How to keep distributed teams connected

Con­tent and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools may have enabled a rea­son­ably seam­less tran­si­tion to remote work­ing dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, but the rapid shift has also fueled dis­trac­tion and dis­rup­tion. Mes­sage pings and meet­ings are at an all-time high, while focus time has fall­en by the way­side. In fact, employ­ees are not only spend­ing more time on less valu­able work, but they are also more like­ly to be feel­ing dis­con­nect­ed and dis­en­gaged, accord­ing to Asana’s Anato­my of Work Index.

The research, which sur­veys thou­sands of knowl­edge work­ers around the world each year, found that UK employ­ees are spend­ing 61% of their time on what Asana calls “work about work”. This is work that does not add val­ue, such as ping­ing co-work­ers for an update on a project, attend­ing sta­tus meet­ings or piec­ing togeth­er an end-of-week report. This means remote work­ers are spend­ing less than half of their time on the deep knowl­edge work they were actu­al­ly hired for.

“With the men­tal toll of con­tin­u­ous lock­downs and the uncer­tain­ty of the pan­dem­ic, work­ers are find­ing it hard­er than ever to remain aligned and con­nect­ed to their team,” says Simon O’Kane, Head of EMEA at Asana, a work man­age­ment plat­form that helps teams orches­trate their work. “In the next phase of dis­trib­uted work, lead­ers have an oppor­tu­ni­ty, and a busi­ness imper­a­tive, to take action and rede­fine how they keep their teams engaged, aligned and on track.”

With most com­pa­nies look­ing to adopt a hybrid work­ing mod­el post-pan­dem­ic, com­pa­nies face the dif­fi­cult task of prepar­ing their man­age­ment to lead teams dis­trib­uted across time zones and depart­ments, with some in-office and oth­ers remain­ing remote. With some at home, some in the office, and most mix­ing and match­ing, organ­i­sa­tions can expect new chal­lenges around vis­i­bil­i­ty and coor­di­na­tion, and the pos­si­ble emer­gence of vast­ly dif­fer­ent employ­ee expe­ri­ences at the same com­pa­ny.

“If they’re not care­ful, com­pa­nies could see two tribes: those who work pre­dom­i­nant­ly in the office ver­sus those work­ing pre­dom­i­nant­ly at home,” says O’Kane. “What does that mean in terms of access to infor­ma­tion? If there’s still an office cul­ture where peo­ple get ad hoc updates at the cof­fee machine, home work­ers are going to be dis­ad­van­taged, and if home work­ers are more like­ly to be young par­ents, for instance, will that lead to new work­place inequal­i­ties? It’s a real­ly com­plex top­ic and just under­lines the need for task clar­i­ty and team vis­i­bil­i­ty, regard­less of where peo­ple work.”

For hybrid work to work, lead­ers must arm their employ­ees with a sin­gle source of truth across the organ­i­sa­tion. Asana achieves this by inte­grat­ing with each department’s exist­ing tools to stream­line the tech stack, keep­ing employ­ees pro­duc­tive, con­nect­ed and engaged wher­ev­er they are work­ing.

Ear­li­er this month, Asana launched a num­ber of new fea­tures to help employ­ees elim­i­nate dis­trac­tions and boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in a world of dis­trib­uted work. In part­ner­ship with Vimeo, the new Video Mes­sag­ing fea­ture gives users the chance to con­nect async, erad­i­cat­ing unnec­es­sary meet­ings. Enabling Asana users to send embed video notes with­in the real-time con­text of work, projects and tasks, to cre­ate short videos of them­selves and/or their screens.

Tran­scripts of these videos will also be auto­mat­i­cal­ly avail­able, allow­ing teams to exchange infor­ma­tion in a silo-free and per­son­alised way. Oth­er fea­tures include ‘My Tasks’ a per­son­al pri­ori­ti­sa­tion sys­tem that com­bines an individual’s to-dos with their broad­er team’s work, and ‘Smart Cal­en­dar Assis­tant Inte­gra­tion’ with Clock­wise, a lead­ing smart cal­en­dar assis­tant, to eas­i­ly sched­ule tasks into focus time with­out leav­ing Asana — help­ing employ­ees man­age their time to get mean­ing­ful work done.

“We make that coor­di­na­tion lay­er very democ­ra­tised and open,” O’Kane adds. “You don’t need to be an expert – it’s intu­itive and sim­ple to use, and you can access it from home, on the move and in the office. Now with our newest fea­tures, it is even eas­i­er to reduce dis­trac­tions and improve focus. With Asana, organ­i­sa­tions can elim­i­nate ‘work about work’ no mat­ter which mod­el they choose as we enter the hybrid age.”

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it asana.com

Pro­mot­ed by Asana