• Connects 56,000 users in 100+ countries in real time

• Reduces IT support requirements and cuts infrastructure travel costs by 20%

• Improves productivity and inspires more openness and knowledge sharing

• Accelerates time-sensitive communications through real-time collaboration

To prevent any disruption to the business during the Google Workspace migration, Nielsen engaged Maven Wave, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, for professional services assistance. Maven Wave brought a wealth of change management experience, helping Nielsen keep the migration on track.

“We had a great rapport with Maven Wave and worked hand-in-hand the entire time,” says Nerina. “They aligned their resources closely with ours and helped us craft an effective change management plan in preparation for our global launch.”

For multinational firms as large as Nielsen, changing the way employees work isn’t always easy at first. Nielsen approached change management carefully, using consistent messaging and focusing on leadership and employee engagement.

“Moving to Google Workspace was as much a change management effort as a technology shift,” says Nerina. “We appointed a full-time change management leader to work alongside the technical architect and project manager.”

Nielsen conducted a multi-phased approach, focusing on creating a culture of collaboration. The company identified several personas to target. These included general end users, administrative assistants, executive stakeholders, as well as core IT staff and help desk professionals. Nielsen onboarded this last group before other employees, since their workload would be most impacted by the change.

Employees who volunteered to be early adopters of Google Workspace got a head start using Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides to improve their workflows. At each of its global offices, Nielsen appointed Google Guides to help distribute marketing materials, raise awareness, and make sure colleagues could get fast answers to their questions. Nielsen went live with Google Workspace to its global community over a single weekend. To highlight the successful launch, Google Guides led celebrations around the world, wearing shirts in Google colors and waving flags to generate enthusiasm.

A month prior to launch, Nielsen conducted over 100 training sessions in 8 languages to help employees understand what they can do with Google Workspace. The company also provided resources such as recorded training sessions, a ‘Going Google’ site with links to helpful instructions and videos, and a quick-start guide to assist users in getting started on Google Workspace apps in 15 minutes or less.

“Moving 56,000 people onto Google Workspace in 6 months is impressive, and I attribute much of our success to our Google Guides as well as our relationships with Google and Maven Wave,” says Kimberly. “We all worked together as one team to achieve a successful, non-disruptive migration.”

Because Nielsen’s enterprise IT staff no longer need to provide the same degree of support and maintenance that was needed for traditional desktop office software, they can concentrate on initiatives that move the business forward. Previously, one particular team had to collect metrics from more than 150 teams, which had to be captured in as many different spreadsheets. Creating surveys was likewise time consuming.

There was also a need for more automation in the work request process. Previously, the process involved back-and-forth emails to fill in multiple fields, which were tracked in a repository but that made it difficult to establish reporting. Now, with departments co-authoring Sheets and Google Forms capturing survey data automatically, teams are saving time and streamlining processes. One particular team is saving seven hours per reporting cycle. Using Google Sites, Nielsen can provide relevant metrics in a single location.

“Google Workspace gives us solutions that are so easy to deploy and use that we don’t feel any of the pain we previously experienced when deploying and maintaining employee collaboration tools,” says Kimberly.

As Google continues to enhance Google Workspace and add new features, Nielsen is making employees aware of how they can take advantage of new functionality to improve their workflows. Nielsen has adopted an agile mentality about the Google Workspace production environment, giving the company a different mindset on how to embrace digital transformation.

Today the collaboration between Nielsen, Google, and Maven Wave continues, with Nielsen providing input on product features to help further enhance future Google Workspace capabilities. Nielsen has also embraced Google App Maker to easily and more securely create custom apps on the same platform used by Google Workspace.

“With Google Workspace, there’s always something new coming out that can benefit someone at Nielsen,” says Nerina. “Seeing associates have ‘a-ha!’ moments where they find a better way of working is exciting. We feel comfortable and aligned with Google because their commitment to innovation matches our own.”