Use G-Suite Tools to Support Remote Workers During COVID-19
Check out G-Suite tools to support remote workers. Send your team home but stay productive. Get help from a San Jose computer network security company.
To minimize the COVID-19 contagion curve, many businesses are sending their workers home. Working remotely minimizes nonessential contact between employees and others, helping to reduce the number of people who contract this virus. Whether you’ve already sent workers home or are preparing to make the switch to a remote team, you need the right tools, and Google G-Suite can help.
Use Hangout Meets for Virtual Meetings
The free version of Google Hangouts lets you bring together up to 10 people for a video chat, but with Google Hangouts Meet, you can hold meetings with up to 250 participants. Amid the coronavirus, Google is offering free access to this tool for all of its G-Suite and G-Suite Education clients.
To improve the success of your meetings, choose someone to facilitate the meeting. They can keep the conversation on track and ensure that everyone gets to participate. Also, give your employees tips on how to optimize the quality of their video feed by positioning light sources behind the camera and muting their microphones when they aren’t talking.
Continue to Give Presentations
Whether you need to pitch a client, hold a training seminar, or give any other type of presentation, Hangout Meets can also facilitate this process. You can present slides and documents to up to 100,000 viewers, and you can also record presentations for people to watch later. Consider adding captioning so people can easily watch without sound.
Edit Cloud-Based Documents Together
Whether you’re a G-suite customer or not, you can leverage Google’s cloud-based tools to edit documents with everyone on your team. Your G-Suite subscription gives you access to unlimited storage so you don’t have to worry about the size of your documents.
With Google Drive, you can create documents, spreadsheets, slides, and more. Rather than emailing attachments to each other, your team can all look at the same document. They can make changes in real-time which all other users can see instantly. They can even chat or leave comments without exiting the file. Features such as suggested edits allow team members to make suggestions that can then be approved or disregarded by team leaders as desired.
Rely on Google Sites to Share Information
When you’re trying to manage a remote team, you often need to implement new policies. For example, if you normally don’t allow employees to take hardware home, you may need to adjust your approach as you deal with COVID-19. To communicate policy changes, talk about projects, or broadcast any other types of announcements to your team, you may want to set up an internal website using Google Sites.
You can limit access to your employees or even to certain people in your enterprise. You may also want to provide tips on how to work from home successfully or share tutorials on how to use the tools that are helping you go remote.
Take Advantage of Google Calendars
Your Google Calendar shouldn’t just be used to keep yourself organized. You can also use this tool to organize your team. You can layer multiple calendars on top of each other so that you can see at a glance what each of your team members is doing, and you can more easily identify times when people are free for meetings.
You can also set up video conferences with Hangouts Meet using your Google calendar. When you create the meeting on the calendar, it generates a link for your participants to join the meeting and a call-in number for anyone who doesn’t have access to the internet.
Build Camaraderie
Dealing with the uncertainty and the unprecedented response to this epidemic is incredibly stressful. You may also want to use G-Suite tools to inject at least a small bit of levity into this situation. For instance, set up times to socialize or share a virtual cocktail over Google Hangouts. When your team is remote and dealing with stress, team building activities can be more critical than ever.
Going remote brings in a lot of new challenges. You need to find the right tools to support your team, and you also need to ensure your network environment is as secure as possible. To protect yourself, you should turn to a San Jose computer network security company for guidance. To learn more, contact us at Valtec Networks today.
