At Asana, we’re big on helping organizations cut back on busywork and increase efficiency. This month, we’re proud to introduce a set of new features designed to help teams take back time and focus on what matters—even in a distracted world.
Just before the holidays in 2021, the marketing team at Mural was met with the most brow-furrowing of work problems: Company leaders presented them with an abstract-sounding challenge and gave them a hard deadline to figure it out. Mural was going to complete its first acquisition in its 10-year history and establish a new market category. But how does one launch a new category? And what is this new category? How does one communicate that positive transformation to customers?
My KonMari journey began a few months into the pandemic. I picked up Kondo’s definitive work about tidying up out of boredom. I admit I was surprised at how quickly her ideas resonated. It might have been the rut I was in because of lockdown and working from home, but I was immediately following the steps religiously at home. During a period of excessive time indoors, her process brought much-needed peace and joy to my home. Work was a different story, though.
Burnout is not a feeling. Burnout is a physiological and neurological condition that can take months to develop and months to undo. Throughout the working world, both burnout and imposter syndrome are pervasive: Asana’s Anatomy of Work research has found that seven in 10 knowledge workers experienced either burnout or imposter syndrome in the last year, with an average of 42% experiencing both. These data suggest that the root causes of burnout and imposter syndrome may be linked.
Great things happen when teams see the value of their work. But often, strategic initiatives are disconnected from day-to-day projects, leaving employees uncertain about their top priorities. According to the 2022 Anatomy of Work Index, nearly 1 in 3 employees can’t see a clear link between their day-to-day efforts and their company’s goals. To fulfill an organization’s mission and be effective, teams must have clarity about their goals and what’s needed to achieve them.
If you work from home, you’ve faced this dilemma: You want to show face during a video meeting to signal engagement with your job, but video meeting stress is the unavoidable consequence when you go on camera. It’s been more than two years since millions started working from home, and by this point, we’re all tired of seeing our own faces.
When you’re driving change to your stakeholders—be it the executive team, your employees, the board, or even the customers—the situation comes with its own gravitational force. “You have every opportunity to lose trust and to see it erode. So being genuine and getting it right really matters,” Anna Binder, Asana’s Head of People, explains to me in her matter-of-fact style during a recent phone call.
Erica Dhawan, the author and business consultant, is surrounded by cardboard moving boxes. Among the items she unpacked first were a bookshelf, a big plant, a ring light, a tripod, and a 4K video camera. For Mrs. Dhawan, settling in after a move from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Florida began by first unboxing these workplace essentials. (Her discussion with Asana was sandwiched between virtual keynotes for an investment firm and a technology company.)
