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- New year, new ways to set your team up for success(Article originally published by Asana) From tracking goals to running better meetings, there’s no better time to create a more productive and engaging work experience for your team. Here are five ways: 1. Cracking the code: 6 steps to achieving your company goals8
- How to take back your productivity with No Meeting Wednesday( Article published originally by Asana) Meetings are a part of nearly everyone’s work life: some of us have more than others, but we all have days when we feel it’s nearly impossibleto get uninterrupted time to do work. In response to this, we created No Meeting Wednesdays (NMW): every team member knows not to schedule meetings on that day, unless absolutely necessary. It’s a simple, mindful practice but something that we’ve seen has helped our team tremendously and we think could help yours, too. Goals of NMW Give all team members a large block of time to focus on heads-down work, without having to fit it in between meetings. Allow everyone, including managers, to be ‘doers’ and ‘makers.’ Benefits Fewer disruptions means more team members can be productive. We get to check more work off our task lists than any other day of the week. Wednesdays are many Asanas’ favorite day of the week (productivity is rewarding)! Why no meetings? Managers are typically used to having a schedule-driven day and even makers’ days get filled with meetings. But unlike many companies, at Asana we want to enable managers to be makers some of the time as well, and we want everyone to be the as productive as possible. We created a schedule that ensures everybody gets some flow time to work on a time-consuming project, projects that always seem to get put off, or to check lots of little things off their tasks lists — but that also gives us time to have meetings to discuss ideas. It’s a concept pioneered by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a social theorist (you can watch his inspiring TED talk on the topic here). How it works, in practice We observe No Meeting Wednesdays, even with over 100 employees; when you look at our calendars, there are usually no internal meetings. As with many practices at Asana, we ask employees to practice mindfulness and encourage everyone to use judgement. There are occasions when we have to schedule meetings, for example: a job candidate is only able to come in on a Wednesday. Other times, teammates may decide to proactively schedule a working session with a teammate on a project they’d like to tackle together (for example: pair coding). We make exceptions to NMW when absolutely necessary, but we all try really hard to avoid them. Because a meeting involves more than one person, it may be hard for the meeting invitee to push back (particularly if they’re new). As such, we ensure that everyone in the company is informed about the policy but from there, trust our teammates to make an appropriate decision. Implementing NMW with your team If you want to implement a No Meeting Wednesday policy at your company, we recommend adding NMW as a recurring event for the entire staff as a gentle reminder to keep those days free. Encourage team members to use judgement when scheduling a meeting on a Wednesday, if a meeting has to happen. Results Since NMW have become a regular occurrence at Asana, we’ve noticed that our productivity, in terms of number of tasks completed and work accomplished, increases over other days of the week. Having one day focused on flow time is a simple and effective way to get teammates energized, get heads down in the work they need to or want to do, and feel that at least one day in every week, their day isn’t schedule-driven. No Meeting Wednesday is an integral part of Asana’s culture, and something everyone looks forward to. Have you tried implementing No Meeting Wednesday? We’d love to hear how it’s working for you. This article is part of a series of spotlights on how we work at Asana. Read our previous article on how to implement AoRs. (Published on the Asana blog)2
- Cross-functional collaboration: why we struggle with it and what to do(This post was originally published on the Asana blog: Cross-functional collaboration) Given the amount of technology built to improve team communication, cross-functional collaboration should be easier than ever. We can instantly contact coworkers with Slack. We can share documents across the globe with Google Drive. We can assign tasks and collaborate on projects in Asana. However, introducing new software to your team isn’t always enough. You likely have other, more interpersonal, barriers to overcome as well. At InVision, for example, collaboration tools play a key role in coordinating work between the product and marketing teams. However, they also emphasize the importance of constant communication, clear delegation of responsibilities, and company-wide knowledge of upcoming product launches. All of these ingredients feed into their ability to successfully collaborate across multiple teams—and their marketing campaigns are stronger for it. When you lack of clarity of purpose, it becomes apparent when you try to break out of your silo to collaborate—and then hit a wall. Cross-functional collaboration can unlock opportunities for companies to do their best possible work. So why do we fight it? And why do we have a hard time facilitating it even when we all agree we want it? Below, you’ll find 5 common barriers to collaboration across teams, departments, and functions—along with solutions for each. What is cross-functional collaboration? Put simply, cross-functional collaboration is when people from different teams or functions (marketing, sales, engineering, HR) within a company join forces to work on a common goal, project, or responsibility. It can be anything from day-to-day responsibilities, like customer support and marketing teaming up on social media, to one-off projects, like sales and product developing a new, customer-converting feature. However, making it happen—not to mention making it work work—isn’t always easy. 1. The teams involved have conflicting goals—or no goals at all Have you ever tried to involve another team in a project, only to hear them say “that’s not a priority for us”? It can feel maddening if you know it will directly impact revenue, gain a significant number of new customers, fix a huge technical debt, or otherwise positively impact your business. In this case, you and the team at hand likely lack alignment on goals. Or worse, you don’t know the goals of your team or company. When you lack clarity of purpose, it becomes apparent when you try to break out of your silo to collaborate—and then hit a wall. Solution: align on goals and share them with everyone Encourage senior leaders to make your company goals publically visible so everyone, not just the leadership team, knows your company’s priorities. If you’re an individual contributor, make sure you know how your projects ladder up to broader goals (you can use the pyramid of clarity to help map this out) and communicate which goal your initiative supports with collaborators.1
- Dublin Down: Spotlight on Asana’s EMEA Business HQ(This post was originally published by Asana: Spotlight on Asana’s EMEA Business HQ) Last month we were excited to start welcoming our European customers into a world of more productive and efficient collaboration with the announcement of the Asana product and customer experiences now available in German and French. And just as the European demand for Asana has grown this year, so has our EMEA business HQ based here in Dublin, Ireland. From customer success to sales and user support, Asana’s E2
- Cracking the code: 6 steps to achieving your company goals(Article originally published by Asana)1
- Clarity in the design process: how to create a process map for your team(This post was originally published on the Asana blog: How to create a process map for your team by Ben Blumenfeld) There’s something I often hear from designers at early-stage startups in my work at Designer Fund: “I wish we had more clarity around the process we use to take a product from idea to launch.” This is why I often recommend to teams and leaders that they create a process map of their ideal design process. In other words, a template that everyone can refer to as they bring a produc1
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Work history
Business Development ConsultantAsana
Aylesbury, United KingdomFull Time