• Enables a seamless hiring and onboarding process for new employees

• Supports ongoing learning and development throughout the pandemic with Google Classroom

• Supports innovation with automation to free up teams from laborious day-to-day tasks with Google Apps Script

• Keeps employees motivated with company-wide town hall on Google Meet

When the pandemic made remote work compulsory, employees at NTUC Enterprise could continue with their daily tasks without much interruption. “Since we were already on the same Google Workspace platform, it was easy for us to communicate on Google Chat, and share files with one another easily on Google Drive,” says Miguel Ho, Head of Process Automation at NTUC Enterprise.

The team also saw seamless communication across the different organizations within the group as every employee was equipped with the tools they needed to collaborate. “We were able to make use of Chat to look for colleagues easily because Chat is like instant messaging, where it’s quite informal so we can just drop someone a message and wait for them to reply. It really helped break down boundaries,” says Tan, adding that people were much more open to support one another as it felt less imposing than communicating via email.

Over the past two years, NTUC Enterprise saw many new employees join the organization. “Changing jobs in the midst of a pandemic would have been quite a unique, perhaps even scary experience for some,” says Tan. However, with Google Meet, the group was able to interview and employ many new additions to the team. “The entire process was seamless, from the first interview to their first day. In fact, many new hires only came into the office for the first time when they needed to pick up their corporate laptops,” he adds.

A key feature that NTUC Enterprise leveraged during the pandemic was Google Classroom, where they were able to provide ongoing training for employees across different subjects. Moving away from the mindset that anything related to technology should be managed by the IT team, Tan and his team launched a citizen developer program, whereby employees from every department are trained to use dashboards on (Google Data Studio, is now known as Looker Studio).

“Since Google Data Studio is so easy to use, we decided to train employees across the organization so that they can use it to meet their specific business needs,” says Ho. “It was a huge success because we started seeing different use cases as people started using the platform, and we were able to optimize our data analytics efforts.”

Having seen the amount of interest pour in, Ho also started a basic coding class for employees so that they could build their own scripts on Google Apps Script, and was amazed at the learning culture embedded within the organization. “There was a lot of interest. I was supposed to run the course for just one month, but ended up doing it for the entire year because it was oversubscribed,” he shares.

At the height of the pandemic, temperature taking at every entrance point was compulsory. To keep track of the data and apply best practices on safety management, Ho and his team developed a code using Google Apps Script that was linked to Forms and Sheets, so that every time a temperature within an unsafe range was recorded, the relevant teams in charge would be alerted so that the appropriate notifications could be sent to the safety management office. “Using Google Data Studio, we were able to also build a safety dashboard with all of this information, which was a far cry from the pen and paper option that would have otherwise been adopted by default,” says Ho.

Apart from temperature taking, the dashboard was also used to monitor employee health and safety, by ensuring adherence to the necessary COVID-19 precautions. “We had safety management officers on the ground at our offices, checking to make sure that employees had their masks on correctly,” Ho says. If an employee was spotted wearing their masks incorrectly, the safety management officer would indicate it on a form, which linked back to the larger database. Based on the information collated on Sheets, the safety management office could see where most non-compliant cases were, their key causes, and even develop infographics to better educate employees.