The last year and a half has really tested how well organisations in the UK—and around the world—are able to communicate goals and create clarity for their teams. Without strong goals to work towards together, teams flounder and can’t do their best work, especially considering the amount of sudden change and stress people have experienced.
Leading a company through a global pandemic is no easy feat. It requires resilience, purpose, and a whole lot of empathy. At our recent Focus & Flow Summit, Asana Customer Success Manager Rasha Harvey sat down with Blavity’s Founder & CEO Morgan DeBaun to learn how she guided her team through change while staying focused on her organization’s purpose. Here are a few of Morgan’s insights along with tips on how to achieve greater focus and flow.
While a company’s headcount might grow person-by-person, its functional complexity grows exponentially. In a team of only 10 people, there are over a thousand possible combinations of working relationships; for a team of 15, there are over thirty thousand. But let’s forget the math. After all, we’re not talking about cracking a safe, we’re talking about working with people. And when we work with people, complexity is about more than a numbers game.
In today’s world of big data, we have incredible amounts of information. How many people saw a particular ad and how many proceeded to click? Which campaigns brought in the most pipeline and what percentage of those deals closed? Through data, we can find the answers to all of these questions. Yet, with all the dashboards, spreadsheets, and analysts we have at our fingertips, one question is difficult to answer: How well is your team working towards achieving their goals?
The digital media landscape is vast and ever changing. With constantly moving parts and assets, it can be challenging to manage. Now imagine running a business—and all of its moving parts—on top of that. That’s exactly what Don Brown, founder and CEO, at The Longtail Agency does on a day-to-day basis. The Longtail Agency is a full-service digital media and marketing agency that specializes in building strategic full-scale campaigns to drive tangible results for their clients.
Knowledge workers today are more distributed than ever. They’re also more distracted. In fact, 80% of employees work with their inbox and communication apps open, leading to nearly 75% feeling pressured to multitask during the day according to the Anatomy of Work Index. The result? Lower efficiency, overlooked messages, and missed deadlines.
The past year has been a rollercoaster of changes for teams globally. For many companies, the abrupt change from working in-person to working remotely disrupted the way teams communicated. One of the biggest challenges of working remotely is ensuring that your team members are staying connected and aligned. Teams can easily get stuck in silos from working in different time zones or juggling several different tools in the remote working environment.
Today’s senior leaders have a visibility problem. Within your organization, you likely oversee many projects across many teams, balancing details and budgets competing for your attention. If you pause for a moment, do you know exactly the state of your organization’s work at any given time?
In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly announced the first annual Global Day of Parents. Since then, June 1st has become a day dedicated to appreciating parents for their selfless commitments and sacrifices. At Asana, we’ve been intentional about fostering an inclusive environment where everyone—including parents and caregivers—feel supported and can be themselves at work.
In a world of distributed and hybrid work, it’s more important than ever for organizations to create seamless workflows that empower collaboration and enhance cross-functional visibility. That’s why we launched Asana Partners, a single platform for distributed work that connects over 200 essential application partners.
