Change was the theme for the opening address when over 4,000 Smartsheet users and enthusiasts gathered in Seattle for ENGAGE 2024.
In his welcome address at the three-day event, Smartsheet CEO, Mark Mader, said the pace of change was showing no sign of diminishing. Instead, change is accelerating in our workplaces and in our technology.
Smartsheet’s mission to empower everyone to drive meaningful change becomes more pertinent in these rapidly changing times, prompting Mark to exhort the attendees to get out in front of change and be the ones directing it.
Delivering mission critical change in your organisation
Delivering change in your organisation was the theme for two guest speakers, who offered practical advice for making it happen in your organisation.
Crissy Nolen, Chief Marketing Officer at real estate experts Colliers, in Houston, offered this advice for bringing new Smartsheet solutions to life:
- Identify the specific problem you are addressing.
- Target training on the solution by user group needs, one size will not fit all.
- Templates to copy/save will make it easy for people to use and engage with the solution for the first time.
- Use dashboards as navigation points, not just as ways to display information.
Lisa Symons, VP Customer Engagement and Delivery at Maximus, which specialises in enabling large scale solutions across a wide scope of needs, spoke of how 8,000 users worked across their enterprise-wide Smartsheet solution, supported by a technology staff of just four. Her advice for working on those scales was:
- Simplify and streamline everything you do.
- Use your Control Center templates to standardise processes.
- Even if you are working across multiple Control Centre blueprints or solutions; standardise key terminology so you can compare ‘apples with apples’.
- Have a Smartsheet day (or session) internally; do training, Q&A, shared learning – turn it into an event that engages people.
We heartily endorse the advice from Crissy and Lisa; these are the things that make the difference between success and failure.
One unified Smartsheet
The message from the excellent Ben Canning, Smartsheet’s Senior Vice President of Product Experiences, was simple – Smartsheet is changing to enable the following:
- Scale effortlessly.
- Better, faster outcomes.
- Improve collaboration.
There are amazing Smartsheet changes happening now or coming this year, he said. It truly is going to be a revolutionary period for the platform.
Here is an insight into what we can expect.
Workspaces are the bedrock of Smartsheet and sharing, but each user group may have different information needs and different sharing permissions, so it can be difficult to organise these effectively.
We have all been calling for folder level sharing for several years, but what was explained to us goes above and beyond – Collections.
Collections are segregated spaces within a workspace, where you can:
- Create a curated set of items/info for each user group.
- Share subsets of information so everyone is not overwhelmed by information they don’t need.
- Add a wiki or a tableau dashboard or a range of other items (amazing!).
- Navigate to shared Collections via the home page.
If you are using Brandfolder/Digital Asset Management, it is the same concept but in Smartsheet. Collections is available today for customers on the new user subscription model.
Resource Management properties continue to expand into the sheets with more information coming directly into Smartsheet.
File Library is rolling out now to customers on the new user subscription model.
For those in the Early Adopter programme, you will be familiar with Timeline View, but it is now being rolled out to everyone. As it is now generally available, comments and attachments are available with it. Later this year it will be available to be placed on dashboards.
Board View is having a boost, so some new features coming through later in the year.
The last of the new views is Table. Do not be fooled into thinking this is just Grid all over again, it is so much more – it is the future of Smartsheet.
Table View has been built from the ground up to be faster, bigger and better than Grid. Here’s why:
- 10x faster formula calculation
- 1million cell capacity
- Real time collaboration with real time changes, i.e. immediate autosave
- Custom sorting and faster filtering
- Ability to paste 1,000 rows at a time
- Delete more than 5 columns at a time – this got the biggest cheer of the day!
Table View is live for EAP participants now. Reports and Dynamic View will be added to it later this year.
Finally, is your organisation using Amazon Q Business, the AI-generative, AI–powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems?
If so, something great was announced: the Smartsheet-Amazon Q Connector. This enables Amazon Q to look across Salesforce, Slack, Teams and Smartsheet to conduct deep searches while respecting permission levels.
This will represent a massive time saving for any organisation and is now on public preview.
Day 2 – The future of work
Day two opened with an illuminating and thought-provoking keynote address from Future of Work Strategist Heather E McGowan. This was a fabulous session – here are some key points, but we recommend that you check out Heather’s website for the full view of her exciting work and findings.
“Smartsheet is just a pile of code, it’s up to you to make the impact.”
The increase of work in people’s life has been accompanied by a decline in ‘bonding capital’, said Heather, i.e. we have fewer wide social interactions away from work. This is partly due to wider social changes around how and where people meet and interact. So work needs to deliver more to meet inherent social needs.
Next year the Gen X cohort will become a larger proportion of the workforce than the Boomers. But the major disconnect is that ‘work’ has been designed by the Boomer generation, who are all retiring so ‘work’ and ‘workers’ are not aligned.
For boomers in work, loyalty equated to security. Gen X is looking for meaning, mentorship and a sense of purpose in their work. So, how do organisations and leaders start to develop that?
- Hybrid thinking – Work has been about cognitive intelligence. It needs to be more. Hybrid thinking is cognitive thinking + emotional intelligence.
- Harnessing collective intelligence – Key to getting everyone to work together well is trust, which starts with listening and understanding.
“Begin with Trust”. By Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, May-June 2020
3. A new leadership model – Leadership used to be about expertise and certainty, but not anymore. A really curious challenge of the new leadership model is that the people who exhibit these characteristics may not be those who naturally self-select as leaders. But they are likely to identify with “I surprised myself with what I could accomplish”.
Heather E McGowan, Smartsheet Engage, Oct 24
“The future belongs to those brave enough to collaborate to create it.”
In conclusion…
As always, ENGAGE was informative, inspiring and thought-provoking. Without a doubt change is happening at a pace difficult to keep up with but keep up with it we must!
The changes to Smartsheet explained to us and happening now, along with the developments to come in the short to medium term, will help everyone who uses this great platform to get out in front of change and be the ones directing it, to quote Mark Mader.
Crissy Nolen and Lisa Symons shared practical advice to support Smartsheet’s mission to empower everyone to drive meaningful change, and we heartily support their counsel that could make the difference between success and failure.
The imminent ‘changing of the guard’ in the workplace as the Gen X cohort becomes a larger proportion of the workforce than the Boomers in 2025 also makes us consider change, what it needs to be and how we make it happen.
Huge thanks to all who took part in ENGAGE Seattle 2024, speakers and delegates alike, and we look forward to another three days of insight and inspiration at ENGAGE London in June 2025.
