As global workforce adjusts to distributed work, Asana introduces new offering alongside survey findings that only 16% of companies are effective at setting and communicating goals

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Asana, a leading work management platform for teams, today announced the release of Goals, a flexible goal-tracking system that bridges the gap between company strategy and work execution. Asana Goals provides organizational leaders with a single source of truth for setting, tracking, and managing their company goals to ensure teams are working on the company’s most important work, no matter where they’re located.

Coinciding with the introduction of Goals, Asana and research firm Censuswide conducted a survey of over 6,000 knowledge workers from Australia, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. to uncover how distributed work resulting from the COVID-19 global pandemic has impacted organizations’ ability to effectively set, communicate and achieve company-wide goals.

Highlights from the survey findings include:

  • Nearly half of all respondents (45%) say their company goals have changed at least once since working remotely.
  • However, only 16% of workers believe that their company is effective at setting and communicating their organizational goals.
  • As a result, only one-quarter (26%) of employees have a clear understanding of how their individual work relates to their company’s goals.

“We know organizations work best when everyone has clarity on their company’s mission, objectives, and who’s doing what by when. But this clarity can be hard to achieve under normal circumstances and is even more challenging now, as organizations experience many shifting dynamics and business priority resets in 2020,” said Alex Hood, Head of Product, Asana. “According to our survey findings, employees using a collaborative work management tool like Asana are nearly twice as likely to say that they have a clear understanding of how their individual work relates to their company wide goals.”

Hood continues, “Today, we’re building on the clarity that work management platforms provide with the introduction of Asana Goals which are OKRs done right. Now companies have a single system to set their objectives and manage all the work needed to hit them. With the ability to see how the business is progressing towards the achievement of its goals in real-time, entire organizations will be better aligned, engaged and connected to their mission.”

Introducing Asana Goals

With Goals, aligning teams around clear Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and prioritizing the right work is easier than ever. Goals let every team member on every team see how their work contributes to organizational goals, why certain work is being prioritized, and what impact that work has on the achievement of their company’s mission. With this level of clarity, organizations can create an empowering sense of purpose for teams, motivating them to do their best work so they can achieve more ambitious goals.

Today, customers on Asana’s Business and Enterprise offerings can achieve unmatched organizational alignment via:

  • Company Goals: Longer-term goals tied to the achievement of your organization’s mission.
  • Team Goals: Shorter-term goals that ladder up to the company’s mission-oriented objectives.

Unlike setting and tracking goals in emails, spreadsheets or OKR software, Asana Goals enables everyone to manage goals and the actual work needed to achieve them in one place. By linking Goals across projects and entire Portfolios, leaders now have a bird’s-eye view of how teams are progressing on strategic initiatives, ultimately prioritizing the right work and seeing when and where initiatives are at-risk, before it’s too late. When a goal is off track, teams can drill down into the strategy, project and task that’s at risk — helping them to take corrective action instantly.

"We used to track our goals the way most companies do—in a spreadsheet. But we couldn't see progress in real time or proactively spot risks,” said Michael Chidgey, PMO and Program Manager, SiteMinder. “Now with Goals in Asana, we can track our quarterly goals alongside our work to stay aligned and on track."

By making Goals visible to everyone, individuals across every level of an organization have clarity on the company’s priorities at any given time. As teams become increasingly distributed as a result of the rapid shift to remote work, Goals ensure that when changes occur to company priorities and initiatives, organizational leaders won’t need to spend countless hours remapping priority initiatives. Instead, they can revise goals and pivot business focus instantly to pursue their highest-value work.

"We have reached the point where employee goals can be tied to the systems that support the work being done. This creates a seamless, more objective and accurate measure of success," according to Wayne Kurtzman, Research Director of Social and Collaboration, IDC. "It also provides insights to some of the challenges to the goals while there is still time to make changes."

Announcing the Future of Work from Asana

Expanding on the launch of Goals, today Asana will be sharing exclusive access to the company’s multi-year vision for the future of work at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time/1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Featuring Co-Founder and CEO, Dustin Moskovitz and Head of Product, Alex Hood, this first-of-its-kind event will explore how Asana is reimagining the future of work as organizations around the world navigate the great business reset. Join the live Future of Asana event at https://asana.com/future-of-asana.

Survey Research Methodology

The Asana Goals survey research was conducted on behalf of Asana by Censuswide. The survey of over 6,387 knowledge workers from Australia, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. was conducted from June 3rd - 15th, 2020 to assess how companies around the world approach goal setting, tracking and communicating, whether they’re working in-person or remotely.

About Asana

Asana helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Asana has more than 75,000 paying organizations and millions of free organizations across 195 countries. Global customers such as AllBirds, Comcast, CyberAgent, Far East Organization, Sephora, Sky, Spotify, Viessmann and Woolworths rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to digital transformation to product launches and marketing campaigns.

Contacts

Leah Wiedenmann leahwiedenmann@asana.com 415-612-0635