EasyPark accelerates onboarding, supports 60% annual growth with Google Workspace

Fostering a winning company culture has never been easy, and it can be especially difficult when businesses grow through mergers and acquisitions. Add to this a rise in remote work and a drop in corporate travel due to the pandemic, and the challenges facing companies are undeniable.

When the Stockholm-based EasyPark Group acquired the PARK NOW Group in 2021, it faced these sorts of fundamental challenges. A pioneer in mobile apps that help drivers find parking, along with parking data and software solutions for parking operators and other entities, EasyPark now employs some 1,000 people and operates in over 3,200 cities across more than 25 countries.

EasyPark wanted to promote a collaborative mindset for its global teams and achieve its goal of “making cities more livable.” Plans for onboarding many new employees from the acquired organization — more than doubling the company’s total headcount — included migrating them to Google Workspace as a single solution for communication, productivity, and collaboration.

Partnering for success

EasyPark worked with Gapps, a Google Cloud partner in northern Europe, to help with the migration, including the people and processes critical to promoting adoption and the initiative’s overall success. Adapty, EasyPark’s primary Google Cloud partner, suggested working with Gapps due to its experience helping more than 500 Google Workspace customers.

“Thanks in part to our acquisitions, we have a growing presence in new markets, so it’s been helpful to tap into the Google Cloud partner network for assistance,” says Daniel Thor, head of internal IT at EasyPark.

Gapps helped EasyPark navigate project management, technical components of new user setups, data migration, information security, and change management, including training for all employees.

“This wasn’t just a technical migration project. This was a change management project,” says Thor. “We invested in Google Workspace because it aligns with our corporate values and is a driving force for our teams’ productivity, but if nobody knows how to use the tools effectively, then they’re worthless. Gapps nurtured the expertise of our staff to maximize the value of Google Workspace.”

Following a recommendation from Gapps, EasyPark migrated all new employees to Google Workspace at once, since a phased approach would have hampered collaboration rather than promote it across the board. With all employees on a unified platform, EasyParkers work seamlessly in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and across Europe.

Driving collaboration

Essential daily business activities are now much simpler, such as managing meetings and broader team collaboration. “Using Calendar makes it easy for us to see each other’s schedules to readily schedule meetings. People still have the option to keep information private, but our default is for transparency,” says Thor. “This has made it easier for us all to come together as one company.”

Thor has noticed more and more employees are using Meet for virtual meetings and are keeping their cameras on.

“I see more faces now. In the past, we struggled with making online meetings more engaging and interactive, but now people can use the Q&A function, translated captions, or emoji reaction buttons. It’s fun to see colleagues laughing together,” Thor says.

Meet connects staff worldwide, helping cultivate interpersonal relationships and mutual trust to forge strong teams. “Meet has really helped build bridges. There are cues in a live video call that you just don’t get if you only use email or chat,” says Thor. “It’s been valuable not just for getting work done, but also for getting to know each other as people.”

EasyPark teams create documents and presentations about its parking ecosystem solutions using Docs and Slides. “I haven’t seen any other solution that enables collaboration quite as effectively,” Thor says. “People appreciate being able to do ‘huddle editing’ on the fly, working together to polish up their work.”

Employees use Drive to store their work data, using shared drives to organize and provide access for collaborative projects with confidence, thanks to the secure-by-design nature of Google Workspace. Thor appreciates that Google takes security seriously and makes permissions for accessing or editing files transparent and easy to control.

Ensuring continued information security compliance was a key concern during the migration. “It was crucial to maintain established security certifications, because if those were compromised, it would have jeopardized customer relationships,” says Thor.

Where the rubber hits the road

EasyPark celebrated 60% annual transaction growth between 2018 and 2022, and Thor attributes this success in part to better communication and teamwork in Google Workspace.

“Looking at our people, how they use these tools, and what they accomplish — that’s the value of Google Workspace,” says Thor. “People are happy, they’re collaborating, and our company is growing. That’s priceless.”

In the past year, EasyPark has launched support for the EasyPark app for Android Auto and expanded its Parking Data as a Service (PDaaS) offering with collaborations and pilots in cities such as Aarhus, Denmark, Heidelberg in Germany, Westminster in the U.K., Chattanooga in the U.S., and Milan in Italy. The company also achieved growth in facilitating electric car charging payments via the EasyPark app, with transactions jumping by 190% in 2022.

With an eye toward potential future acquisitions, Thor is happy to have established a best practices blueprint with Gapps for onboarding large numbers of new EasyPark employees to Google Workspace, enabling them with collaboration tools to help facilitate a smooth merger.

He also looks forward to continued training to help ensure existing staff know how to use helpful features. “Capabilities such as generating automated Meet transcriptions, sharing meeting notes documents automatically linked to Calendar events, and other great features will continually improve how our global teams work together,” says Thor.

To learn more about why companies like EasyPark are using Google Workspace and Google Cloud to promote collaboration and reach their goals, discover more Google Workspace Customer Stories.