Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Google Workspace Essentials Starter is free, and it carries the Google brand so it's understandably the first thing many teams consider when setting up collaboration tools. Before you roll it out, though, it's worth knowing exactly what you're getting, where it hits a wall, and when it makes sense to look at something else. This article covers what's included, what's missing, and who this plan actually works for.

We’ve all been there. You’re in the middle of your most important work when a notification pulls you out of your flow. A project lead needs a status update. A client is asking about a ticket. Finding the information in Slack is easy – but pulling it together and drafting a clear response takes time you don’t have. At Slack, we believe that making automation workflows accessible to everyone is the key to unlocking true organisational productivity.

A well-designed onboarding process helps new hires become productive quickly and encourages them to stay with the company. The transition from candidate to team member is easier when you provide employees with structure, consistency, and an easy-to-use digital system that supports their new role. Studies show that a structured onboarding process can improve new-hire retention by 82% and increase productivity by more than 70%.

Your people are working hard and so are the teams supporting them. Many organizations have expanded benefits, added mental health resources, and introduced flexible options. Those efforts matter.

Starting today, Jira teams can assign work directly to Cursor, where a cloud agent will pick it up and begin working. You can steer agents directly from Jira, your IDE, or Cursor on the web. When Cursor needs input or is ready for review, it will notify you in Jira. When it opens a pull request, it will be automatically linked back to Jira.

Think about your to-do list for a given work week. From responding to a colleague’s quick message to building a team strategy, how do you prioritize how much time and energy to allocate to each task? Behavioral science tells us most of us don’t optimize; we satisfice — we find the first “good enough” option, and we move on. The term, a mash‑up of “satisfy” and “suffice,” was coined by Herbert A.