About the Author
Alex Hood is Asana's Product Manager
We recently spoke with more than 6,000 knowledge workers around the world to better understand the issues people and teams face in managing and distributing work.
According to our research, 8 out of 10 employees are either overworked or about to experience burnout, and more than 70% of them experienced burnout twice or more over the course of the year. last year
And while the majority of employees (93%) firmly believe that they are more productive than their peers, more than a third (37%) don't know if work is distributed evenly across their teams.
So what does this all mean? This means that the traditional tools we've used to plan and distribute work over the past decades, from spreadsheets to emails to face-to-face meetings, don't work.
Why do you think workers have these problems?
From Slack to Google Docs to Dropbox, we have more ways to communicate and collaborate than ever before. However, most teams are still turning to outdated and fragile technologies, such as spreadsheets, to plan and manage their work.
We believe that there is a strong correlation between overworked teams and the effectiveness (or not) of your organization in managing work. For example, while we often think of technology companies as innovative and disruptive, nearly half (44%) rely on archaic spreadsheets to plan and allocate work across their teams. Therefore, more than two-thirds of the technicians surveyed believe that their company consistently underestimates the time and effort required to complete all the tasks and projects for which they are responsible.
What are the implications for the company?
Most of the people we spoke to believe that team and society morale suffers from the fact that employees are overworked. In addition to lowering morale and engagement, staff retention has also suffered. Almost half of the companies surveyed had employees who left their company because they were overwhelmed by their workload.
We believe there is a better way. A system that ensures the right people work on the right projects at the right time - less time on the job and more time on the job.
How can technology solve the problem?
We are really focusing on eliminating work at work. To do this, we act as a GPS for your organization, ensuring that everyone knows the archive plan and is updated as each item is collected.
We know that the happiest and most productive teams clearly know who does what and when. This week we released Workload, a new feature that gives you a centralized view of your team's capacity, connected to the actual underlying work. With it, not only are your most important projects and initiatives completed on time, but you never lose sight of your most valuable assets - your team members.
And since no two teams are identical, it allows you to customize the workload based on the efforts provided, such as hours or points. To help teams balance their work and avoid burnout, Workload sets capacity limits with visual alerts when work assigned to a person exceeds their capacity.
Providing this level of clarity is not only powerful, but it also brings power. When people can clearly see the interconnectedness of their work, their responsibilities, and their goals, they feel secure in their teams, their management, and themselves.
What are you excited about for the future of product development in this space?
We have taken a decisive step towards realizing our vision of the future of work.
At Asana, we are the pioneers of the work table, which builds a connective tissue between everything that includes work, from individual tasks to meetings, performance indicators and even objectives and mission. of the society. With this extensive network of relational data about people, teams, and the projects they are associated with, we can provide companies with a powerful data resource that enables employees to more effectively engage in how their work produces valuable data. . Real and tangible impact.
The result? Happier teams achieving their best results.
Alex Hood is the product manager for Asana.