Peter Moriarty: So this collection of videos and
sections is called Google's best team collaboration tools. And
we're gonna be talking about communication and collaboration
tools from Google covering some stuff that we haven't covered in
a long time, actually. So we're gonna cover currents and some
other bits and pieces. And looking forward to this. Now,
why is this important for you? Well, it's important for you to
make sure that your team are collaborating effectively, and
actually working together. And Google's got all these tools.
But I want to try and demystify them a little bit. So we are it
genius, and we help small business owners get the most out
of their tech. And we are all about helping you get technology
working well in your business to help you grow and scale and work
more effectively. We're all about empowering your teams, so
that they can collaborate, communicate effectively. And we
want you the business owner to learn a bit more about
technology. So that you can actually be the driving force
behind technology strategy in your business. And that will
mean that for you, you can build a great business, because we all
know that when we add technology to a business, like the Ubers,
and their menu logs of the world, that we actually have,
you know, big leaps in how the world works and how businesses
work as well. So we've grown and scaled quite successful business
now. And so we've got heaps to teach on how to grow and scale
teams, particularly international teams. And that's
what we love doing helping small businesses get ahead. If you
haven't already checked out our growth roadmap headlong to our
YouTube channel, check on the playlists function. And you'll
see we have specific playlists for each level of business. No
matter where you are, right now, we've got technology strategy,
which will help you get ahead in your business. So no matter what
stage of business you're at, we've got different ways of
helping you out in making sure that you're on fire. So we're
gonna be talking about Google's best team collaboration tools.
The first part of this video is talking about Google Chat versus
groups versus currents. And I'm going to attempt to demystify
the difference between these different applications and where
you might choose to use one or the other. Now, Google have
created multiple different apps for communicating collaborating
with team members. And they are important now more than ever,
with everybody working from home, although Google have a bit
of a way of, you know, allowing their users to get a little lost
in all the different options that are available for tools. So
it's important for you to choose the right tool, because if
you're trying to screw something in with a screwdriver, you don't
want to try and use a hammer and knock it in, right, we want to
use the right tool for the job. And so it's really important for
us to make sure that when we're utilizing Google's tools or any
tools in our business, that we actually choose something that
is going to be effective. So my aim here is to attempt to
demystify the difference between groups chat and currents, where
you might use either of those. And to give you a bit of an idea
of what are the individual features of each of those, and
because there's been some changes that have happened. And
so up to the minute, I'm going to be sharing what the current
features are on each one of these applications, and where
you may choose to use them inside your business. So let's
start with Google Groups. And Google Groups basically, kind of
like, you know, started out as just something called
distribution lists inside of Google. And distribution lists
are effectively an email group they work, it's kind of similar
to the kind of way that a contact group would work,
whereas you can email one group or one email address, and then
it will shoot that out to a number of different people. And
Google does some kind of like funky stuff with that when you
email a group, one of these special groups inside of your
Google workspace account, it will, you know, collect all of
those emails in one place. And that becomes like the
distribution list. And then anyone who replies to that
thread that emails basically gets sent back to everyone on
there. And that's kind of useful, I mean, but these days,
we've kind of moved away from email being a collaboration tool
in businesses. And although large organizations still
probably use a lot of email for their communication, I'm really
anti email for internal communication within a business,
because I think it's just horribly inefficient. And the
other problem with email is, as soon as you go into your inbox,
you get distracted with all the other junk that's in there. And
so if you're using email for your internal conversations,
you're going to get distracted by emails from people outside
the business, and they're probably going to be distracting
you as well. So I'm not a fan of using distribution lists for for
emails, especially internally inside of business. Next up, you
have the discussion boards feature and this acts a little
bit more like a forum. Now, again, this is like a kind of
older feature. And it works. I don't specifically have any,
like particular use cases that I talked to about, you know, for
small businesses that may use a discussion board, but that
feature is there. It's I don't know what it's useful for. I
can't think of anything. So let's move on. Next up, we have
the collaborative mailbox. And this is the one that gets
really, really useful. And so Google have their own version of
a collaborative mailbox. And that is basically one place
where emails come to and that might be helped at it genius.com
or Hello, and it genius.com and that one mailbox is basically
where multiple people can
see into and start managing email from one place. And so a
collaborative mailbox is really useful. If you've got lots of
customers who need service or support or customer service or
for whatever reason, you want to consolidate the communication
with those customers and have multiple people help out with
it. And that would make sense if you've got like a customer
service team or a sales team, or a support or delivery team of
some sort. And they want to all be working with one common email
address back and forth between you and your customers. Now, the
collaborative inbox that Google has out of the box is okay, and
if you're just doing the basics, it'll get the job done. But
really, it's not as sophisticated as would be useful
to a business who's doing a high volume of requests. And by a
high volume of requests, I mean, more than like, five emails a
day, if you're getting more than five emails a day to
collaborative inbox, or you want some more features, you might
consider using a third party tool instead. And so the tool
that we recommend is called high bar, and we're a reseller. So if
you're interested in this application, please chat to our
team because we've got discounts and other perks available. Now,
what hayver basically does is a couple of key features. Number
one, it lets you have shared labels. And so you don't have to
go out of your inbox and into a second tab to open up the
collaborative inbox like you'd have to do with Google's one.
