Things have changed. There’s no more chit chat by the water cooler anymore, office banter has been replaced with emojis and meeting greetings have been replaced from “Hello” to “Hello, can you hear me?”. From a productivity standpoint, working from home has brought some challenges. And here is where Google Workspace comes in.

Majority of us have been able to adapt and find amazing solutions to today’s world. Organizations already familiar with cloud-based forms of working have now traded office space for cloud space. Allowing for less of a need to report to work physically and signing up to productivity tools that were previously perceived as unnecessary. And this ‘change’ has brought forward the question of how to retain the same level of productivity from home as that that was achieved from the office. Luckily, we have a simple answer to that: Google Workspace.

For most organizations, the largest decision-making factor is cost. The question of “How much will a particular procurement decision impact the bottom line and what sort of return on investment can it hope to achieve?” burns in every procurement manager's mind. However, the real question is no longer which is the cheapest but what offers the best features and functionality at the lowest price. So, let’s have a look at what features you should consider when making this decision for your organization.

1. Making real-time collaboration the standard for document creation

There is no “I” in team. In the basis, organizations are made up of individuals working together to deliver several objectives. Now that a great deal of the formal work force is working from home, the traditional method of collaborating on a particular document is no longer a viable option. E-mailing colleagues back and forth with different versions of the same document was extremely time consuming and led to various issues like “who has the final document?”, “which version is the final version?”, “what changes were made and who did what?”. There was no accountability, no shared workflow, no unity. In this regard being a cloud native can make everybody’s life easier.

“A study of Harvard Business Review in 2019 shows that 84% of Google Workspace users review and edit the same document over the course of a regular meeting. 92% says real-time collaboration has become the standard for document creation.“

Google Workspace offers collaborative features such as the ability to dynamically create and collaborate on documents in real-time, work on documents offline, host and conduct meetings picture-in-picture, view version history, share and assign various edit permissions for security.

2. The effortless communication dream has been realized

Communication is everywhere nowadays. Emails, audio/video-conferencing, live chat and so on. Data from the U.S Census bureau shows that remote working has “exploded” in the last 10 years. And most likely it will be the standard of communicating in the future. Google Workspace offers tools such as G-mail, Meet, Chat and Calendar. These features are interconnected and can be utilized in Docs, Slides and sheets concurrently making communication effortless. Imagine if while working on a Google document you can chat with your colleagues and schedule your next document review meeting - without leaving that web page? You wouldn’t have to wait for change approvals - the feedback would be instant!

3. Google Workspace provides comfort by offering useful features

Microsoft is a legacy brand. Microsoft Office is more than likely the first tool a lot of today’s employees first used when they began their working careers. For Africa especially. For example: ICT classes were taught exclusively with MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in mind. In comparison, Google Apps was first introduced in August of 2006 giving Microsoft a sixteen year head-start! As a result, Africans are already extremely familiar with most, if not all Office 365 has to offer whereas there might be a small learning curve to adopting Google Workspace.

So how long does it take for an organization to get comfortable using Workspace vs Office 365? The Harvard Business Review report continued to state that after a month, 52% of Google Workspace said they were comfortable with the solution as opposed to 39% of Office 365 users. Three months later and the results show 77% of Workspace users were comfortable with Office 365 claiming 66% over the same time period. These results are a testament to the innovative and intuitive user interface that Google Workspace offers and its ever-growing list of useful features that are continuously updated.

Picking the right solution for your organization can be a herculean task that requires a lot of consideration, especially if you’re considering moving from an existing solution. However for a great deal of SME’s looking to better their workflow – the solution has never been more straight-forward.

So are you ready?! Reach out to us and we will make sure Google Workspace will impact your business for the better.