Effective use of GSuite for your business(How we use it)

You will find a lot of articles that tell you about the benefits of using GSuite for your business and the tools it provides. So we will not go into that. What I do like to share is, the ways we use GSuite which helped us save a lot of time by putting processes in place. Let's dive into that.

We are a tech company with 20+ employees. I want to share the way we use GSuite tools with some real data. Not all of them may apply to your business but I am sure it will help in one or the other way.

We start by making Domain Users. So, for the first time, you will have to create a company email for all your employees. Everytime someone joins you, we start with this point.

Once users are created we create Google Groups - department and hierarchy wise. You can do it as you feel right for your nature of work. As a technology company, we have groups for Team, Managers, Different Projects, Different Departments etc. You can start with some of those and then add/remove as required. The group associates an email to each one of them for ex. team@logicwind.com. You need to add relevant people to those groups so that they all get notified when there is any action performed(email sent, file shared etc) on that group email. Don't worry, you can prevent people outside the organization to perform an action on that email if you want to. We also have an HR group(hr@logicwind.com) which can notify us if anyone outside is interested in working with us :)

Groups are in place, we now use Google Drive for data storage(files). In Google drive, we create Department wise folders as well as other folders. We have folders like Accounts, Marketing, Sales, Team, Employees, Projects, Proposals for storing all the data. Adding relevant people to the folder is also important. This is where Google groups email will be helpful, you won't need to add everyone individually, you can do so with a relevant group email.

TIP: Create groups for almost all folders you create in drive(project or company related) So whenever you have to give/take access, all you need to do is remove them from the group.

We use Hangouts Chat for our daily communication/project updates which makes it easy for us to communicate with an individual or a group of people. We have different rooms for different projects and some rooms for Admin and miscellaneous stuff. Communication happens in relevant rooms and we can have a history of it as well. You can also start multiple conversations in a single room to have a thread of different topics which organizes itself perfectly and you can refer to the whole thing later on.

Shared Contacts:
Google doesn't provide organization-wide shared contacts which can be shared with domain users with read/write permissions. But it is really essential from a business point of view. So we are building our own system which works on Google Contacts to give us a shared panel where Admin user can easily manage contacts. If you are interested in that, let us know in the comments. We will be happy to share updates on that with you.

Edit: We have started providing early access to Contactbook.app.

We use company-wide shared Google Calendar. Meetings or schedules can be incorporated in that and it is put up on our internal site so that everyone can refer whenever needed. Leaves can also be put there by managers when they are approved. We set multiple notifications for that for a single event. For ex. We have a notification setting which sends us an email a day before and on the same day 9 AM when someone is on leave. The calendar also helps us set a video conference meeting. A URL can be sent to the participants and all can join it.

Google website:
GSuite provides a facility to create drag-n-drop style website which can be shared to domain users as well as outsiders. We have implemented an internal site for all our domain users. They can see a calendar(Meetings, Holidays, Important deadlines etc), some important updates, some of the things that the team has to refer to frequently - all at one place.

We use Google documents, spreadsheets and slides to collaborate in real-time with others. Our Team members use Google Keep for their individual notes and todos.

Just like that, we are able to take care of many things with the help of the tools GSuite provides us. I hope some of the points above will help you do things better. If you know a better way to use any of these, please let us know in the comments.