Smart working: which applications are useful for remote working.

Smart working, how do you manage it? Can you work from home as well as in the office?"

We learn that productivity has always been measured when you are sitting at your desk. Those who work for goals and deadlines, however, know that you can spend as much as eight hours a day in the company with poor results.

Smart working, accelerated especially by the pandemic, has forced many companies, to resort to this mode. Some were already ready for this step because they were working with cloud applications useful for facilitating team collaboration even remotely.

What seemed only a temporary solution has become the new normal for many: in fact, smart working continues to provide some sectors with continuity for teams and clients. 

This way of reimagining work, in which the connection between people and content is crucial even at a distance, has offered new reflections. We can build on these to make every business more competitive and closer to market needs.

Your customers don't want to know whether you are responding from home or your office, they want to receive immediate, comprehensive, and reassuring answers.

We learn that smart working is not easy for everyone: there are those who still struggle to manage call transfers from switchboards to cell phones; those who still take a long time to search for the necessary files.

Some still juggle hundreds of emails to complete simple tasks.

Many downloaded new applications for video calls, backups, and did it on their own because the company did not provide the solution on a silver platter.

If you also recognize yourself in this condition you have all our sympathy, but know that innovation is simplicity!

Applications must support your activities, decrease the hours and tasks you do, the calls, the emails, and even the uncertainties. 

Customers don't care if you are in smart working or in the office, they want to count on you all the time

Still today we happen to contact companies and receive no response. This happens because employees are smart working, handling other emails or responding from personal cell phones. 

You will understand well, first as a consumer and then as a business, that this is not good and does not help productivity.

Regardless of the type of emergency, knowing that it is not important where you work, but how, educates you to stay connected and productive even when you are traveling, onsite at a client's office, at a trade show, smart working from home or in another country.

In fact, it makes one rethink all the time we lost with our "old" way of working.

Of course, reactions to smart working are and always will be different. For some, greater "autonomy" in work also corresponds to increasing satisfaction and optimization of time and resources.

They are happy that they cut down on the expense of getting to the office, skip the subway or highway queues, postpone the alarm clock, and devote more time to their families. 

For others, on the other hand, smart working has become a nightmare, a frustrating and dispersive activity. 

If you, too, feel disconnected from your team, if you use work applications that have complicated communications and multiplied the things you have to do, forcing you to work twice as hard, we suggest you continue reading our article.

The problems of smart working

If there is nothing we can do to help you with managing children at home with DAD, as a Google Cloud Partner in Italy power2Cloud can give you helpful advice on how best to approach your smart working.

Now that you don't have an ordinary office day and your reassuring desk waiting for you, with the coffee break punctuating your breaks on time, we know that getting the job done can be more complex.

Can distance be a limitation to your work? Certainly not. Think about teams that have overseas locations or dislocated outlets. Also consider the immobility to which the computer in your office forces you. 

It is important to understand what the persistent problems are, the ones we dragged along day after day thinking they were marginal or too complicated to deal with before the pandemic:

• how much information/communication do I need to handle to get my work done?
• how do I use technology solutions even if I am not an IT expert?
• how do I know when my colleagues when available for a meeting?
• what files do my colleagues share outside the company and with whom?
• how do I protect my data if I use devices that are not corporate?
• How do I get more space to manage my large files?
• How do I keep my applications up to date?
• How can I search faster for the information I need?
• How can I exchange shorter and faster communications with the team?
• How can I work on the same Presentation effectively even if my colleagues are mobile?
• How do I update referrers from different teams in real time?
• how can I engage them more with my colleagues?
• how many different applications do I have to use every day?
• how many manual tasks do I have to perform?

Automatize tasks, put Google Workspace to work for you!

Many questions, but for all of them there is only one answer: Google Workspace.

You will know that the demand for different applications used at work has grown significantly in recent years also to meet the countless needs.

The good news, however, is thatcompanies are abandoning those that do not meet the new needs in favor of applications and tools focused on security, data, and development. 

We believe that teamwork even remotely is a reality accessible to all, how? By sharing information and facilitating communications securely with cloud solutions.

Using the sameinfrastructure as Google you can count on automatic updates and the flexibility needed for your reality. It is no coincidence that solutions such as Google Workspace are used as much by the network of neighborhood pharmacies as by multinational corporations. 

Using cloud-based applications such as those from Google make it possible to organize daily tasks smoothly: holding meetings remotely, chatting with colleagues who are no longer desk neighbors, accessing resources to the team's corporate archive, and commenting on files to optimize deadlines and results.

Google Workspace, which you may remember by the name G Suite, continues to meet these and many other needs by providing a suite of applications that interact seamlessly and work together better than ever before.

Smart working and safety

Don't forget that among the services included in Google Workspace you get personalized business email @companyname, double the cloud storage space for Gmail and Drive, dedicated support, 99.9% business email uptime guarantee, interoperability with Microsoft Outlook.

In addition additional security options, such as two-step verification andSingle Sign-On (SSO), andadministrative controls for user accounts, which can help you manage multiple users and devices working in smart working.

What has changed from G Suite?

You can now use all the applications included in the Google Suite in one place, in a way that is even more integrated.

From your corporate Gmail for example, you can access and share Drive files, comment on Documents, and search what you need without opening a thousand work windows.
Everything is just a click away to organize, create, and communicate with a colleague or hundreds of people.

Enabling collaboration in remote environments can be difficult, but not for Google Workspace. So it is possible to move an entire company into smart working in the same day without any problems.

By leveraging Google Meet and the rest of the Google Workspace platform, employees are able to stay productive no matter where they work.

The use of Google Meet has become strategic and is used as the preferred tool for video collaboration. 

Google Workspace talks to everyone

Google Workspace also simplifies collaboration with customers and suppliers. 

It happens, for example, that someone uses different tools, think of Microsoft Office such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 

Google Workspace makes it easy to continue using Microsoft products in its environment, allowing employees to store Microsoft Office files on Google Drive and open, edit, and save them using Google Docs, Sheets, and Presentations. 

Google Workspace integrations also simplify collaboration. Employees can update data in Google Sheets, save images and reports to Drive, and update calendar events, all from one place.

The law decree extended smart working until April

Smart working more than a necessity or a habit must become a mindset. 

In this light, employers are allowed to unilaterally decide to use agile work through Law 81 of 2017, which is the individual agreement with the individual worker as a condition for using smart working.

Clearly, not all sectors make smart working from home possible. You can try, however, to better organize, control, and administer your activities even when you are not in the office, from your cell phone as well as your computer, alone or together with other teams.

What will change tomorrow? What should we expect? Who can say. The future is the choices we make today: the course a company takes is given by the choices we make every day, even today.

The our team can provide you with some use cases and show you the full potential of Google Workspace for smart working as well as in the office.