Fostering stronger connection and collaboration by switching to Google Meet

At Robinhood Markets, we’re on a mission to democratize finance for all with financial education, resources, and technology. This ambition to empower people with the right tools is a core part of our culture. Just as we give customers tools to help them make the most of financial solutions, we also provide our employees with the technology to do their jobs as effectively as possible.

We’re long-time users of Google Workspace, a suite of tools that helps our employees and customers alike. Here’s how we’re using the platform to fuel creativity, improve collaboration, and accelerate educational opportunities across our organization.

Powering education, connection, and collaboration

We’ve relied heavily on Workspace since 2014 and recently switched to Google Meet as our video collaboration tool of choice to unify our internal systems. We’ve introduced Meet hardware into our offices, outfitting conference rooms and single-occupancy phone booths with the equipment our people need to run meetings, no matter how big or small.

It’s a one-touch solution at our fingertips when we enter a meeting room, and our laptops connect effortlessly using companion mode so people can fully participate with chat, emojis, polls, and more. The interoperability features in the Meet hardware also enable us to connect seamlessly to Zoom meetings. Meet also syncs with Google Calendar in real time, so we can see at a glance if a room is available, making planning, scheduling, and rebooking meetings easier than ever. The Workspace apps are so connected that we don’t even have to think about them.

Meet has become a mainstay at Robinhood, not only providing a holistic platform for video communications, but also facilitating unprecedented collaboration and teamwork across our organization. Before the pandemic, attendee limits prevented us from using Meet for all-hands meetings. Now, Meet can support our largest of meetings without issue. Knowing Google iterates at pace with user demand made our decision to switch that much easier.

We use breakout rooms in Meet to run live training sessions and improve employee onboarding. We can assign discussion topics for subteams to inspire deeper conversations, and then come back as a larger group to share ideas. With Q&As and polls embedded directly into Meet, we can spark engagement and bring everyone in on important conversations, from collecting anonymous responses to measure employee satisfaction to brainstorming ideas for upcoming team events. Our employees are also big fans of emojis in Meet. They can react in the moment without coming off mute or disrupting the speaker’s flow.

Meet has also opened doors for global connection. I recently had a meeting across three continents, in four different time zones, with zero latency. In an era of remote and hybrid work, having technology that can support this level of collaboration is key to our success. We need solutions that work right out of the box and can scale as we grow. Workspace meets our needs every time.

Accessible tools for accelerated growth

The Workspace ecosystem provides a granular level of security across any document in our environment with a hierarchy of permissions that ensures only the right people have access to the right files and folders. This end-to-end protection, along with the platform’s automated compliance checks, is of critical importance for a financial services organization such as ours. With Google Drive, we can manage all of our assets.

Most people today have some experience using a Workspace product, which has made it familiar, convenient, and accessible for everyone in our company. The ease of use is unparalleled, whether using the free apps at home or the enterprise-level suite in the office. For us, it wasn’t even a decision to use the platform for Robinhood’s internal collaboration and productivity. It was a given.

Google Docs has become the first place people go to start a project. It provides a canvas  to throw down ideas and organize our thoughts. With Google Slides, our organization has standardized presentations, using templates to maintain consistent branding. Google Sheets is our preferred spreadsheet application, giving us a real-time solution for collaboration to activate data-driven decisions.

Building a secure, stable partnership

When I started my career in IT, there were separate tools for almost every function. To access a particular program, employees had to get permission and support from their IT departments to download it onto their machines. With Workspace, the barrier to entry to technology is virtually eliminated. From day one, all you need to get started is a laptop.

Workspace gives us the ability to operate a business from a web browser, allowing all employees access to technology, no matter where they are. We’re excited to continue our relationship with Workspace and are currently evaluating how additional features can support our goals. By using Workspace, we know we’re getting industry-best technology that’s held to the highest standard. That’s how Robinhood will continue to provide top-tier solutions to our employees and customers, today and tomorrow.