Submerge into a Google Workspace Immersion with the Navy

As the CIO for the U.S. Navy Ship Repair Facility (SRF) in Japan, Peter Guo leads a culturally diverse team that’s charged with supporting the success of global fleet operations. His multi-generational, multi-lingual team has a mix of different motivations for joining SRF. During the Google Workspace Summit earlier this year, Guo shared some of the ways he is helping drive cultural transformation with a multi-generational workforce. 

Guo notes that cultural transformation is core to driving innovation in support of the mission. “People are your most valuable asset," Guo stressed. "We need people, processes, and technology working together, in that order of importance, to drive cultural change. Investing in technology solves today's problems. Investing in processes solves next week's problems. But investing in personnel solves your ‘forever’ problems."

With the use of Google Workspace, Guo has witnessed how technology can break down barriers to improve organizational collaboration. His team uses Google Workspace not just for basic chat and call capabilities, but to help break down language barriers between Japanese and U.S. personnel. Like Google, Guo believes the effective use of technology can help drive cultural change — especially as more millennials join the workforce. When millennials join public sector teams, “they bring experience using the latest and greatest technologies and processes with them,” Guo explained. By being open to new and diverse experiences, the SRF finds new, innovative ways of working together to solve those “forever problems.”

Using Google Workspace in an Emergency Situation

One innovative way the SRF team stays operationally ready is through role-playing how they would respond in an emergency situation — using Google Workspace tools. One recent example the crew chose to simulate was responding to a Navy ship fire.  

The NAVSEA team arrived at the Tokyo office where they were briefed on Google Workspace, the cloud-based collaboration tools they’d be using to support the immersive exercise. Afterward, the team broke into pods to brainstorm solutions for their mock scenario, with their Captain pushing participants to consider solutions that could engage critical groups from ship crews, to local firefighters, to the General in the office. 

The pods generated several innovative ideas using Google Workspace:

• One team proposed using AppSheet to perform future safety checks. This could allow leadership to quickly make decisions based on aggregate safety reports. 

• Another team suggested using video translation services to provide real-time reporting via Google Meet in non-native languages. 

• A different team came up with a solution to utilize Google Forms and Google Sheets to track over 1,000 items of Base Firefighting inventory, along with Google Maps to trace inventory location. 

These proposed solutions offered new ways to solve the problems outlined in their scenario, but the experience also offered insight into the way the team works together. Creating this immersive, real-time mock situation helped the NAVSEA team build their confidence, establish stronger connections, and strengthen readiness in the case of a real emergency situation.