The Top 4 Roadblocks to Your Team's Productivity and How AI Can Solve Them, According to Asana's Head of Corporate Marketing

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You open your computer on a Monday morning, and you have a few Slack messages about a campaign you’re launching on Tuesday.

After you‘ve answered those, you check your inbox and see you’ve been tagged in some slides for that same campaign.

Once you’re done responding, you hop on a Zoom call to chat with stakeholders about last-minute tasks that need to be completed for launch. A few of the stakeholders would like you to email a follow-up from the meeting, so you do.

But others would rather you tag them in the appropriate Google docs, so you do that, too.

Suddenly it‘s 1pm, and you’ve done nothing substantial on your to-do list to get this project launched. Your entire day has been hopping in and out of various messaging apps, slide decks, and Zoom calls, just trying to get everyone aligned.

Sound familiar?

I spoke with Jake Cerf, Head of Corporate Marketing at Asana, to untangle the biggest challenges most teams face when it comes to productivity in 2024 – and how you can solve them.

What Teams Get Wrong When It Comes to Productivity

Jake empathizes with the chaos that can ensue when you don’t focus on creating efficient processes for team-wide productivity.

“It can get chaotic,” he told me, adding, “Before I joined Asana, I reflected back on how I spent my time coordinating with folks — and it was a mess. We would be on email, Slack, and Google docs, and slides. And you never really knew who was doing what, and when, and it was too easy to lose sight of the objective we were all after.”

Which sounds painfully relatable. Fortunately, he has some tried-and-true tips for cleaning up your team’s processes and creating more scalable options to improve cross-functional collaboration.

1. Each team leader needs to know how their work ladders up to corporate objectives — and they need to make it clear in their workflows.

People always want to know how their work connects to broader strategic initiatives. They want to feel seen, valued, and know they are making an impact. So much of a leader’s job is about making sure people are working on the right priorities, and aligning to goals that move the needle.

That’s what makes a product like Asana so crucial. Jake has an easy time ensuring he isn‘t micro-managing his team on specific tasks, and that’s because in Asana he can see how each sub-task his team is responsible for ladders up to the company’s key objectives for 2024.

Additionally, to solve for conflicting cross-department goals, it can be helpful to use one centralized productivity tool that highlights the top-down priorities for the company.

“As a leader, so much of our job is making sure people are working on the right things, helping unblock team members and enabling them to have a North star. It’s good for productivity because when folks feel like they’re working on things that matter, they do better …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog