Speaker 1: Hi guys, Fintan here from Dams and Cloud, and this week I want to talk about eight strategies for managing remote teams with Google Workspace. If you want to know more, you know what to do. Stay tuned. So before we start, I thought I might begin with talking about why we should actually facilitate remote working for our teams, or rather continue to, because obviously for most of us, we've had to work remotely for the last year or so because of the pandemic. And there's been some really interesting statistics come out over the last couple of months about people's response to remote working over the last year. And there was a recent McKinsey study that said that 75% of employees that started to work remotely during the pandemic felt that they were able to maintain or actually improve their productivity. And I think that that's really interesting because for a lot of people, they felt that maybe they weren't able to work remotely and suddenly they were obviously forced into it, and they were quite surprised. Another recent study done by Grow Remote basically came back that 97% of employees didn't want a full return to the office. They wanted some sort of remote working or hybrid environment or fully remote. And I think most people seem to be settling on some sort of hybrid solution where they're remote working some of the week and they're in the office some of the week. So I thought we might go through some of the reasons why we should support remote working. Well, it's better for productivity. As we said, most people have actually found that it increases their productivity to have some or all of their time away from the office. People have heightened job satisfaction and they find it less stressful because they have a better work-life balance. And I think that's, again, something that we're really moving towards, that people's jobs and careers are not just now focused on the work, work, work, but actually getting to that point of a real true work-life balance. So when your team are working remotely, it's really important to support them physically. And I've seen varying degrees of success with this, where people have supported their teams physically and gotten out the desks and the screens and the laptops and things like that that they need. And in some cases, maybe they've gotten out the bare necessities like a laptop, but maybe haven't supported teams in getting maybe a home desk set up or a decent chair. And I think it's important for companies to remember that you're responsible for someone, even if they're not in your office. If they're working for you remotely, you're responsible for them from a health and safety point of view. So they're physically resourcing them is really, really important. But you also need to resource them digitally. And that's what we're going to cover today. What digital resources like Google Workspace can you use to help teams be more productive when they're working remotely? Okay. So the first one is to establish active communication. And active communication is really, really important when a team is working remotely and probably even more so when teams are in a hybrid scenario where some people are in the office and some people aren't. And so it's really important to have that balance and to make sure that you're checking in at least twice a week. That's my recommendation for small and medium-sized teams. Ideally, you're doing it over video call. Obviously, we'd recommend Google Meet. But having that check-in, whether it's in person or whether it's in the office, and particularly you've got that hybrid approach that the team check-in happens whether someone is in the office or not. We really also think it's important to look at what people have achieved during the week. So we often look at like, what did you do and what's your intent for the week? What are you saying that you're going to do for the week ahead? And that just helps people to define goals and kind of set expectations for the team as well. And then the last thing that I'd say is it's really important to leave a little bit of time for chit-chat and for small talk. Sometimes companies don't do that, and I think it's actually a really important part of that kind of company and team community, particularly when people aren't necessarily getting it in a remote setting. So leaving that time for the kind of catch-up, the water cooler talk, that's really important too. And so make sure you leave space for that. The next part I want to talk about is what we call synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Synchronous collaboration is collaboration happening live. So it's happening in the moment. It can be a video call, it can be a phone call, it can be working on the same document with someone at the same time. And then asynchronous collaboration is just collaboration with some sort of time delay, emailing a document to someone and them working on it, or even something like Google Docs that has live collaboration, but you're working on it at different times. So not everybody's working at the same time. And Google Docs and tools like that are great for creating synchronous collaboration. That's often what those sort of tools push us towards. But when you have teams working remotely, it's really important to... We've heard this term a lot, Zoom fatigue or video call fatigue. And it's very easy for people to get tired or fatigued with the next video call, the next video call. I know myself, sometimes you can end up in five or 10 video calls in a day. And what we found and what companies that work remotely on a regular basis have found is that you need to balance that synchronous and asynchronous collaboration so that there's not too much really of either. And that you try to, as best you can, share the documents and the slides and get the brainstorming kind of done or a little bit of it done beforehand so that when you get to the meeting part, you're actually making decisions rather than, okay, let's all start working on this