Hi, we just live straight in your inbox. And the shared tabs
and labels just basically shop there for everyone, which is
really groovy. Secondly, it lets you do things like add
guaranteed response times, you can put internal notes on
tickets and a few other bits and pieces that you just can't do
with the Google solution. But Thirdly, and this is the most
important one is it's got customer satisfaction built in.
And so what that means is that customers can give feedback on
how their experiences working with your team, and you get all
kinds of reports on, you know, on what that satisfaction is and
how that's been delivered. And what I love about that is that
gives you the opportunity to really know well, what is the
performance of my team? You know, how are they actually
delivering support, and what's experienced that our customers
are getting. Now many ticketing systems or customer service
systems will actually wait until a request is finished or closed
before they send a customer service rating. And I don't like
that because sometimes a customer may have an email
conversation open. And they want to give feedback during the
course of the project or during the course of the process of
getting support. And with Hiva, what happens is, every single
email that goes out has those customer service buttons on the
bottom. And what that means is that you're always getting rapid
feedback not waiting till the end of a request when the
customers like steaming away if they haven't had a good
experience. But when they're actually during the process. So
we've got more videos on Hiva, check out our YouTube channel
for that. So that is the collaborative mailbox. And and
and kind of like the the the version of groups that allows
you to get stuff done within Google Now it's, it's okay for
the basics. If you're a small team two or three people and you
just need something really basic, it works great. But
really, that's just you know, a matter of sharing emails with
people in a basic way. Once you've grown to a business
that's flourished, then you want to start looking at a more
dedicated ticketing and customer service system, which is going
to suit your business a little bit better. Next up, let's talk
about chat. And this is something that Google's put a
lot of development into over the last few years. Now you may
still have the ghost of hangouts hanging around, which is
challenging. And for many people, they had a bad
experience with Google Hangouts. And it was pretty average to be
completely honest. And Google Hangouts was something that
lived inside a chrome kind of like extension that you had to
add, and you could chat to people, but it was really one on
one. And unfortunately, the only thing that really hangouts was
useful for was instant messaging. It didn't do video
calls or phone calls great because it was so slow. And so
lots of people got frustrated with that and ended up
eventually using Skype or zoom or other solutions. It wasn't
until Google rewrote hangouts completely into Google meat,
that they finally started doing meetings well, and it took a
long time for people to trust Google, again to do video
meetings because Google Hangouts was just so slow and crappy,
pretty much.
But really, Google's now done a great effort in actually
building chat into something that is really, really useful
for everyone. And let's be honest, there were about three
years too late to do this. And slack came in. And it's created
an amazing tool, which heaps and heaps of people started using.
But bit by bit, we're seeing a lot of customers coming back to
using Google Chat, because it's free, and it's deeply integrated
with the rest of Google workspace. Now, some of the
features of chat are is living inside of your Gmail. So this is
probably one of the best features in that it's right
there every time you're doing your work. Next up, you can use
rooms or you know, these would be called channels inside slack
if you're familiar with that. But inside a room, you can
actually create threads of conversations and you can see
all the emojis and things like that are all included in that
there. And so what that does is let you organize the chats into
different teams or different groups which makes it really
useful essentially grated with meat, which is pretty cool.
There's a meat bot. And what that lets you do is actually
automatically have a meeting schedule between different
people that you have in a group and it goes and checks their
calendars to see when people are available. All kinds of cool
stuff like that. And you can see there's even a little meat
button there. And with that meat button, you can just click one
button and jump straight into a meeting. And so I often find
when I'm chatting to a colleague back and forth on chat, and we
really just need to hash it out over a quick conversation, I
just click one button, and then all of a sudden way quickly into
a Google meet with each other, which is really cool. Next up
Google have built in the ability to for third party developers to
create bots. And so there's all kinds of bots available for
Google mate. And so you can see this is a giffy bot, we've got a
poll bot there where you can create little polls and things
like that. Basically, it's going to automatically, I can see
there that someone's used the phrase test, and it's brought up
scons deadlines on that. But basically, it allows you to,
basically it allows you to communicate outside of just your
chat, which is which is pretty damn groovy. The basics of
messaging, each other is still there. But what Google have
brought is their AI and machine learning technology into Google
Chat. And so you can see here when sending a message, you
actually have the smart replies that pop up, just like in Gmail,
and it makes things super easy. So they are some pretty
compelling features of chat. But there is one big downside. And
the big downside of chess is that you have an interruption
factory, and instant messaging is is a big challenge. What that
means is that because we have the ability to be always on with
everyone, it means that everyone can interrupt us all day long.
