Forrester: How Google Workspace can deliver a 336% return on investment and drive enterprise-wide security, AI automation, and employee productivity

A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, commissioned by Google, estimates that Google Workspace’s secure and collaborative environment can result in a 336% return on investment and net present value of $57.3 million over three years.*

Forrester analysis finds that Google Workspace can deliver significant financial benefits 

Forrester spoke with six representatives at five enterprise organizations that use Google Workspace — the productivity suite that includes well-known and intuitive applications such as Gmail, Google Drive, Sheets, and Docs — to understand why they made the investment and the resulting benefits and costs. Based on the experiences of these organizations, Forrester designed a representative composite organization and built a financial model to determine the potential ROI of investing in Workspace. 

While the interviewees Forrester spoke to said their organizations invested in Workspace for different reasons,after adopting Workspace, organizations reported a more secure, collaborative, and connected workplace for office and frontline workers alike. Due to the Workspace investment, a representative composite organization could realize several quantified benefits, based on Forrester’s analysis, related to improved security, productivity, and revenue generation, resulting in 336% ROI and $57.3 million net present value over three years. 

One of the interviewees, the head of IT at a technology company, reported: “The value of Workspace is collaboration and the stability of the system. We’re an organization that works 24/7. It’s the most reliable and collaborative system that we have.”

Workspace can provide a secure and reliable environment

Across the board, interviewees emphasized Workspace’s superior security and reliability. For example, a senior consultant in professional services said: “Workspace is much more secure, and [ever since implementation] we have not had any actual issues related to security and related concerns.” The same interviewee added: “We have not faced any outages [with Workspace]. They have maintained the backend infrastructure services at their end seamlessly.” 

The security features built into Workspace as a cloud-based platform had a financial benefit on interviewees’ organizations. They were able to retire third-party legacy security solutions from external vendors for anti-spam, anti-phishing, and encryption. 

Additionally, security teams and IT teams saved significant time with Workspace. For example, at the representative composite organization, it can take 90% less time to configure new workstations, and there can be a 20% reduction in IT support tickets. A VP of operations in healthcare summarized the situation with, “The administration of Google Workspace — all I can call it is ‘easy.’” The combined security benefits can result in millions of dollars of savings at the composite organization.  

AI infused throughout Workspace can allow employees to focus on the “best” parts of their jobs

The AI embedded in Workspace was a key value proposition for interviewees’ organizations. A change management leader in manufacturing said: “The fact that there’s a bunch of AI features inside Workspace is one of the reasons we chose it in the first place. The AI functionalities help automate. We want the people at our organization to focus their time on using their brains, not monotonous tasks that could be automated.”

Interviewees repeatedly noted the concrete ways the AI in Workspace improved their employee collaboration and productivity. The director of IT in a retail company explained, “Automatic completion of sentences, translations, suggested calendar times, and suggested email recipients based on historical trends are really useful and simplify daily activities.” The VP of operations in a healthcare organization added: “The AI capabilities in Workspace are beneficial for quick email replies or automatic sentence completion. Our team members have come to rely on them and probably don’t even think about it anymore.”

Improved collaboration and time savings can be major benefits of Workspace for both office and frontline workers

Office and frontline workers alike reported significant time savings due to improvements brought by Workspace. Forrester analysis reported improved collaboration, enabled by apps such as Google Drive, Chat, Gmail, Meet, Docs, and Sheets, can lead to improved collaboration by users at the composite organization of 30% and saving 1.5 hours a week on average.

A director of IT in retail said: “If you really want to collaborate, there’s no competition with Workspace — working on the same Doc or Sheet together, tracking histories and permissions, and so on. And everything is available on mobile, so it’s seamless.” 

The VP of operations in healthcare added: “I couldn’t give up Google Workspace. It all goes right back to the collaboration capabilities with Drive, Meet, Chat, and all the other apps. I cannot imagine working without Workspace now.”

In addition to this, with Workspace, employees at the composite could see improved speed of searching for and finding information by 40% and, with AppSheet, a decrease in application development time by 80%. The change management leader in manufacturing said: “The combination of AppSheet, which allows you to automate without any code, and then the AI functionalities, which help automate without needing to do anything, means that there are a bunch of things that are more efficient.”

Interviewees emphasized that both office and frontline workers benefited from Workspace, and in particular, Forrester reported that Workspace may support a connected work community frontline workers by allowing employees to easily communicate and collaborate, both in real time and asynchronously.

Read the case study to learn more about what an investment in Google Workspace could mean for your organization 

Read the full TEI Report of Google Workspace here to learn more about these benefits and other findings, including potential revenue uplift, cost savings from decommissioning redundant systems, and improvement in employee experience.

* Calculations are based on a representative composite organization