Struggling to transform your culture? Put MS Office in the bin and move to GSuite

I think the biggest, unmentioned, impediment to proper remote collaboration (and the associated culture change) is Microsoft Office.

That's a bold statement to start with, isn't it? I haven't written an article for a while so maybe I'm rusty. Either way, I've not really seen this discussed before (sorry if it has and I've missed it). And discussion is the right word, lets carry on talking about it in the comments, rather than me writing paragraph upon paragraph. Right after I’ve explained my opinion a little.

From my first hand experiences, it doesn't seem to matter if you use Mural or Miro, Jira or Asana, Slack or Zoom (or, ironically, Teams, I'll address that bit later); if you use Microsoft Office instead of GSuite you seem to be doomed to have a sub par remote/distributed working culture. This is, of course, a broad brush by which to tar everyone and I know there will be exceptions, even if I've not experienced them.

GSuite fundamentally changes the way you work with….everything and everyone. It’s nigh on impossible to carry on as you did before; people don’t send files around, they share collaborative documents, and they’ll chastise you if you do send one back. There’s no V1.0.1.3.docx floating around, there’s a doc with recoverable version history. I’m not ignorant, I know Office 365 has this capability, but I’m saying that in all the companies I’ve worked in [that have it], it’s barely leveraged. It seems to me that collaborative working in a shared document really brings around some behavioural change, it all seems more informal and far more effective (and efficient) AND so far, for me, seems to be exclusively done in companies that have GSuite.

If you’re reading this and working somewhere with GSuite, you maybe nodding along in agreement. If you’re working somewhere with Office and that place is fully brought into the MS Ecosystem, giving you Surface laptops, having Surface Hubs in all the meeting rooms, not using local files…you’re REALLY lucky, but also in a minority. I’ve experienced that too btw, it works really well. The biggest issue I find is that the cost of entry to that setup is high, so a lot of places don’t spend on it and that’s where Office falls down. Once you’re out of that perfect ecosystem then you’re in a space where GSuite wins, hard. Being platform agnostic helps - Windows? Mac? Linux? Chromebook? Take your pick, you get the same experience everywhere you go. Android? Obviously. iOS? Sure. Not as integrated maybe, but sure.?

Microsoft Teams is a bit of an anomaly here. It’s such a weird thing and nothing else is really like it. Video Chat, Calendar, Document Manager, IM?! It bizarrely works reasonably well, but it’s also really muddled - it has a huge variety of capabilities and I don’t feel some of the better ones really get leveraged as, no matter how hard they try, real teams don’t live in Teams.

Here’s my “hot take” - if you’re looking at kick starting a cultural change in your organisation, move to GSuite before you invest in any other tooling or do anything else. And thank me later.