- Hello amazing people, Peter Moriarty here.
This is a very important video today
sharing with you a massive change to Google's branding,
and a lot of other plan details for what was Google G Suite,
is now Google workspaces, Google Workspace.
And so I'm just getting used to the name, as you can see,
we're gonna jump into some details
on what the plan changes are,
what Google's philosophy is with the change,
what's kind of some of the driving forces
behind it for them, how work is changing.
And if you're currently a subscriber
to Google's Productivity Suite,
then this is gonna be an important one for you to check out.
I need to give you a bit of a caveat before I get started.
And that is that, we've just been given this information
literally hot off the press from Google.
And so what that means is,
if some of the information that I share is not perfect,
or if it changes in the next couple of days or a week,
please forgive me.
So what I'm sharing today is gonna be for guidance only,
of course, before you enter into any, you know, agreements,
or change your plan or anything like that,
you should definitely consult with a professional,
make sure that you're getting exactly what you're expecting,
and you can reach out to our team
if you'd like any help with that.
So this is Google Workspace.
And we are gonna take you through
exactly what you need to know
about all the new app and how it works,
and the new branding and you know,
new logos and stuff like that,
but really what the new strategy means for Google
with their workplace collaboration tools.
If you don't know who we are,
we are a small business consultancy.
We help small and medium sized business owners
and even large organizations with the technology.
We wanna help get businesses in flow,
get their tech running smoothly,
and we use a tool called the Growth Roadmap for that.
What that means is that, in each stage of business,
you'll have different challenges with technology,
you'll have different challenges with managing your team,
and we know the order that businesses go through
and where you should be putting your attention.
We know what boxes you're gonna tick
based on what stage of business you're at.
Because if you're in business and you're flying blind,
and you know,
you're trying to do all of the tech things at once,
you'll find that very quickly gets overwhelming.
And so for us, what we wanna do is make sure
that you put the right things in place now,
as your business growing and scaling
so that you don't run into problems later.
And what kind of problems can you run into?
Well, if you are investing in expensive infrastructure,
or maybe you have security breaches
that cannot cause problems
or you've got a business partner
who disappears and takes files from you,
any of those kind of risks that can happen in a business,
if you don't put the right technology strategies in place,
we wanna help you avoid those.
So if you haven't already checked out
some of our other videos, on the growth roadmap,
head along to our YouTube channel,
we've got heaps of stuff on there,
and that'll share with you
and guide you in the right direction
on building a technology strategy
inside the business and developing yourself
as a strong technology leader.
But today, we're talking about Google Workspace,
and we're talking about Google's rebrand,
and relaunch of their tools
and what Google are doing about that.
First, I wanna talk a little bit about,
you know, kind of what's changing in the landscape of work.
Obviously, at the time of recording this video,
many people are working at home this year,
COVID has come upon us
and many have been forced to work from home.
And what that's meant is,
many have had to change the way that they've been working.
From coming into an office every day, to working remotely.
Now for our business, we've been working remotely
for about six years.
So it's not news to us to work remotely,
our team are all geographically distributed,
we all primarily work from home or you know,
from co working spaces, from different places all around.
And it's been pretty natural to us.
It's also pretty natural to Google internally.
They are a business that have been designed
from the ground up for flexible work.
Even though they certainly have offices
all around the world,
they've been a really really big purveyor
of flexible workplaces.
And we have learned from Google
working in close proximity to them,
and learned the ways of working productively at home.
Now, the rest of the world has kind of been forced
into this, even though we've been saying for years
that remote is the new way of working,
everyone has been forced into this
and has had to learn how to actually get things to work.
And back in April this year, we did a whole series,
an eight week series for our members
in our concierge program,
telling them all of the secrets
and everything that we have learned
in running a remote business for nearly 10 years now.
So if you haven't already checked that out,
that might be one to check out, head along to itgenius.com,
have a chat to the team to get access to that.
Now we're gonna be talking about how work is changing
and interestingly, up to 48% of respondents
in a recent survey,
I can't remember who the survey was from.
But up to 48% of recent respondents actually said,
that after COVID,
they would not wanna go back to only office based work,
they would wanna have the flexibility to work remotely.
And I would say,
it's probably gonna be a higher number than that.
We're already in the day and age
where people are using their mobile phones for work,
you know, while you're commuting on the way to the office,
people are kind of already checking in on emails
and starting to work on documents
with Google's collaboration Suite, makes it nice and easy.
If you're already using all the Google format documents
for your business, makes it pretty straightforward
to work from an iPad or work from a mobile device,
makes it super simple.
So there's some of the real big shifts and changes
that are happening currently in the landscape.
And I've got a couple more interesting stats for you.
Number two, interesting statistic.
Is that one in four workers right now
also primary caregivers, let that sink in.
One in four workers are also primary caregivers.
And what that means, is that,
for employees that are stuck at home on lockdown,
which in some parts of Australia,
that's a whole state of Victoria, currently,
people are literally having to look after the kids,
potentially have the kids through some kind of school
or be maybe they're not old enough to school,
they're gonna look after them,
while working at the same time.
