The way we work is evolving, offering employees greater flexibility and more means of communication than ever before. But with more channels to coordinate and collaborate, information is increasingly fragmented between different applications and business platforms. The result: responsibilities are unclear, work is compartmentalized, and employees struggle to keep up with endless notifications.
About the author Robbie O'Connor, EMEA Manager at Asana. Add to this the challenge posed by outdated systems, such as email, that leave critical information and documents stuck in discussion threads or inaccessible to the entire team. This lack of transparency means that employees are forced to spend hours a week searching for information and waste precious time trying to catch up.
Employees of all sizes of businesses, in all industries, spend hours in unnecessary meetings, answer emails, reply to emails, search for documents and files, and make duplicate efforts. Our work anatomy index found that global knowledge workers think they spend a third of their time at work, but in reality, nearly twice as much on low-value, repetitive tasks, including information research, meetings, and communication. at work. The same survey found that employee performance (39%) and retention (33%) were hit hardest by organizations not managing workloads effectively. While not all work can be of great value, there are ways to reduce the amount of unproductive or repetitive tasks that are performed on a daily basis, including minimizing unnecessary meetings or automating repetitive tasks. Clarifying how to prioritize work based on what will bring the most business value is another great way to improve performance and increase efficiency. At Asana, we leverage a structure called the "Pyramid of Clarity" to align everyone with the goal and high-level objectives of the daily work they do, and the concrete results that individual work should produce. These high-level goals need to feed into a subset of short-term goals, creating a solid foundation that allows managers to provide a clear vision of what needs to happen and when.
How is technology shaping the way we work? What are the pros and cons?
In recent years, we've seen an explosion of apps and software designed to help employees improve communication and collaboration. This represents a challenge and an opportunity for organizations and their employees. While the adoption of new apps and tools can often be the perfect solution to increase employee productivity, they are only as effective as the teams that use them. From an employee perspective, it's important to take control of your notifications or they will eventually control you. Notifications partially turned off or left on for specific projects can help limit distractions at work and allow you to turn them off after you're gone for the day. The companies that have created the software we use for their work also want to make sure that users can "close." At Asana, we're improving mobile and web notifications, giving customers more control over how and when they receive alerts. Companies should also try to define how and when to use the tools, specifying whether they will integrate or replace existing processes and what the desired outcome should be for each individual. Without taking these considerations into account, chaos will ensue, leaving teams struggling with varied processes and disjointed workflows.
How can organizations effectively manage individual and team processes to reduce duplication of work?
Duplication of work is generally the result of a lack of visibility, either at the level of individual teams or across different departments. More than 10% of an employee's day (4 hours and 38 minutes per week) is dedicated to tasks already performed. This represents more than 200 hours of duplicated effort and lost efficiency each year. This is a surprising result when so much important information and documents are tied up in emails or buried in threads. To avoid this, organizations should try to implement tools that provide greater transparency, such as file sharing services, which make files and information more accessible to the organization's managers and employees. . Increasingly, transparency can also encourage greater employee accountability for the work they do, which can make it easier for teams to work together.
Why is automation essential to improve employee engagement and achieve better business results?
We live in an increasingly dynamic and globalized work environment, and in order to keep pace and remain competitive, it will become increasingly essential for companies and their employees to implement processes and technologies that support them. work smarter, not harder. To keep pace, companies must try to increase their adoption of automated tools to eliminate or minimize the number of repetitive or low-value tasks from the workday and give employees time to focus on the work they were hired to do. . This will not only help increase efficiency, but it will also help employees to be more invested in how the work they do advances business objectives.