And you've heard all the studies that it takes 45 minutes to get
back into your deep work. And I didn't think deep work actually
exists anymore in a modern organization, because we're just
literally being pinged all day long. And so I like the idea of
moving out of chat for tasks, not using chat for tasks and not
using email for tasks. But we kind of need somewhere else to
go that isn't inside our, you know, instant messaging and
communication platform. And we've talked extensively about
other task tools. I'm going to cover tasks a little bit later
on in this presentation series. So check out the upcoming
section on that. But the challenges that we have is when
we're using instant messaging for chat all the time, it means
that we're constantly interrupting our colleagues. And
that may mean that we're less productive overall. So we've got
to be really careful with that. Let's talk about Google carrots.
And this is Google's third tool for us to communicate and keep
in touch with our team. Now Google carrots is pretty much
just a new skin slapped onto Google Plus. Now I don't know if
it was just because of the privacy issue and security issue
that happened with Google Plus a little while ago. But Google
decided to give it a rebrand and give it a relaunch. But really,
it's I don't know if it's like a wolf in sheep's clothing, if
that's the right analogy for it. But it's maybe just kind of like
more of the same stuff. Now, think of it a little bit like
what you would use Google workspace for or Google
workplace, sorry. And that is a place where your team can
collaborate share things, I'd say there's less less
collaboration there, it's more just a matter of actually
posting things and sharing them with your team. It's great in a
larger organization. So if you've got more than 30 or 40
employees, it makes sense that you might want to share updates
in a social way.
Personally, I've found it's not super useful in our organization
at the size that we're at. And the thing with that is because I
find that what people use currents for is a very socially
acceptable way of communicating. It's like the professional
version of Facebook. And here's my little status update. And
it's worded nicely, and it has a nice picture, and I've got a
nice photo. And everyone really wants to, you know, look nice
and look good with it. And that's just not the kind of
business that we run in it genius, we're pretty loose,
we've got a really strong culture of having fun with each
other and being more social than let's say how our usual hashtag
professional environment would actually operate. And so I find
that using current is not that useful for us. Also, it might
just be a matter of our team size. Like we've got, I think
about 45 people in the company now. And most people have a
personal relationship with each other. And so we haven't kind of
reached the stage where we have staff who absolutely don't know
each other at all. And I think in a larger organization, that
makes a lot more sense. So that's why we don't use
currents. But that's not necessarily why you shouldn't
use currents, currents is definitely useful. What we find
ourselves using more of is our chat. And so we've got a water
cooler chat inside our Google Chat in a room called water
cooler. And then we've got our main team chat and we use that
to post gifts. We use that to react to things we use that for
our kind of daily tips. And so we've got an overview of a
number of different tools. Here, we've got our groups, which are
really, you know, kind of like an outdated way of doing things
in email, but can be used for collaborative inbox, which are
useful. We've got chat, which is like our instant messaging and
our way of staying in rapid communication with each other.
But it has the downside of interrupting. And then thirdly,
we've got Google currents, which may be a useful tool for larger
teams. And it's great for broadcasting messages in a non
interrupting way. But the downside of currents then is
that there's another tab that you've got to check. There's
just like one more thing to go to. And I asked my marketing
manager Angel, before we set up this live stream, why don't we
use currents internally, and she said, because it's boring AF.
And I've got to say, I've got a little bit of that vibe about it
as well. It's not the most fun or engaging platform to use, at
least on Facebook, when I've got the sound switched on my mobile,
there's, you know, little like notifications and things like
that, which are going to pump some dopamine for me when I'm
using the application. And I just can't say that about
currents right now that it's a pleasure to use. So I want to
give it a go. I'm just yet to find that use case for it
myself. We're going to talk in an upcoming section on this
series on how to use Google tasks and all the different
features that you've got of tasks. And we'll talk a little
bit about how tasks compares to a tool like Asana, which is a
third party shared task management tool. So let me know
your thoughts on that below. Drop some comments down and let
me know what you guys think.