Speaker: Uwe Schmidt, Director Digital Workplace & Collaboration, Mercer International Inc
Uwe Schmidt: Hello, everybody. My name is Uwe Schmidt. I work for Mercer International, a Canadian company that creates bio products for a more sustainable world. I'm responsible for the digital workplace and collaboration.
What led Mercer International to use Google Chat? What problems were you trying to solve?
Uwe Schmidt: At Mercer, we try to organize information around teams, topics and projects and provide employees with information they need for their work. For that, Google Chat is an important tool that allows us to do this quickly and transparently. We also want to reduce the flood of the emails and we can solve that with Google Chat and we reduce the flood by approximately 30%.
How has Google Chat improved you/your team's ability to communicate & collaborate?
Uwe Schmidt: Before we deployed Google Workspace and with that Google Chat, and every facility, every mill at Mercer- and we have mills in North America and Europe and Australia, has its own infrastructure, its own chat tool, it's own mail tool. And we harmonize all of that and after that and then we do that during the COVID pandemic and then working really well. And after that, the communication increase really, really fast and transparent. They use Google Chat also for video conferencing, really quick video conferencing. They used spaces for the projects. The adoption rates increase extremely and in a moment, I guess Chat is more used than Gmail than mail, and that is exactly what we want to achieve. And that working pretty perfect. And we absolutely happy about the Chat function. And yeah, thank you.
What benefits have you realized by standardizing on Chat?
Uwe Schmidt: The biggest benefit by using one harmonized Chat tool is the cross functional collaboration or the the collaboration between different facilities, different mills. And especially when, for example, you work in global project, that was absolute benefit and a boost of the productivity. And also, we can thank the cross when we have just one tool and not five, six different tools and also the administration of the different tools and the licensing that is behind that everything is getting easier with one tool, everybody getting familiar when you have one tool, you speak from the same functionality and that is a really big achievement for us as a company. And our target is also to grow together as one company and that is a major part- was a big part, a big advantage with Google Chat and you have the same infrastructure for that.
How have spaces in Chat helped your organization and/or team(s) build culture and community?
Uwe Schmidt: First thing that come in my mind is our Google key user community. We really build a community within the whole organization, we have key user chats with 50 employees, sometimes 100 employees depends on the location and, and on the language. Really everybody shares their best practice with Google Workspace in the chat. It's a funny place sometimes they use for, for sure gifs and humor is an important part for me, especially for working culture and for that space, it helps a lot. You never will have achieved that with email or other communication tools when you have more than 100 people in one chat and everybody helps each other. So that really drives our culture and brings us closer together as a company and I'm absolutely happy for that function.
