April is typically the month in which businesses worldwide acknowledge the contributions of administrative professionals. In the U.S.and many other countries, this happens in the last full week of the month (yep, we’re a bit behind in this blog article). The recognition is well-deserved as these administrative folks are central to an office or business running efficiently. 

We’d love to recognize every administrative professional personally, but practicality makes that impossible. So rather than a bouquet that will expire in days or a box of Whitman’s chocolates, we thought we’d try to make the lives of administrative professionals just a little easier with these top tips for using Google Workspace. 

 

Make Gmail Your Hub

In a world overflowing with messaging apps, content, and new ways to collaborate, people still kick off most of their days, conversations, and projects in email. In fact, there are some 320 billion emails sent and received every day. Gmail is already fundamental to the way we work, making it the ideal place to bring messages, tasks, and teams together. 

Bringing email, chat, voice, and video calling together makes it easy to reach the people you need when you need them via the channel that works best. Central access helps you get to the core elements of your work faster, boosting both individual and group productivity and overall impact.

 

Stay Organized With Filters

Staying organized is all about being efficient. An inbox that is full of event acceptances and other low priority messages becomes challenging to navigate. You need to keep the most important messages front and center—particularly if you’re responsible for a manager’s or even multiple other people’s mailboxes. Filters are a great way to do that. Set up filters that have Gmail automatically disposition low-priority messages to a folder, archive, or the trash. With a clean inbox, you’ll always have insights into messages that are most important.

 

Avoid timezone-timidation

If you work in New York, and your business has staff in New Zealand, setting up meetings can be tricky. There’s a 17-hour difference between the two locations. For example, 4:00 PM on the east coast of the U.S. is 8:00 AM the next day in Auckland. See the time in other countries by adding world clocks to your calendar. With this tool, coordinating schedules across time zones becomes easy work.

 

Move quickly with prewritten replies

Typing the same message over and over can be monotonous and a real time waster. You shouldn’t have to repeatedly create new emails with directions to the corporate office or reminders to contractors to submit their weekly timesheets. Gmails templates allow you to compose a reply one-time and then save it for future use. When you’re ready, open the template and send it to the appropriate party with just a few clicks.

 

Templates for a signature too

Speaking of templates, they’re great for tailoring your communications to your audiences. Use them for quickly switching email signatures between internal and external audiences or if sending on behalf of someone else. Google allows you to create up to 50 templates, so feel free to use your imagination.

 

Schedule meetings easily with team calendars

With large teams, or maybe an entire organization, it’s hard to schedule appointments that will accommodate everyone. With a team calendar, you can create views of staff availability that make scheduling easier. Create calendars to track who’s in and out of the office, vacations, or which staff members are working from home. Additionally, think about using a team calendar to track project deadlines or other important milestones.

From the beginning, Google Workspace was designed to help teams collaborate and stay productive. Unlike other solutions, which may require legacy tools and on-premises deployments to experience their full functionality, Google Workspace is different, offering features that are flexible, helpful, and simple.

If you’re interested in getting the most out of Google Workspace, WALT Labs can help. Contact us today to learn more about how you can collaborate and control your business operation with Google Workspace.