In the past year due to the health emergency caused by the Coronavirus, Smart Working has experienced exponential growth, to date there are about 8 million Italian workers working from home compared to 570 thousand in the previous year.
Among the many tools created to better organize work from home, it is impossible not to mention Asana, which is simple, adaptable and powerful.
Asana is a web application designed for project managers with the goal of assisting work teams in organizing, planning and monitoring activities.
It is commonly placed within the family of project management tools, although the more correct reference is work management or personal productivity software.
It is a "freemium" product, meaning it comes with a free basic plan and paid versions that have additional features.
Asana was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google and ex-Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving productivity for Facebook employees. The product was commercially launched in April 2012. In December 2018, the company was valued at $1.5 billion.
The two founders of the software decided to use the name Asana, a term that often occurs in yoga terminology and means "easy to learn," precisely to emphasize the simplicity and intuitiveness of this tool.
Through this application, teams can create projects, assign work to teammates, specify deadlines and communicate about tasks; it also includes reporting tools, file attachments, calendars and more.
But how is Asana structured?
The structure of Asana involves four levels:
- Organization
- Team
- Projects
- Task
An organization (a company) may have multiple teams; each team may manage one or more projects; each project consists of tasks and subtasks.
If you sign up using your company email, you can create an organization: all your colleagues who sign up will automatically be linked to the work group that has been created.
Asana to date also includes integration with numerous Apps.
- Google ecosystem: Calendar, Gmail, Drive, Chrome, Sheets, Forms, Skedpal, YouTube.
- Microsoft ecosystem: Teams, Office 365, Outlook, Azure Active Directory, Power Platform.
- Other communication and marketing tools: Adobe Creative Cloud, Mailbird, Slack, Vimeo, MailChimp, Miro, Zoom, Jira, Hubspot, Salesforce.
- File sharing: CloudApp, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, Sharepoint.
- Reporting and time tracking: Tableau, TimeCamp, Instagarntt, HourStack, Timely, pomoDone, Everhour.
The tool, is avowedly designed to meet the needs of those working in different contexts and realities.
For example, it targets teams working in areas such as.
- Marketing
- Commercial department
- Product Development
- IT Department
- Human Resources
- Administration and finance
- Operations
- Top Management
It is continuously updated to meet the ever-changing needs of organizations from around the world.
Asana is also used by companies such as Google, Danone, HubSpot, Deloitte, Accenture, Nasa, Harvard University, General Electric, Sky, Vodafone, Avon, Zappos.com, Spotify, Uber, PayPal, The New York Times, Quora, and National Geographic.
Asana and the new work landscape
In this new and dynamic work landscape every day we interface with and rely on hundreds of applications designed to make everyone's life easier, in fact, according to data from the Global EN Anatomy of Work Report on average people used to change about 10 applications more than 25 times a day to do their work.
Members of distributed teams who, while working remotely, try to recreate the "physical office" resort to multiple apps, but the overlapping of apps inevitably leads to slower work; in fact, 27 percent of employees claim that a high percentage of information and work done is lost when switching between apps, and the resulting overload of apps in turn makes staff less efficient.
This is why relying on a work management platform, such as Asana, designed and purpose-built is the key to success in saving time, effort and money.
According to IDC (the world's leading market research, consulting and events company in IT and digital innovation), teams using three or more integrations experience savings of about 30 hours per week.
Today, in order to "survive" the labor market, organizations must demonstrate great resilience, a strong predisposition to adapt and new ways of thinking and organizing their activities.
However, this organizational capacity often fails, creating quite a few problems, in fact,
in 2019, the World Health Organization classified burnout syndrome as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic stress in the workplace.
For this reason, organizing the work properly is imperative, and Asana is the solution.
Asana represents a workspace within which you can create projects and get a detailed overview of all activities related to the work to be done so that you can synchronously manage all of your team's activities while meeting deadlines and achieving your goals effectively.
This tool also allows you to improve not only work performance, but also to create team spirit, which is the basic prerequisite for leading your team to success.
Nicole Di Salvo
Project Manager - Digital Innovation Days
Anna Moschetta
Communication Trainee - Digital Innovation Days