Drive Adoption of Google Workspace and Survive Heavy Storms with Visibility into Productivity

We had a chance to sit down with Greg Carreon, VP of Information Technology, from Specialty Lighting Group to discuss how Prodoscore helped his company drive adoption of Google Workspace and fully switch over from their legacy email system and back office productivity tools.

Legacy Systems

A few years ago, Specialty Lighting migrated their legacy office productivity solution onto the Google Cloud Platform powered by Google Workspace.However, two years later, virtually all of their employees continued to use Outlook as their main email client as well as the Microsoft Office Suite of products with files stored locally on individual machines.

“Most employees were keeping files local on their desktop computers,” Carreon said.

Specialty Lighting IT was bogged down with frequent technical issues and countless security fixes. With file management and backup crucial to Specialty Lighting’s business continuity, the risk of losing files to a hardware failure was acute. Additionally, having multiple versions of files across different machines made it virtually impossible to keep track of the most current version and increased security risk.

The legacy systems also required extra training for recent college graduate hires who were familiar and naturally accustomed to Google’s EDU cloud solutions.

To improve productivity, security, and future-proof the company’s systems, Carreon drove an initiative to increase adoption of Google Workspace across the company.

“Virtually all millennials emerging into the job market today literally grow up using Google Workspace for education. Many have been using Google since elementary school. Requiring this group to learn both legacy technologies and cloud-based technologies resulted in many challenges, not to mention their disapproval of an antiquated company culture.”

“IT continued to respond to a growing number of trouble tickets to fix local desktop and email related issues. It’s just email. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

How Prodoscore Made the Switch to Google Workspace Possible

Soon after the initial roll-out of Google Workspace, Carreon realized he had a problem.

After two years of trying, Carreon had not found a solution to change employee behavior and realized it was going to be a continuing struggle to fully migrate the entire company to Google Workspace.

In order to realize the security and cost benefits of the cloud, Specialty Lighting needed a way to encourage all employees to fully adopt Google Workspace and move off the legacy systems.

Carreon discovered Prodoscore at a Google Next Conference and quickly realized this might be the solution to help him drive adoption of Google Workspace.

Prodoscore provided administrators visibility into user activity across Google Workspace and provided a simple productivity score. As a result, it was easy to identify users who adopted cloud based workflows vs. teams remaining on legacy workflows and applications. Training and guidance was then focused on those that required the help and enabled Specialty Lighting to demonstrate the advantages of migrating to the cloud as opposed to heavy-handed enforcement of policies.

This approach motivated employees to adopt Google Workspace tools over the legacy tools on their local desktops. With the knowledge of which Google Workspace products employees were using and how often, Carreon was finally able to view a complete picture of the company’s adoption of the platform.

“The features that interested me the most were the ease of implementation, just an email address, and the seamless way that Prodoscore captures users’ adoption across all Google Workspace applications”

“A small portion of the company made the switch, but the majority were still using the legacy systems, particularly Office Suite and Outlook for email.”

While Prodoscore helped Specialty Lighting transition to Google Workspace, the solution also posed an added benefit to Specialty Lighting on multiple occasions when employees were forced to work from home. First during a snowstorm and most recently during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were stretches of time where we needed to give employees the flexibility to work from home. With everyone now migrated to the cloud, we maintained consistent productivity scores and collaboration whether working from home or the office. Prodoscore enabled managers to have confidence in the productivity of their teams, no matter where they were.

Specialty Lighting saw a significant increase in cloud tool adoption since shifting to remote work, which helps justify the cost to implement those tools.

Improved Productivity Going Forward

Looking forward, Carreon plans to integrate more of his company’s workflows into Prodoscore.

“I think it’s a great tool to measure the heartbeat of the company on a day-to-day basis,” Carreon said. “We looked at Monday mornings versus other days and discovered that ‘the Mondays’ was a real thing. We’re now developing strategies to encourage our team to kick-start their week off better.”

Specialty Lighting has seen demonstrated benefits from Prodoscore and they are currently rolling it out to their CRM and office phone solutions to drive ROI on these investments as well.

“We’re looking at all cloud-based office productivity tools to drive adoption and identify best practices across employees that quickly achieve high Prodoscores based on their quick adoption.” Specialty Lighting is also evaluating opportunities to enable a work from home policy as cloud-based computing enables collaboration and managers gain comfort when observing their team’s productivity score.

With Prodoscore, Specialty Lighting has finally been able to fully embrace Google Workspace and all of the benefits of moving to the cloud.

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