Editor's note: Today we hear from Jason Stockwood, CEO of Simply Business, the UK’s biggest business insurance provider and the top-ranked company on The Sunday Times’ list of 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015. See how Google Apps strengthens the Simply Business team’s valued company culture and gives employees the freedom to explore new ways of working.
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| Jason Stockwood, Simply Business CEO |
Working at five online companies in the last 15 years has taught me that a company’s culture resonates in all things that it does, and that an attractive internal culture will ultimately attract customers as much as it attracts talent. So when our systems administrator, Martin Golder, proposed that we switch Simply Business to Google Apps for Work, I needed to understand how the change would affect our company culture, and feel confident it would have a positive effect on both our people and our business.
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| Marting Golder, Simply Business Systems Administrator |
I quickly gained that confidence as I tested Google Apps out for myself. Gmail and Calendar transformed my work in ways I hadn't expected. For example, over the past twenty years, I’d created a complicated, time-consuming filing system for my email, but I gave it up as I discovered Gmail’s incredibly powerful search function. And the ability to log into a web browser and have full use of my account without going through clunky webmail servers was massively impactful.
Then there was the financial bonus: it cost us £26,000 to implement Google Apps for Work, less than half the price of its competitors.
With our pilot complete and our decision made, we rolled out Google Apps for Work in March with help from Cloud Technology Solutions and a group of our own production champions, including both myself and the staff of our contact centre in Northampton. The buzz that evangelists created really pulled everyone on board, and when we finished our full deployment in May, we could rely entirely on the product champions to step in when questions came up from people across the team.
The time and cost savings of Google Apps goes far beyond the deployment. Our IT team no longer wastes four hours a week maintaining our old email servers, which translates to over £4,000 a year that goes back to the business. They also spend 70 percent less time on helpdesk requests. And the wider team saves nearly 20 minutes each meeting merely by replacing our old meeting room booking process — using phones around the office to check availability of a room — with Calendar.
Using simple but powerful work tools gives our staff the freedom to create new ways to be efficient for our customers. At our Northampton contact centre, two hundred of our staff speak directly to customers every day. In the past, they would take a query, put the customer on hold, ring around to find someone who could help, then go back to the call. Now they use Hangouts to ping each other while customers share their queries, comments and concerns, which is simpler and faster and doesn’t put anyone on hold. The System Administration team, split between London and Northampton, also uses Hangouts for daily discussions, while remote consultants use Hangouts for weekly tech tutorials by streaming video through a Chromebox-linked projector in London.
One month after the rollout, we used Google Forms to survey staff reactions to the new system, and received an overwhelmingly positive response. More than two hundred of our staff have already started to use Drive of their own accord, and next year we’ll make the transition official by moving all of our 1.25 terabytes of files and secure spreadsheets onto the cloud. My advice to anyone considering the switch to Google Apps for Work is just to try it out. You’ll see the benefits immediately. It’s a new, lighter, easier way of working.
