How G Suite Enables Our Remote Workforce

G Suite is arguably the leading “all inclusive” cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite for enabling a remote workforce. Not only do the tools within G Suite provide teams with the essentials to create, share, collaborate, and communicate, but it also offers system administrators with a unified web interface to manage the organization.

In its purest sense, G Suite facilitates getting work done from any location, from any device, and at any time.

Dito, for example, has “grown up” as a remote workforce. While we do have office locations, our team is distributed and almost all of the organization’s day to day work — from creating and collaborating on documents & spreadsheets, managing email communications, hosting video meetings, and participating in team chats — is handled from a web browser (Chrome, please!) and a G Suite application, which has only gotten easier, faster, and better over the years as G Suite has continued to evolve its capabilities.

Outside of Gmail, most of our communications happen in the form of Hangouts Meet or Hangouts Chat. All of our calendar invites default to include a Hangouts Meet video conferencing link, which includes a dial-in number for an audio only phone connection, but most of the time the team is all on camera in order to create face time with our teammates. When we’re in need of a quick team chat or just need to message someone, Hangouts Chat is just a “pinned tab” away. From Chat, it’s easy to catch up on department, team, and topic specific chat rooms, search previous Chat history for key information that was shared, or even start a quick video call with one click to transition from chat to video in an instant.

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Some of our teams have quick daily “stand up” video calls to quickly sync up on priorities for the day, while others keep weekly or monthly recurring meetings on the Calendar for the more periodic check-ins. There’s always a healthy amount of impromptu “can we meet real quick” chats that lead into video meetings, essentially our version of the “open door” drop-ins that happen in the office setting. And while working remotely does inherently remove some of the organic conversational opportunities that an office presents, our Water Cooler chat, occasional open Hangouts, and niche specific chat rooms allow our team to further build rapport, get to know each other, and provide virtual environments to encourage innovative thought and collaborative discussions.

With Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, nearly all of the core file creation needs are accounted for in a simple web browser. Long gone (at least for G Suite organizations) are the days of saving multiple versions, emailing copies, waiting on edits, and having to merge updates back into your “master” document. Just share, collaborate in real time, and let the revision tracking do it’s magic. If you really want, you can always use the “Name Current Version” feature to more easily identify and timestamp a particular version of the file. Or, the one-click “Make a Copy” will save a copy of the document to your Drive file storage.

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As more businesses are evaluating flexible working arrangements to support work-life balance, or are transitioning to a remote friendly workforce, G Suite’s cloud-first approach has significantly lowered the barriers to adoption. Teams are simply no longer bound by location, a specific type of device, or physical presence to get work done. For communicating, creating work product, and connecting with your team, G Suite offers end users and IT staff a refreshingly simple, powerful platform to operate from.

Contact us if you’d like to know more about how Dito uses G Suite to power its distributed workforce, or for an assessment on how much you can save by consolidating and streamlining your end user IT with G Suite.