SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Asana, a leading work management platform for teams, announced the introduction of Automation, a new suite of features built to automate your team’s processes so you can focus on the work that matters. Automation is available now for teams on Asana’s Business and Enterprise offerings.
Coinciding with the introduction of Automation, Asana published its Anatomy of Work Index, an annual in-depth study exploring the ways we’re spending time in our modern workplace. Across 10,000 survey respondents in Australia, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S, the Anatomy of Work Index found that 83 percent of employees say their team isn’t living up to their efficiency potential by not having the right processes in place. As a result, global workers are spending more than 10 percent of their time on pure duplication of effort - equaling over 200 hours annually.
“Globally, knowledge workers are spending more time coordinating in email, spreadsheets and meetings than on the actual job they’ve been hired to do,” said Alex Hood, Head of Product at Asana. “In fact, 60 percent of their time is being wasted on ‘work about work’, leaving only 27 percent for their skill-based job and 13 percent for strategic thinking.”
Hood continues, “As illustrated by our survey findings, we believe that the most productive and happiest teams have clarity on who is doing what by when. Earlier this year we launched Workload, empowering teams to be more agile when planning, monitoring and managing their efforts. Now with Automation, we’re introducing the ability to automate your routine tasks so you can spend more energy on your craft and leave the repetitive busywork to Asana.”
Introducing Asana Automation
Asana Automation enables individuals, teams and ultimately organizations to achieve new levels of efficiency and productivity with the introduction of a custom Rules builder, Vision and Voice mobile features and smarter project templates.
Rules
As part of today’s launch, Asana is debuting Rules to automate the manual steps associated with work intake, task routing and agile workflows. Powered by an intuitive custom builder, Rules, such as automatically routing new tasks and giving the right team members visibility at the right time, can be created in mere seconds. Through leveraging curated presets or a simple fill-in-the-blank editor, Rules ensures workflows are tailored to the way your team works best.
In beta testing, Asana teams using the Rules builder saved over 400 steps per week. With more than 70 unique custom-built and preset Rule combinations at launch and more coming soon, Rules delivers industry-leading ease-of-use with the ability to move work forward faster.
“Before Asana Automation, we were doing more than 400 manual steps every week,” said Aurel Laor, Global Marketing Project Manager, Appsflyer. “With Rules, we’ve automated the majority of our steps, like assigning new tasks, adding specific followers, and reassigning ownership based on custom field values. This not only saves a significant amount of time and effort, but also ensures work is following a consistent process.”
Asana Voice and Vision Features
With Asana’s leading mobile app for iPhone, Automation now goes with you to ensure that wherever the work is happening, Asana is there. Asana Voice allows an individual to capture and transcribe an audio voice memo directly into an Asana task. Users can simply create a task and select the microphone icon to begin recording. Their recording is then automatically transcribed in the task title and description, as well as attached to the task as an audio file, all from the convenience of their smartphone.
Using Asana Vision with OCR (optical character recognition) and Proofing, teams can capture an iPhone image in real-time, such as a brainstorming diagram on a whiteboard, and automatically assign the appropriate subtasks in Asana based on the image text.
Smart Project Templates
Automation uplevels project planning by integrating smart capabilities into Asana’s extensive templates library. Now when using a template, such as an event plan or campaign launch, a complete workback schedule can be instantly layered on. When a conflict arises between task deadlines, Asana will automatically correct, enabling teams to spend less time setting up projects and workflows, and more time getting work done.
“Removing barriers to work is essential for adoption,” according to IDC Research Director of Social and Collaboration, Wayne Kurtzman. “The smarter Project Templates added to Asana enables easier access to processes and procedures, and removes barrier to the flow of work.”
Starting today, Automation is available for customers on Asana’s Business and Enterprise offerings. For more information, visit Asana.com.
Methodology
The Anatomy of Work Index was conducted by Sapio Research on behalf of Asana, to understand how people spend time at work. Asana and Sapio Research co-designed the questionnaire and surveyed the behaviors and attitudes of 10,223 knowledge workers across the UK; US; Japan; Australia/New Zealand; and Germany. Visit https://asana.com/resources/anatomy-of-work to download the full report.
About Asana
Asana helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Asana has more than 70,000 paying organizations and millions of free organizations across 195 countries. Global customers such as AirAsia, AllBirds, Grab, KLM Air France, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Sephora, Traveloka, Uber, and Viessmann rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to digital transformation to product launches and marketing campaigns.
