JENNIFER SHEN: Hi, I'm Jennifer Shen,
and I'm a Product Manager on the Google Meet team in Workspace.
I'm joined today by Holger Matthies, who is the new Google
Services Manager from PwC, a professional services
organization with over 280,000 employees worldwide.
In today's session, we will discuss what Google Workspace
is doing to help organizations plan for their return
to office and transition to a sustainable hybrid work setup.
I'll give an overview of what Workspace has learned
over the past year, our top areas of investment based
on these insights, and some of our recommended best
practices for hybrid work.
Finally, we'll close out the session
with a conversation with Holger, discussing
how PwC has navigated the last year
and how its thinking about the future of work.
During the global pandemic and this year long experiment
in remote work, millions of organizations
were forced to put their collaboration and productivity
tools to the test across living rooms and time zones.
While some organizations were able to successfully test
new solutions or adapt existing ones,
many struggled as they discovered
that their tools weren't scalable, secure,
or intuitive to use.
On a personal level, across a variety of industries,
employees reported spikes in burnout,
eroding work-life balance, feelings of disconnection,
and frustration with being able to find the latest information.
Workspace has been investing in helping people collaborate
securely and productively in the Cloud for over 15 years.
This past year, tools like Meet, Gmail, Chat, Drive,
and the editors help people stay connected and productive, even
with the shift to fully remote work.
Our customers found the transition
to remote much smoother because of our tools.
And through this journey, we've seen three main themes emerge.
First, work is no longer a place.
Studies show that a large portion of the workforce
will continue to stay remote, and people
need flexible solutions that support
them working from anywhere.
Second, time is more precious than ever,
with the average working day increasing by more than 48
minutes during the pandemic.
We need tools that help us manage our time
and attention so that we can focus
on the most high-impact work.
And finally, human connection is crucial.
We need solutions to help bridge the gap
between physical and virtual contacts
to make collaboration more human and inclusive.
As we look forward and prepare to return
to office and reimagine what work
will look like in the post-pandemic future,
these insights form the foundation
of three areas of product investment for Workspace.
First, productivity with an easy real-time collaboration
and co-creation while protecting time and attention
for individual work.
Equity, with a special focus on collaboration equity,
with the ability to contribute equally regardless of location,
role, experience, language, or device.
And finally, well-being, focused on our ability
to strengthen social connection, team culture,
and work-life separation.
Now, coming from the Meet team, productive and inclusive
meetings are a particular passion of mine.
You may have remembered a time pre-pandemic
when you were the only person joining a call virtually
and having an experience like the one pictured here.
Imagine the poor remote attendee seeing a small video
of the video room attendees, unable to track
the multiple side conversations happening in person
and unable to get a word in edgewise.
In all remote, we've been able to achieve a sense of equity,
as every meeting participant is represented
by an equal sized video tile in the meeting.
Digital tools like hand raise, polls, and Q&A
enable every participant to speak up and contribute
in a meeting.
As some people start returning to the office
and adopt a hybrid work model, which
includes a mix of both at-home and in-office environments,
there's a fear that the current equity we have will be lost.
To navigate hybrid successfully and make
sure we don't revert to our pre-pandemic behaviors,
organizations need flexible solutions
that help people connect and collaborate from any location
on any device.
And that's where our Workspace solutions come in and can help.
Many organizations are choosing to adopt flexible working
options, allowing employees to choose
between full in-person, full remote, or hybrid,
where employees are in the office a few days
and remote a few days of the week.
Our new Calendar Working Location feature
makes it easier for Workspace users
to indicate where they're working
from on a particular day.
In future releases, we'll also be using this information
to set Smart defaults on our new RSVP join method, where you can
indicate how you're joining the meeting,
whether in the meeting room or in-person.
As I've slowly been going back to the office at Google,
these features were really useful in helping me coordinate
a few in-person meetings and lunches with my teammates who
were also on campus when I was.
Another feature that's critical to
the in-office hybrid experience is Meet's new Companion Mode.
Companion Mode will enable you to join the meeting
from a second device to have a more individual tailored
experience, even in a shared meeting room setting.
For instance, you can turn on captions or translated captions
in your preferred language, or respond to polls and chat
messages without having to deal with audio feedback
or eating up network bandwidth.
Companion Mode is rolling out to customers soon,
and will continue to evolve over the next several months.
On the Google Meet hardware front,
we have some great new developments.
We just introduced two new Series One all-in-one products,
the Desk 27 and Board 65, which combine video
conferencing and whiteboarding.
