The Secret to Building a Connected Enterprise

Through market uncertainty, organizations need to be laser-focused on what matters most: delivering value to customers. 

This can be particularly difficult during times of change, as shifting priorities can make it challenging to align teams quickly while getting top-down visibility into work progress.

“The organizations that will come out stronger through today’s challenges are those that can mobilize teams quickly behind business-critical initiatives,” Amy Borsetti, Asana’s General Manager of the Americas, says. “Leaders need a better way to ensure teams are solving the right problems together. Without clarity, you have teams running in multiple directions.”

Agility cannot be confined to a single team or department. The organization as a whole must have the right technology in place to drive cross-team alignment and collaboration.

Work management technology is the next evolution of work. It has the power to accelerate business growth by creating a central hub for collaboration—where business goals can be turned into action, silos can be broken down between teams, and real-time visibility into the state of work can be achieved—all on one platform. 

Now is the time to embrace this better way of working.

It’s inevitable that business goals will fluctuate to address market conditions. But these fluctuations can happen without much warning and time to plan. Nevertheless, every employee needs to align behind these changes—and quickly—to support the business. 

In these moments, leaders often worry if their guidance will cascade successfully down to every employee at the company. Leaders also struggle to get real-time insight into how their teams are tracking against these goals—often waiting for periodic status updates that take a long time to compile and quickly expire. 

“The most important workplace technologies right now are those that enable leaders to track what's going on holistically, including how employees and teams are doing against their goals,” says Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor whose research focuses on management practices. “When responding to circumstances, leaders need quick access to that data in order to make strategic decisions on planning and resource allocations.”

Leaders should also pay close attention to how much time their employees are spending in meetings and on duplicative work. According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Global Index, people at large companies spend 4.3 hours each week in unnecessary meetings, causing 27% to miss deadlines.

Old and inefficient ways of working are proving costly to both employee productivity and business profits. “Higher productivity allows you to produce more with less, which of course increases margins, cuts costs, and drives growth,” Bloom says. 

Organizations need a new strategy for ensuring employees are spending time on the most important work—work that maps directly to business goals. When employees fully understand how their work aligns to top-line goals, they become more engaged and effective. According to Gallup, teams with engaged workers achieve 23% higher profits and 18% higher sales productivity than those with unengaged workers.

Work management technology is key for helping employees reduce wasted time and stay focused on work that drives the bottom line, especially during pivotal moments. 

“Collaboration is broken,” Borsetti says. “There are too many disparate tools used across teams, with employees at large organizations now switching between 9 apps each day. It slows productivity down, siloes information, and makes it hard to work cross-functionally.” 

More than ever, leaders are grappling with how to get different departments to work better together, move quickly, and meet the needs of customers. Reducing collaboration friction and making teams successful from anywhere is a focal point for leaders in this new era of work.

To improve cross-team effectiveness, leaders need to build a connected tech stack that unifies information around a single source of truth. With a centralized work management platform, teams can organize and connect work intuitively—no matter where the work occurs. 

By integrating with external tools that are critical to success, a work management platform can break down information silos and further elevate the investment in these solutions. It gives teams the confidence to plan, organize, and execute their most ambitious initiatives. 

The pace of work has changed tremendously, and what is required of business leaders today is monumentally different than in the past. Faster ways of working require new solutions. Companies that use Asana’s work management platform are seeing 5.5% higher net productivity for daily users and 34% more projects being delivered on time, according to IDC¹. 

"The old ways of working are costing organizations a ton of wasted time, and as we all know, time is money," Borsetti says. “By reducing wasted meeting time and duplicative work, Asana gives teams time back to innovate and work on what really matters.”

It’s time to embrace this new way of working—where organization-wide alignment, collaboration, and visibility come together on one platform. Work management can help any organization become more connected and achieve business goals with the utmost efficiency.

Learn how Asana Enterprise can help your organization align, adapt, and accelerate work with confidence.

¹ IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Asana, The Business Value of Asana (doc #US48130821, August 2021)

² Ibid.