Hybrid: it’s about more than where you work

As millions of organizations emerge from more than a year of remote work, a hybrid work model is rapidly becoming the new normal. But hybrid is about more than just where you work.

• How do people working "somewhere else" stay connected with those in the office?

• How can all employees better manage their time and attention?

• How can technology support wellbeing so everyone can maximize their impact?

Although hybrid work has some unique challenges, Google Workspace has been focused on empowering anywhere, anytime collaboration for well over a decade. In the pages ahead, we share what we’ve learned about hybrid work in collaboration with our customers. This handbook focuses on tools, spaces, and best practices that seamlessly connect in-office and remote teams.

What does success look like?

As organizations around the world embrace hybrid work, they’re looking to level the playing field across all work and collaboration touchpoints. They want to know how to build connections with their teams, and how to ensure everyone can participate fully no matter where or how they join a meeting or a brainstorm session.

When we recently surveyed Google Workspace customers, they reported their top hybrid work concerns:

• Keeping people productive and engaged, even when they’re away from the office

• Preventing the sort of meeting fatigue that happened during the pandemic

• Making the hybrid work experience equitable for all employees

• Ensuring the in-office experience promotes collaboration

Google has spent much of the past year solving for these challenges. Our mission is to enable a hybrid work experience that enhances collaboration, strengthens human connection, and increases wellbeing for every employee — wherever and however they work.

Best practices

Based on Google’s own experiments and research, we’ve put together a set of best practices for hybrid work success. Our approach blends culture, software, hardware, and conference-room layouts based on meeting types. While technology can’t solve everything, there are concrete ways we can help people use tools to build stronger connections with each other, better manage their time and wellbeing, and achieve more — together.

Boosting productivity through anywhere, anytime collaboration

Hybrid collaboration is fast-moving and fluid. It doesn’t just happen in scheduled meetings that span locations; it happens in countless everyday moments, from spontaneous discussions over chat to shared brainstorming documents. Tools must be flexible enough to support both real-time and asynchronous hybrid collaboration. The ability to seamlessly move between modes of communication — like jumping between a shared document in Spaces and a video call with one click — is crucial.

HOW IT’S DONE WITH

An informal hallway chat in the office between two colleagues continues and broadens through group chat or over Google Meet.

A team shares its weekly update in a topic-based Space to keep their co-workers informed and get feedback.

A group chat seamlessly evolves into a Google Meet call.

Google Workspace

Collaboration happens everywhere, anytime.

A team builds a project plan in a shared Doc and uses @-mentions with smart canvas to bring in relevant people, content, and events.

As team members collaborate, they use a dedicated Space where all the relevant content for the project is organized and discussion happens.

Creating a dedicated space for teamwork and collaboration

Distributed teams need a dedicated, shared space to bring their projects to life by connecting the right people, content, and conversations.

Spaces in Google Chat provide a dedicated place for organizing people, topics, and project. Spaces offer a streamlined and flexible user interface that helps teams stay on top of what’s most important. Powered by new features like in-line topic threading, presence indicators, custom statuses, expressive reactions, and a collapsible view, Spaces seamlessly integrates with files and tasks, becoming a new home in Google Workspace for getting more done — together.