Desk 27 is for desktops, both personal and small shared
spaces, like phone booths or hot desking.
Board 65 is for small to medium-sized team rooms.
It can be wall mounted or you can
add an optional stand for mobility,
and it can turn any room or space into a video call
collaboration hub.
These two new products and existing room kits
come together to create a comprehensive Series One
portfolio that offers Workspace customers a video conferencing
solution for any room or space.
Some key Series One features that support hybrid work
include occupancy detection, so admins
can be aware of how many people are using each space
and adjust resourcing accordingly
if there are social distancing issues,
hands-free voice commands so you can
limit touching shared surfaces, AV carts for our Room Kits,
which give you the ultimate flexibility
to build out video conference rooms and spaces in just
minutes, enhanced in-room experience,
meaning you'll have the same experience in the room
as the people on the remote end and be able to see and use
hand raise, polls, and Q&A, and finally, you
can expand your calling [AUDIO OUT]
with our recently-announced embedded interop
with Cisco Webex devices.
Now, meetings are great when you need
high-bandwidth synchronous time together.
But we know, just as importantly,
people need dedicated shared spaces
to collaborate in more distributed, asynchronous ways.
We recently announced Spaces, an evolution of the Rooms
experience in Google Chat.
This is a dedicated space for organizing people, topics,
and projects in Google Workspace to help
teams and individuals stay on top of everything that's
important.
[INAUDIBLE] here, we're also adding powerful new features
like Discoverable Spaces, where organizations
can decide whether or not to let members of the organization
discover any of those Spaces and content so that they can
join in on the conversation.
Enhanced Search will also let users easily
search for information across Spaces
and within their own Spaces and discover new Spaces to join.
And finally, in-line topic threading
allows users to reply to any message within a Space,
allowing for even deeper discussions and collaboration
among team members.
These updates will help teams adapt
to a more sustainable hybrid setup,
help find opportunities for in-person collaboration
when necessary, and promote collaboration equity
when you're not all in-person.
But we know that not all meetings and collaboration
are equal, and so these tools are not one size fits all.
That's why we've also taken the top five most common meeting
types--
relationship building, working sessions,
high stakes reviews, brainstorms,
and all-hands-- and created a set
of recommended best practices to highlight
the specific features, hardware, and physical space
configuration best designed to support each of these use cases
to ensure continued collaboration equity in hybrid.
Today I'm going to quickly talk through our recommended
blueprint for two common meeting types, working sessions
and all-hands.
But you can find more information plus the complete
blueprint for all five meeting types
at g.co/NavigatingHybridWork.
OK, let's start with the working session, which
could be as small as two people or as many as 10.
We see this as a small group collaboration,
often creating, discussing, or editing a document together.
Working sessions could include multiple individuals or groups
of people dialing in remotely and people
participating in a conference room.
Our recommendation is that in-room participants
would join the meeting directly from a Series One video
conferencing device like the Room Kit or the new Board 65.
They can also launch Companion Mode on their laptop
so they can actively participate.
Remote participants, either from home or in another office,
could join via Google Meet on their laptop
or on their Series One Desk 27.
And they can all let the organizer
know how they're going to be joining in the Calendar
Invitation RSVP.
Now onto software and the working part of the meeting.
As the meeting organizer, I would share the working Doc tab
in the meeting so everyone can follow along.
But all participants, remote or in the room,
can work on the document together
in real time with the full power of Google Docs and Smart
Canvas.
I can also use the upcoming Meet sidebar
to see meeting participants while editing the Doc,
or I can split screen the meeting and the Doc.
I can also unpin presented content during the discussion
to see even more participants.
The second meeting type I'll talk about are all-hands.
These are meetings designed to bring together large teams
to share information and create alignment, anywhere between 10
to 250 participants.
In-room experience is similar to the working session,
but you'll want to use the Large Series One Room
Kit with dual large displays and dual audio bars
for the optimal video and audio experience.
Remote participants can join using
their laptop, tablet, Desk 27 personal device,
or even their mobile phone if they wanted to join this call
and get a few steps in for the day.
For software features, as organizer,
I can enable meeting recording and transcription.
I can also set up the event as a livestream in Calendar.
In the meeting, I can start and share
polls in real time, moderate hand raises and Q&A
from my laptop or meeting room hardware,
and I can review the attendance report, results for the polls,
and Q&A artifacts after the meeting
and share the presentation and recording with attendees.
