Counties Share How Productivity Suites Improve Team Collaboration

The cloud-based software suites support an increasingly mobile and hybrid workforce, serving as a central hub for interacting with colleagues, enabling important workflows, and accessing work resources, business data and insights, says Adam Holtby, Omdia’s principal analyst for workplace transformation.

“These collaboration platforms play a vital role in shaping the digital workplace and enhancing employee productivity through seamless collaboration,” Holtby says.

Not only do Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace provide email, videoconferencing and chat functionality, but they also allow the government to create, edit, store and share content over the cloud as well as build team sites for collaboration, government IT leaders say.

Facilitating Hybrid Collaboration Among County Workers

Kern County covers 8,000 square miles, with a mixed workforce of on-premises, remote and mobile employees. Microsoft 365 empowers the county’s thousands of workers to stay connected and collaborate regardless of location or device, Buonauro says.

The county completed its Microsoft 365 implementation in 2019, which was perfect timing because it allowed staff to easily transition to remote work during the pandemic. Today, most employees have returned to the office, but some departments still allow remote or hybrid work, he says. For example, the County Administrative Office lets employees work remotely when needed, and 30 percent of IT staff are fully remote. Post-COVID, Microsoft Teams has improved daily operations by increasing employee availability and eliminating travel times for meetings, says Joe Arriola, Kern County’s senior fiscal and policy analyst.

For example, the county’s communications team attends many events where they take pictures and shoot video for social media posts, the county website and a weekly TV news program.

The five-person Countywide Communications department works collaboratively with about 30 communications staff from other departments. When they attend events, they share content with each other by uploading subject matter from their smartphones to Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud-based storage, says Ally Triolo, Kern County’s chief communications officer.

“When we’re out in the field taking different shots and video, the content is too large to text or attach to email, so we upload it to a shared OneDrive folder where our television crew can access it,” she says.

When they need to post news on the county website, communications staff members use a Teams group chat on their computers or phones to send content to a dedicated IT team, which updates the website.

“It’s a great way to quickly get in touch with our IT colleagues when we have important news that needs to go out immediately,” Triolo says. “We don’t have to wait for an email response.”

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The county’s finance team uses Excel, OneDrive and SharePoint, Microsoft’s content management software, to facilitate real-time communication and collaboration. Finance team members also use Microsoft Planner as a project and task management tool, Arriola says.

These cloud-based tools create a central hub for document and data management, ensuring team members have easy access to the latest information, he says. The software has proven valuable by allowing staff to analyze legislation or state budget proposals.

“With Microsoft 365’s collaborative tools, proposals can be analyzed across functional areas and perspectives in real time, offering a more comprehensive picture of impacts,” Arriola says.

Optimizing County Business Workflows

Eagle County, Colo., also uses cloud-based productivity tools to cultivate digital teamwork, but it has chosen Google Workspace as its platform.

Many departments have embraced Google Forms, which allows staff to easily build forms and surveys. When used internally, the technology enables interdepartmental collaboration while streamlining — and in some cases, automating — business processes, says Brandon Williams, Eagle County’s innovation and strategy manager.

For example, the Communications Department built a Google Form for other departments to submit news items or events they want to promote. When forms are submitted, Google Forms automatically notifies the communications staff over Gmail that new submissions have arrived. The results are stored and accessible in a Google Sheets spreadsheet, which serves as a lightweight database, Williams says.

“A Forms workflow or lightweight database is traditionally complex IT services, but Google has made it so tools can now be put in the hands of frontline workers so they can do it themselves,” Williams says.

Eagle County has also begun using Google Looker Studio, a data visualization tool, to build dashboards that let county departments analyze data from Google Sheets and build reports, such as how many residents are getting affordable housing, he says.

The county’s Emergency Operations Center also uses Google Workspace to coordinate emergency responses and provide residents real-time information. It uses a single Google Doc to update and share incident information among emergency response teams; Google Chat for real-time communication; Google Forms for resource requests and tracking employee hours; and Google Sites and Maps to inform the public during emergencies (for example, to provide evacuation plans).

“Our Emergency Operations Center is 100 percent Google-based,” Williams says.

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Eagle County, which supports remote and hybrid work, also relies heavily on Google Meet and Chat. The county has installed videoconferencing systems with large LED displays in meeting rooms so teleworkers can log in to Google Meet and attend office meetings remotely.

“Our norm is usually a hybrid in-person and remote meeting,” Williams says.

County departments, such as IT and HR, also use Google Chat to communicate with the entire workforce. The IT department, for example, holds open IT office hours over chat.

“You can ask a question, and immediately, four or five people will jump in and answer, not just IT staff, but also tech ambassadors from other departments,” Williams says.

Improving Sharing and Collaboration

In Multnomah County, Ore., half of the county’s 6,000 employees spend a part of their workweek telecommuting, so they rely on Google Workspace for communication and collaboration. Sharing, editing and collaborating is much more seamless in the cloud, says County CIO Tracey Massey.

“Instead of finding an Excel spreadsheet in network-attached storage, and people emailing files all around and saving multiple versions, it’s much easier to send a link to collaborate on the same document without worrying about creating duplicate copies,” she says.

Overall, cloud-based productivity tools effectively enable teamwork among staff, Williams says. “The digital tools bridge the physical separation of our employees.”