together. You can work with Google Docs on the same document without actually having to be in a video call. And it's less exhausting and you can all sort of brain dump into something and then get it to a point where you kind of actually have an idea of what you want. And then the meeting, there's more actions happening and people will actually feel like things are moving forward rather than having a meeting for meeting's sake. So I would say for meetings, set an agenda and make sure you can get as much of that information upfront so people have read the documentation and your meetings are about moving things forward or as we say, making decisions. The next one is the kind of big brother effect and using what we call passive communication. So we often say like, you know, try not to be the big brother. There are lots of tools out there that allow you to monitor employees, see what they're doing, photograph or record what's happening on their screens. And I know in some cases that that's necessary, but I think in general for knowledge workers, you need to think about better ways to communicate what people are doing. And passive communication is a really good example of that. So an excellent one is just Google calendars. And we have our team do this. At the end of the day, people just spend literally two minutes just filling in what they've done and filling out what they think they're going to do for the next day. Now, if you're someone that used your calendar to book stuff in, you might want to do it in the days ahead, but certainly for the day that's passed, it doesn't matter. You just fill in just a quick one word. This is what I worked on. I was working on this doc or I was working on that customer proposal. And it just allows managers to just glance at it and go, oh, that's what Sam or Alina or Charlotte or Donald was working on yesterday. And it means that you're having that communication without having to check in all the time and go, hey, what were you working on yesterday? Because I think when teams are remote, managers worry about that, what's actually happening. And so that passive communication, and I'm going to talk about this again, is really, really important. A really funny story I saw on this one was someone that their company had set up this monitoring software and the guy attached his mouse to a fan and the fan was moving backwards and forwards and it was moving his mouse and making it look like he was active or keeping his window active when in actual fact, he wasn't. So I think the Big Brother approach really just leads to distrust and employees will often find ways around it. The next one is thinking about the kind of to-do list and moving towards a task-based approach rather than a time-based approach. Obviously you want your employees to be available at similar times. Do you know what I mean? You might have different time zones or people working sort of different shifts, but you want people to overlap a certain amount. I think that that's really important. But the whole point of remote working is this flexibility and so we try to push ourselves towards task-based approach that it's not necessarily the time. We expect people to be kind of available between these times, but we're judging you on the work that you're getting done. And it becomes really obvious if someone isn't pulling their weight in a team. Do you know what I mean? Most people will know fairly quickly, our managers will know fairly quickly if someone isn't pulling their weight. I like the Parkinson's law that suggests work expands to fill the time available for its completion. So I think it's about setting realistic goals for a project, whether that's a month or six months or whatever, and putting the tasks in place. And then those check-in meetings are about checking the progress on those things. Tools that we'd recommend that we use ourselves are tools like Google Tasks. Google Tasks is becoming much more integrated into some of the other feature sets. You've got stuff like the ability to add tasks now within a meeting room, within a room within Google Chat, which is very useful. There's some other add-ons or improvements coming to Tasks as well. And then you've also got Todoist, which is a tool we've started using recently and it's fantastic. It integrates really nicely with Google, but it also has this really nice feature where you can just forward an email into it and it will create a task within your Todoist. And I use that feature all the time because I sort of triage my email and turn them into my tasks basically, and my team can see them. So I can sort of forward it into my shared team collaborative Todoist, which is great. So definitely recommend checking out both of those. The next one is around instant or fast communication. And sometimes email isn't the best way to communicate. If you've obviously got long form communication, you need to get something across to your team, email makes a lot of sense. But a lot of companies now use instant chat tools like Slack and Google Chat and Microsoft Teams. And those types of tools are fantastic and sort of being available as a manager for your team on tools like that are really, really valuable. And we'd obviously recommend Google Chat. It's a great sort of fast, instant form of communication. It's probably one of the most used tools within our business. And you can now create groups and rooms within Google Chat. You can create rooms for different topics. So we have threaded conversations in one of our rooms and that's our kind of discussion room. And we throw different topics in there and people talk about them and it keeps them threaded together. And then in our team room, it's just kind of a single stream of consciousness of the team and what's happening that day, but stuff can kind of get lost in it. So you can create multiple rooms for different things. I've also seen other companies create a room per department, so a marketing room, operations, finance. And again, people are sort of throwing