As an in-room meeting participant, using my laptop
I can open the Companion Mode experience
to participate in activities.
As a remote attendee, I can participate in these activities
through Meet as I normally do, but I also have access
to Background Blur and Replace.
And for both in-room and remote attendees,
noise cancellation optimizes my audio experience.
There are additional Meet features
available to facilitate meetings of all sizes and complexities,
so I hope you'll spend some time with the hybrid handbook
to learn more.
And now, switching gears.
I'm pleased to introduce Holger Matthies.
Holger is the new Google Services Manager at PwC,
and he is focused on how new features will impact people
within PwC once they are deployed.
Thank you for joining me today, Holger.
HOLGER MATTHIES: Thanks, Jenn.
Looks like your team is continuing
to respond to our feature requests.
It's very impressive, and I guess
we'll have certainly another busy year in the new services
department.
JENNIFER SHEN: I'm so glad that you found our updates helpful.
I'd love to ask you a few questions about how
PwC is thinking about the future of work
based on some of the learnings from last year.
First of all, workplace well-being
is a very important topic these days.
What does the well-being mean at PwC,
and what does that have to do with technology?
HOLGER MATTHIES: So PwC is committed to a culture
of workplace wellness.
Well-being, at PwC, means different things to our people.
And one key aspect of enabling workplace wellness
is flexibility.
PwC is focused on enabling well-being and flexibility
through technology.
This has allowed us to continue to collaborate and bring
our people together and serve our clients,
and tools like Meet with video enabled
have materially improve the quality of those interactions,
to the point that we now take them for granted.
It would have been a horrible experience
if we had to rely on telephones and speaker phones
during this pandemic to stay connected.
We have many well-being initiatives
that are built around Meet, such as 15-minute one-on-one chats,
where participants are paired with another person
elsewhere in our global network, and small fireside
chats with global leaders, for example.
JENNIFER SHEN: I love that-- virtual copy networking.
One of the things we often talk about is technology parity,
and from the product side we're certainly
working on features that give people the tools so that they
can participate more equitably.
What is PwC doing to encourage usage,
and are employees actually embracing these features?
HOLGER MATTHIES: Yes, PwC has long
encouraged good meeting habits.
So for example, an audience would submit questions
before the meeting so curated answers would
be provided to the most popular questions during the session.
We also provided dedicated in-office phone rooms,
both for call confidentiality and to improve
the general quality of the interaction.
And with the Q&A, polling, and breakout room features
that have been added to Meet over the last year,
we are now able to provide in-person and remote attendees
a similar experience, and we see more colleagues simultaneously
than before.
So we are delighted to see those features being
supported in Google Meet.
And I guess if you ask me about the most used features,
those would be hand raising and polling.
They've made it so much easier to organize big meetings
and to give everybody a voice.
JENNIFER SHEN: That's awesome.
I know you speak with the users at your organization
on a regular basis.
What feedback have you received on how they're
doing from a well-being perspective,
and what are they struggling with?
HOLGER MATTHIES: No doubt, I guess,
virtual meetings and especially meeting overload.
That has surpassed email overload as the number one
complaint for many.
At the moment, we provide more guidance
on dealing with virtual meetings than any other medium.
And from tools perspective, being
able to blur or to replace backgrounds,
to enable noise canceling, and to conduct high-quality
and reliable virtual meetings just using home internet
service-- that has helped a lot and has helped people
to reduce anxiety associated with virtual meetings
and with conducting business from home.
And the good news for most is that people
are learning to manage their time differently--
to mark time in their Calendars for deep work
and to attend to family and other personal matters.
JENNIFER SHEN: That's great.
How do you think work will change for PwC as you look out
a year from now?
Will hybrid work just completely work?
HOLGER MATTHIES: I think so.
The pandemic has proven one thing at last,
that by using these collaboration tools,
our people have continued to deliver quality
work to our clients regardless of where
we are physically located.
And trends that were just developing pre-pandemic
are now well-entrenched.
The way we work is much more flexible now,
and our meeting culture has been completely
transformed, honestly, really for the better.
JENNIFER SHEN: Awesome.
Thank you for sharing those valuable insights, Holger,
and joining me today.
And that brings our session to a close.
I hope you found this session informative,
and I encourage you to continue your learning
at Next and beyond.
Here are a few other great 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 more about specific products
and how you can ready your team and organization
to adopt Workplace.
And lastly, you can stay on top of all of the great Workspace
news on Google Cloud Blog, as well as the Workspace Updates
Blog.
Thank you.