Working better together – a study of innovation and collaboration at work

Posted by Sebastien Marotte, VP, Google Apps for Work


Editors note: Today we share a few of the most enlightening insights from our study on the impact of collaboration and innovation on a company’s success. Read on for some highlights of what we learned from business leaders at companies of all sizes and industries, then check out the full report here.

As a culture, and in business, we’ve become increasingly conscious of the positive impact of collaboration, group interaction and free exchange of information. And with the word “social” tied to many of the ways we now spend our time — social media, social apps, social gaming, social software — we’re often reminded of the power of connecting and sharing.

The numbers reflect this trend. Over the last decade, Google search volume for the term “social collaboration” has grown globally by more than 300 percent, while interest for the term “social innovation” has jumped more than 200 percent. And the money trail is headed in the same direction: business leaders are directing focus and budget on tools and strategies that foster collaboration.

So how exactly does collaboration stack up against other business objectives in the eyes of today’s business leaders? We teamed up with Raconteur to find out. We surveyed senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies of all sizes and industries about a wide range of business concerns, from changes that impact profitability, to barriers and drivers of innovation, to the most formidable organizational threats they’re facing, to the tools they’re using to address their challenges. Here’s what those business leaders told us.

Collaboration is good business

Our research shows that the benefits of collaboration extend far beyond the success of any single project. An overwhelming 73% of business leaders said their organization would be more successful if employees could work in more flexible and collaborative ways. In fact, they tell us that “employees working together more collaboratively in person” is the number one factor impacting profitability.

Another eye-opening discovery was that collaboration and employee happiness go hand in hand: 88% of business leaders who believe their company fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration also say employee morale and job satisfaction are high.

Business leaders also told us that the most serious people management-related threats to organizations are failure to attract enough talent (25%), inability to retain the best talent (18%), and concerns about a disengaged workforce (14%). While we haven’t proven a direct causation, it appears that a culture of collaboration could potentially help address these threats by creating a more desirable work environment.

Who can spark change?

While business leaders look to departments across the organization for innovation and collaboration, they consider IT the greatest changemaker. Twenty-six percent named IT the leading department for driving innovation, and 28% named IT the department that best collaborates with internal and external teams. So we weren’t surprised when leaders also told us that investing in technology, which IT manages, has the biggest impact on knowledge sharing and collaboration. We saw that companies of all sizes rely on IT and technology for the tools to share, innovate and transform.

Business teams with access to the right technologies and tools and the support of IT and leadership can work better together, with greater mobility. And this paves the way for a collaborative culture that may bring a host of benefits, including greater profitability, happier employees and more consistent innovation. We may continue to be surprised by what results when teams truly sync.

See the full report on collaboration here.

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Teaching teams New ways to work together in Classroom

Posted by Hugh Lynch, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

We built Classroom to help teachers spend less time on paperwork, and more time with their students. Since we launched, we’ve also heard from teachers and professors that they’d love to be able to use Classroom to collaborate with other educators.

Teach together: Whether it’s a substitute, a teacher’s aide or a department chair, almost every teacher and professor is supported by other educators. So starting today, you can have multiple teachers in a Classroom class. To try it out, just go to your class’s About page and click “Invite teacher.” Additional teachers can do almost everything the primary teacher can do: they can create assignments or announcements, view and grade student submissions, participate in the comments on the class “stream,” invite students and even get email notifications – everything except delete the class.

Dani Raskin, a special education teacher at Clarkstown High School South in New York, has been helping us test out this new feature. “It’s really important for me to be able to work closely with other teachers who also teach my students, but we don’t always have prep time together,” Dani said. “We are now able to split the workload: both of us can provide direct feedback via comments and grading. It really fosters an authentic sense of teamwork and collaboration."

Prep for your classes in advance: We know how much planning goes into every class you teach, and now we’re making it a little bit easier to do some of that planning in Classroom. You can save announcements and assignments as “drafts” and wait to send them to students until you’re ready. And similar to Gmail, any time you start creating a new announcement or assignment, it’ll be automatically saved as a draft. This works with multiple teachers as well, so all the teachers in a class can collaboratively prep assignments in advance, and even make changes to each other’s posts on the fly.

We’re also making some other updates you’ve told us will make Classroom easier to use:

• Autosaved grades: If you can’t get all of your assignments graded in one session, but still want to return them to students at the same time, grades will now be auto saved as you enter them. You can choose when to return them to students.
• Better notifications: Teachers and students will now receive email notifications when a private comment is left on an assignment. 

For schools here in North America and in Europe, we know you’re working hard as you round the corner into the end of the year. We are, too, and we’ll have more Classroom news for you before school’s out for summer.

