Quimmco: Elevating team collaboration during a pandemic and beyond

• Transitioned to a fully remote office workforce during COVID-19 with no disruptions
• Enables business continuity with proven tools supporting reliable, personal collaboration
• Increases employee productivity and more than doubles use of Google Drive during pandemic to 24 million+ files

As a multinational industrial provider in metalworking and chemical formulation, Quimmco’s technology vision is focused on creating an intelligent, reliable, and secure collaborative digital ecosystem, following international standards, that allows its companies to evolve to digital formats. Aligned with this vision, the company has successfully implemented multiple innovative projects.

Years ago, the company’s Chief Information Officer, Jorge Treviño, had a vision for the future of how employees could work and collaborate remotely. Knowing that the company’s digital capabilities would mature quickly with the right collaboration solution, he moved most of Quimmco’s knowledge workers to Google Workspace.

“Initially we wanted to replace our legacy office suite with cloud-based tools, but we got much more than that,” says Treviño. “In Google Workspace, we got a collaboration solution that led to a nearly 50% jump in productivity.”

To provide a solid foundation for learning management and training, Quimmco worked with partner eSource Capital. “eSource Capital helped us create a training portal with video courses for employees to advance their skills on Google Workspace tools from their homes and at their own pace,” says Treviño.

In 2020, COVID-19 challenged Quimmco’s technological and digitization capacity. Fortunately, Treviño’s vision for the future was already in place when the pandemic closed many of Quimmco’s production lines and led to office employees working remotely. Because office employees were already familiar with Google Workspace tools such as Google Meet, Chat, Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar, and Gmail, they were able to quickly adjust to working from home, using two-factor authentication to keep their collaboration secure.

“When COVID-19 hit, we used Google Workspace to quickly shift into a fully remote, home-office workforce almost overnight, with no disruption,” says Treviño. “In fact, employees realized the true power of Google Workspace to reliably collaborate on work inside and outside the company.”

As adoption of Google Meet, Chat, and Drive more than doubled, managers and directors discovered that their teams were just as productive as before the pandemic—and sometimes more so. Reviewing documents and presentations became much easier with the ability to make real-time edits in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as collaborate face-to-face using Google Meet.

“With Google Workspace, we kept everyone connected and sustained our productivity and service levels during the pandemic, even with all our office employees working remotely,” says Treviño. “Our teams executed faster and better with the easy-to-use, cloud-based collaboration tools.”

As Quimmco’s collaborative culture grew deeper, the company began conducting “town hall” meetings with Google Meet, communicating plans for socially distanced shop floors and safe reopening of facilities. Managers even organized virtual activities on the weekends for employees to do craft projects with their families and have fun with their colleagues outside of work hours.

“We use Google Workspace to make personal connections with our employees in ways we didn’t before,” says Treviño. “It’s proving very worthwhile. Employees are happy because they can stay productive while spending more time with their families. We relieved a lot of anxiety about the pandemic.”

Quimmco’s business leaders and managers also make better connections with their teams using Google Workspace. For example, as the CIO, Treviño can connect more easily with his staff via Google Meet and Chat. The more personal, regular connections have helped him identify new talents that employees can cultivate to move their careers—and Quimmco—forward.

“It’s important we make sure our employees don’t burn out and that we help them succeed,” he says. “Interacting with people on Google Meet is simple. I can really get a sense for how they’re doing and what I can do to solve any challenges they might be experiencing.”

Remote work is here to stay at Quimmco, and the company plans to offer flexible on-site and remote work arrangements to office employees in the post-pandemic world. Whether working in offices or remotely, employees will take full advantage of their digital collaboration options, which are now an integral part of Quimmco’s culture.

“We now use Google Workspace for more than 90% of our communications and collaboration,” says Treviño. “It has allowed us to build employee relationships and trust and address unforeseen challenges. Without it, we could not execute our strategy.”