.
I hope today's session was helpful in understanding
how you can increase productivity with our latest
integrated solutions for distributed teams in Google
Workspace.
Thanks again.