New Innovations For Google Workspace To Bridge Hybrid Work Gaps

As part of Google’s vision for hybrid work, the company announced today major advancements to Google Workspace, enabling employees to collaborate regardless of their location, device preference, role, or language. With these enhancements, organizations will be able to bridge the gap as they navigate new hybrid work environments through the launch of spaces in Chat and new meeting enhancements.

“Since many people have returned to work, it is imperative teams have the freedom and flexibility to collaborate anywhere, anytime,” said Sanaz Ahari, Senior Director of Product Management, Google Workspace. “Google faces the same challenges as many of our customers: how do we stay in sync, make decisions, and build a culture of innovation on your behalf?” “Workspace spaces—a new, dedicated location where we can share information, work on projects together, and build community as colleagues.”

Now everyone can work together in Google Workspace spaces
In Google Workspace, spaces are the central location for team collaboration, and spaces are now available to everyone. With Spaces, you can organize topical discussions, share knowledge, share ideas, move projects forward, and foster community and team culture through tightly integrated Google Workspace tools.

This includes Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meetings. Users can see the full history, context, and content of conversations using spaces, so they can follow along and jump in at any time.

Streamlined navigation: Users can easily access their inbox, chats, spaces, and meetings – all from a single location.

Discoverable spaces: Members of an organization can discover spaces and their content, so others can join the conversation. Organization administrators can also make discoverability their default.

Enhanced search: Allows users to easily find content within and between spaces, or even discover new spaces to join. Using “Search everything” in spaces opens up powerful new collaboration possibilities and makes it easier to access the team’s collective knowledge.

In-line topic threading: In order to foster collaboration and communication among teams and organizations, you can reply to any message within a space.

Robust security and admin features: Content moderation, managing spaces, and setting up the right rules for healthy communication across domains and companies.

Collaboration and equity in hybrid meetings
Whether companies choose to work in-office, virtually, or through a hybrid model, it’s crucial that participants in meetings can co-create and collaborate on projects, no matter where they are.

Using Google Calendar:Team members can now specify their working location in Calendar in addition to notifying meeting hosts of their virtual or physical presence. This can be done on a regular basis or as per segmented working hours.

In a hybrid workplace, it’s easier to plan in-person collaboration or set expectations by indicating which days of the week you plan to be in the office, working from home, or working from another location.

Google Meet calling: As a seamless interaction for starting a video or audio call between one or more participants, Meet calling complements the more structured, scheduled video meetings in Meet and allows for more spontaneous connections that support the ebbs and flows of hybrid work.

You will be able to initiate an ad-hoc call from any of Workspace’s natural endpoints, including chats, contact cards, and workspaces. Google announced today that this will first be available for 1:1 chats within the Gmail app.

Google Meet companion mode: In November, all Google Meet users will be able to use companion mode to join meetings from their devices.

Live captioning in Google Meet: In the coming months, live captions will be available in English to French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and many more in the future so participants can follow along in the language of their choice from their smartphone or tablet.