information in there, commenting on it, collaborating together. And as I mentioned earlier, you now have the ability as well to actually add tasks and things like that within Google into rooms. And so you can assign them to people. And that's another valuable feature that's been added quite recently. I also think they're kind of useful from a broadcast point of view. I've seen them used in companies where they've set up a room that's just for the sort of execs to broadcast on. People don't engage on it, but it's just a way, it's a particular room that's for broadcasting information out to people quickly. And I think that's very, very useful as well. And I think just that availability piece when your team is remote working is really important because normally they would be able to drop into you, into your office and sort of say hi and catch up with you on something. They're not able to do that when you're working remotely or when they're working remotely. And so being available on that sort of instant message as not all the time, but as much as you can, I think is really helpful. And the next one is sharing and collaborating. And I think documentation, making sure that it's accessible from anywhere is really, really important when you have a remote working environment or setup. We have seen during the pandemic, some companies still using old technology like VPNs and logging in when they could just set up something like shared drives and be able to easily store and search and access these files from absolutely any device. And that sort of ubiquitous access just helps people get things done faster. I can start working on a document on my laptop. I can move over to my desktop. I can pick up my phone and I can work on a document on my phone. So having that ubiquitous access just means that you can get work done faster. You want the technology to get out of the way. And so if you've got technology where it's difficult to access the information, there's multiple places to put it. It's one thing that frustrates me about Microsoft. And I've used Office 365 where I have things within OneDrive and things within SharePoint and their stuff is just kind of all over the place. What I love about Google is there's only one place to put things. And that makes it much, much easier to find that information. Next up, we have facilitating online collaboration. And online collaboration is obviously really important when your teams are remote. You need a way to sort of get together in a single place. I don't know if people have ever heard of Jamboard. It's both a physical device, but it's also a free piece of software. So you can set up a jam, as Google call it, on jamboard.google.com. And you can collaborate on an interactive whiteboard now in a video call. And we actually did a previous video on this that we'll link to that would allow your team to collaborate on a whiteboard environment when they're in separate locations. And I think that is hugely valuable when you have a fully or partially remote team. I've seen teams use Jamboard where in the office, they have a Jamboard setup, a physical Jamboard setup where they can write on. And then they have teams joining remotely where they're able to input into that same digital whiteboard. So I definitely recommend that you take a look at that. People often don't realize that it's also a free tool. And then the last one is around employee engagement. And this is an area that we at Danson have really focused on or are really focusing on in 2021. We think it's going to be one of the single most important areas for companies as they move to the hybrid approach. As I said before, companies had people working remotely, and they've had people working in the office. They haven't had people working in the hybrid environment yet. And that is coming, and that is going to be a challenge for a lot of companies. And so tools that help you with employee engagement, both in the office and working remotely, are going to be really, really important. Tools that we would recommend for this would be stuff like social intranets. Tools like LumApps and Hapio will simplify processes, streamline workflows, engage staff, and staff engagement is going to be really, really important, and promote collaboration. They give you a central place to put all of your information, your policies, your documents, but also give you that sort of, the new social intranets give you that ability to actually have interactivity with your teams as well as actually distributing information to them or announcing information to them. You can also, in a lot of them now, ensure that people have actually seen updates so people can confirm, yes, I've seen this announcement. And so for CEOs and executives and companies, it allows them to have confidence that people have actually seen the information that they're sending out. So I would recommend, we're splitting our social intranet out into the Google sites on the basic end, and then Hapio and LumApps for customers that maybe need more powerful solutions with more community and social engagements. So I would recommend that you take a look at some of those third-party applications. I think it's going to be really key that companies have some sort of intranet or digital workspace as the year progresses, and particularly as we move to the hybrid work environment, where again, some people are going to be in the office, some people are going to be remote. And in order for teams to feel connected, it's going to be really, really important for companies to focus on that. That's it for me, guys. I hope you enjoyed this week's update on eight strategies for managing teams remotely with Google Workspace. Please do let us know what you thought in the comments below. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, or if you're on LinkedIn, to hit the follow page on our company profile, and I will see you guys next week. No outtakes this week. I'm going to have to do some things. Is that a good enough outtake for you?