And so they have to take advantage
of remote collaboration tools,
Google obviously being one of those that is, you know,
very effective tool at helping people to work remotely.
Number three, statistic.
That right now, one in three workers,
one in three colleagues is feeling disconnected,
feeling disconnected from the human element
and the human touch of working in a workplace
with their colleagues.
And so connection and collaboration and you know,
people not only just working together literally,
but feeling like they're working together
has never been more important.
So these are pretty interesting.
I'm curious to hear what you think about those.
Maybe drop down in the comments below this video,
let me know what you think about those statistics,
I found them pretty interesting,
and I think now is the time for all business owners
to get really smart about making sure
that your team are, well, you know,
protected and well supported in the way that they're working
particularly around their family arrangements,
but also making sure,
we're actually using the tools that we have.
And if you've not already checked out
the other videos on our channel,
we have heaps of resources
on how to use G Suite effectively,
and we also have a G Suite getting started course,
which is free if you transfer your licenses
into billing with itGenius.
Again, contact our team if you're interested in that.
Now, Google's big idea with Google workspaces is,
Google Workspace, I'm still getting used to the name.
Flexible, helpful, simple.
Now, we already know Google's tools
are pretty darn flexible.
They work across multiple devices,
they work across multiple operating systems,
they're basically designed
to work across multiple platforms.
Even though you will still have some people
who might be using Microsoft based documents
and emailing them to you every now and again,
Google will let you edit them inside of Google Drive
in the Chrome browser, even save them into Google Drive,
you can't collaborate in real time or anything like that,
but you can still work with those kind of documents.
And that's one of the things
that I really love about Google, is that flexibility.
Is that, okay, if someone sends you a PDF,
you can convert that to a Google Doc,
and it will actually take the text out
and convert it to a Google Doc.
If you're working with Microsoft documents,
you can still work with them
and even send them back into Microsoft format
if you really wanted to,
of course, the preference would be
to switch them over to Google format and share it that way.
Number two is helpful.
And what I really love about Google's focus on being helpful
is how deep they've gone into their AI efforts.
Having suggested responses inside of email,
inside of chat, inside you know, Google Sheet,
you've got the Insights tab,
and that's gonna automatically pop up and show you things
like suggested graphs, or you know, data analysis,
or it can even do an AI driven, what's called a pivot table.
And so you've got all of those options that are AI driven,
basically just baked into Google's technology,
making your day easier.
I absolutely love that.
Google even have said to us that over 20% of all emails,
over 20% of all emails across Google's platform,
are now written at least in part by AI,
are either using the auto composed feature,
which you know, finishes sentences for you,
or the suggested responses down the bottom of emails.
And that's really phenomenal.
Think about how much time you spend on email each week,
for some people that might be five or 10 hours a week,
and Google are able to help you save that time
up to 20% potentially, for each person,
that's pretty damn awesome.
That could be hours a week back in your pocket.
Now, number three is simple.
And Google's focus has always been simple.
They've been criticized for being overly simple,
but I really like the minimalist approach of Google,
because for me it means that I can just focus
on getting my work done.
I don't have to worry about the bells
and the whistles and having a million different buttons,
but you know, not being sure how to use them.
It's a little bit like the difference
between a gasoline based car and a Tesla,
you know, in a Tesla, it's got autopilot,
it's got auto steer, there's no you know,
electrical system or cooling system
or oil or you know, service changes
or anything like that you need to do.
So it's got four wheels, big battery,
a couple of electric motors,
and that's about it.
I think they've got less than 50 moving parts in total.
And that's what I like about Google,
is that focus on simplicity theme.
Me myself, I run a team of over 40 employees
in our business.
And if we were trying to worry about training someone
on how to use all 300 buttons inside of Microsoft Word,
just to get their work done,
I'd actually just prefer them to focus
on getting the result with a more simple tool,
rather than over complicating things.
So that's one of the big things
that I really, really appreciate about Google.
So what's the future strategy?
Google are really focusing on their unified experience.
And so you would have seen changes inside of your Gmail
with Google including chat, inside Gmail now,
Google now including, you know,
your other plugins inside of Gmail.
So third party apps,
if you're using something like copper CRM,
it'll just appear on the sideline there inside your Gmail.
And they're going even further with that unified experience
by actually even bringing in things like documents now.
And so you can see here there's a document being created
from a chat room.
And then when someone clicks on to that document,
it's actually gonna open
and allow you to work on the document,
literally inside the Gmail window,
which is pretty darn cool.
So yeah, unified experiences like that are coming
more and more to Google.
I'm not really a fan of spending all day long in Gmail,
I've got another video that I recorded
on what tool I use to hide my inbox
and only get to my emails when I want to,
rather than being distracted by them all day long,
'cause that's not great for productivity.
But I am loving that Google are bringing
all their tools into one tab.
'Cause usually I've got six tabs open,
I've got mail, I've got calendar, I've got chat,
I've got Google Drive,
and now it's actually like those first three
have automatically been consolidated down into one,
now that my calendar and my chat
are both inside the Gmail tab.