Three do’s and don’ts to get the most out of your migration to Google Workspace

Migrating to Google Workspace can help companies transform their culture by empowering teams to collaborate and work in new, secure ways. Workspace is built to meet the needs of businesses, and customers choose Google Workspace for many reasons, including for its secure-by-design approach to collaboration and its AI-first capabilities that can save users up to 105 minutes per week.

While each company’s migration is unique, here are three high-level best practices to help ease the transition.

Three do’s and don’ts to get the most out of your migration to Google Workspace:

1. Do: Define your technical and business objectives at the same time.
Don’t: Only consider the technical benefits of migration.
It’s important to consider how migration can help you not only achieve your technical goals, but also create new behaviors and ways of working. 

Airbus had a business vision of teams collaborating and working from virtually “any device, anytime, anywhere,” in addition to a technical vision of transforming its security posture and data management. By migrating to Google Workspace and Google Cloud, they have adopted a zero-trust model across the organization. Migrating has also transformed how data is secured, managed, and accessed by employees working across a broad range of locations, and the new flexible approach has led to changes in how collaboration happens.

2. Do: Include training and enablement in your strategy from the very start.
Don’t: Let change management be an afterthought.

Set your organization up for success to build deeper adoption and excitement by introducing change management and training plans in tandem with technical migration plans. 

Proper change management planning will help reinforce a sustainable new way of working. To get started, you can work with your implementation partner to consider tailoring training sessions for different roles, and create workshops, immersion days, and targeted messaging. 

To build a sense of community, you can empower your employees to become Google Guides so that they can share best practices with their colleagues as they learn. You can also explore building your own version of a champions program that hosts office hours, schedules demo days, and much more to build excitement and provide resources for your teams. Read our change management methodology, and use this guide as you begin to plan your migration. 

During its migration, Turner Industries partnered with SADA who helped provide thoughtful planning, ongoing training, and hands-on support. SADA helped Turner Industries successfully transition 4,800 employees to Workspace and the cloud, with plans to onboard more people as the migration continues. “SADA brought us a clearly defined plan for change management — all we had to do was follow it,” says Amy Kling, CIO at Turner Industries. “Not only did the SADA team deliver on everything they said they would do but also they did so ahead of schedule.”

3. Do: Use Google Workspace to build a new way of working.
Don’t: Maintain the status quo way of working.

Migrating to Workspace can help employees build new ways to collaborate and get work done. Encourage employees to discover new ways of working and collaborating from virtually anywhere — whether they’re in the same office building or halfway around the world. Fostering a sense of open-mindedness can bring enormous benefits to speed, transparency, and innovation unlocking new levels of productivity across your business. 

Using Workspace, Trimble has helped connect business siloes to unite its global teams — including a large number of companies Trimble has acquired over the last 40 years. “At Trimble, Google Workspace is a key component of our ability to communicate across cultures, across teams, and across the world to deliver the best solutions for our customers,” says Frej Krook, Google Workspace manager at Trimble.

And according to Kim Anstett, CIO of Trellix, migrating to Workspace was a key step in supporting the business as it grows. “Our previous software stack felt stagnant. It was never going to connect into new things we were doing or building,” says Anstett. “I expected Google Workspace to be the right and easiest solution, and it was. The platform is constantly evolving, updating its integrated components, and embedding automation across its stack. Migrating to Workspace made my job as CIO a lot more fun because it’s now about creating experiences for employees, not just implementing IT.”

Enterprise customers can get started by visiting our new migration hub and exploring resources including our Data Migration for Enterprise CIOs guide, enterprise deployment resources, technical deployment guides, and migration guides to get a sense of what an implementation partner and Google can assist you with.