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Introducing new Chromebooks and features engineered for work

Posted by Saswat Panigrahi and Raghu Yarlagadda, Product Managers, Chromebooks for Work

Editors note: To learn more about the new features that make Chromebooks ready for work, join our Chrome product team for a Hangout on Air on Tuesday, September 1st at 10AM PT. 

Today, Chromebooks are putting on their power suit. Customers like Netflix, Sanmina and Starbucks have adopted Chromebooks for their ease of deployment, security and ability to integrate well with existing technologies, and a recent IDC study of Chromebooks use in K-12 education shows that Chromebooks require 69% less labor to install and 92% less labor to support than other devices. And with today’s announcements, the Chromebook family gets even bigger and better:

Work-ready devices: Today, the new Dell Chromebook 13 joins the Asus Chromebook Flip and Chromebook Pixel in the Chromebook for Work lineup. Built with a lightweight carbon fiber cover, the laptop comes with a 13.3” FHD IPS touchscreen display, 5th Gen Intel® Core™ processor, magnesium alloy palmrest, backlit keyboard and high-precision glass trackpad. And if you’re often on the road or rushing between meetings, you’ll have the machine power to keep moving, thanks to a 12-hour battery life. Starting at $399 and available for purchase starting September 17th, the Chromebook 13 brings enterprise class performance at an economical price point.

Plays well with others: Using Microsoft infrastructure? No problem. Single sign-on and support for legacy apps mean Chromebooks can now plug right in with VMWare, Dell vWorkspace, or Citrix’s improved Chrome receiver. Connecting to your files is even easier with Windows File Shares (SMB/CIFS), Box, Dropbox, or OneDrive. Need to print? Printing to local printers with Cloud Print 2.0 or to any existing printer using the improved Cloud Print CUPS connector is simple. With the help of a new API, HP supports over 100m+ printers with the HP Print for Chrome app. And connecting just got more seamless –VPN support from Pulse Secure and Dell SonicWall join Cisco AnyConnect on the Chrome Web Store (F5 Networks and Palo Alto Networks coming soon).

Manage from the beach: Chesterfield School District deployed 14,000 Dell devices in just a few weeks, and manages almost 32,000 devices today. What’s their secret? The Chrome Device Management console, a cloud based management solution with 200+ features that integrates Chrome devices with your infrastructure and helps manage thousands of devices with ease – from users to networks to applications. Weve made enhancements such as domain autocomplete and asset management, making users and IT admins lives easier.

With so many businesses undergoing transformation, shifting to the cloud and rethinking how mobile and devices play into this transformation, Chrome authorized resellers and SYNNEX corporation are ready to help you.

Check out our webpage or join us on Tuesday September 1st at 10AM PST for a Hangout on Air to learn more about Chromebooks for Work.

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Let’s build a new work Inbox together

Posted by Alex Gawley, Director of Product Management, Gmail and Inbox by Gmail

Have you ever felt like your inbox was someone else’s to-do list? Requests, project updates and action items stream in all day. You move between your computer and the phone in your pocket to try to manage, and instead of focusing on the most important things, you find yourself focusing on the most recent things. No matter the device, email should feel like a time saver, but instead it feels like a chore.

This is why we created Inbox by Gmail, to help you focus on the things that matter to you. Since we launched five months ago, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve received is that Google Apps customers want access to Inbox at work. That’s why were excited to kick off the next phase of our journey: collaborating with you to bring Inbox to work.

Even before the first invitations went out to use Inbox for your own email, Googlers have been using it to get more done at work. Whether it’s snoozing the expense report notification until after the big presentation, or adding a reminder to schedule lunch with a favorite client, Inbox helps put email on your terms. And since Inbox was built on the same infrastructure as Gmail, it meets the same high security standards you expect from email.

Of course, every company and every person is different, so we want to get more input on how Inbox will work at your company. Starting next month, we’ll begin enabling Inbox for a small group of Google Apps customers to learn about their needs, challenges and use cases.

• Do you want to use Inbox as your primary email at work?
• Are employees at your company heavy mobile users?
• Most importantly, do you want to partner with Google on user studies to help build the new work Inbox?

If you answered “yes, yes and yes!” then email inboxforwork@google.com from your Google Apps for Work administrator account to apply for an invitation to the early adopter program. To start, we plan to work very closely with the early adopter companies, so not everyone that applies will be accepted right away, but the program will continue to expand over the coming months.

Inbox wasn’t created to reinvent email, Inbox was created to help you reinvent the way you get things done. This means we need to understand more about how things get done (or don’t) today. And with your feedback, who knows, we could reinvent the way people work.

Note: Only the Google Apps administrator can apply for entry to the Inbox for work early adopter program.

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