Google helps businesses build cultures of innovation. How can our tools help your business too?  

Building a culture of innovation is easy with Google. Here’s how we help our clients discover new perspectives and access key tools for enabling innovation in the workplace:

According to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, innovation is easily stopped: “A small team of weird but brilliant people who have a new idea are typically not understood by people around them and their executives.” So how do you solve this? Start with tools, continue with communication and conclude with a quest for common ground. 

How does innovation happen?
Innovation doesn’t happen at the office. It happens in the shower, on the road, or during a run on the beach. So don’t expect systems built to use inside an office to lead to amazing ideas. In addition, innovation rarely strikes one individual at a time. It requires teamwork. So don’t expect systems that are built for individual working to foster innovation. 

How do you translate flexibility and teamwork into actual tools? Colleagues need tools that help bring their passions to life. Platforms such as G Suite help innovative workers to communicate beyond their cubicle, beyond their team and beyond the nine to five. By providing a “virtual” online office space with perks such as simultaneous editing and instant file sharing, these tools allow staff to focus on the changes that will take their businesses forward, rather than on processes.

Startups have already discovered the disruptive powers of G Suite when it comes to flexibility and teamwork. Watch the video.

It takes two to tango
But collaboration and a flexible work environment is only half of the story. Think about it: Employees outnumber executives in almost every scenario, inevitably they’ll come up with more disruptive ideas than management. So it’s good for staff to be aware of and involved in C-Level targets and plans.They can nurture innovative ideas aiming at the right objectives. 

It comes down to being open, which is something deeply rooted in the culture of Google. Weekly TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday) meetings, fronted by founders Brin and Page, bring together the global workforce to discuss new products and marketing, legal issues and revenue,  and everything else that is important to Google at that time. Google does this using Meet, the enterprise version of public messaging tool Hangouts. 

In addition, openness and transparency are key to our way of working. Documents are not protected (internally) unless you specifically request them to be kept secret. In many other companies this process is completely inverted. In this blog post, we explain how transparency and sharing of information contribute to our culture of innovation. 

TGIF is something we were already doing in 1999. See it on YouTube.

Having the tools to foster open and collaborative communication has helped Google tremendously in creating a culture of innovation and change. With platforms such as Google Cloud and G Suite, we can now offer these experiences also to those who matter most to us: our customers. 

Get in touch with us to learn more about using tools to foster innovation in your workplace.