Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Effective communication transcends simple information exchanges. Understanding the emotions and motives behind the given information is essential. In addition to successfully conveying messages, it's important to actively listen and fully understand the conversation, making the speaker feel heard and understood. Today, we’re in almost constant contact with our coworkers.

Modern-day product development isn't just about the latest feature or trending use case. At Asana, we're redefining product development by innovating how we listen and respond to our customers. Partnered with our work management platform, we can more effortlessly turn this feedback into action.

Goals give structure to big-picture plans for your business—but they’re only useful if you can action on them. Lotte Vester, Head of Organizational Strategy at Asana, drives a process to guide teams through execution of goals. She helps transform broad initiatives into focused goals and Key Results (KRs) for Asana's dynamic teams. But she’s a one person team, and Asana is a multi-faceted, global organization. So she doesn’t try to do it alone.

An employee performance review is a meeting between a manager and their employee to discuss how the team member is pacing toward organizational goals. Though simple in design, there are many ways to create a more effective process that brings your reviews to life. See the top 15 performance review templates to measure success and improve your review skills. Measuring success is a key piece to leading an effective team. After all, you can’t improve until you know what skills you need to build.

Mobilizing an entire organization is hard. Processes often involve many stakeholders and workflows, while teams work in isolation with their own tools and collaboration methods. As a result, trying to execute your business plan can feel like turning a massive tanker ship—slow, clunky, and inefficient. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve taken a deep dive into four common organizational planning challenges so you can arm yourself with the right solutions for each one.

Project closure is the last stage of a project, when you tie up loose ends, communicate your results, and debrief with your team. Just because you’ve hit your objectives doesn’t mean work is finished, and a clear project closure process ensures that you check every important task off your to-do list before officially wrapping things up. In this article, learn eight steps to help you close projects with confidence.

Both PESTLE analysis and PEST analysis are research tools that help you analyze the surrounding political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological environment that can affect your business. Learn how these tools can help prevent risk and inform your team’s future business decisions. Change can be scary. Oftentimes, the best way to deal with change is to understand it.

If you’ve ever struggled with mapping project tasks or keeping track of dependencies, we have the perfect solution for you. A PERT chart, also known as a PERT diagram, is a tool used to schedule, organize, and map out tasks within a project. PERT stands for program evaluation and review technique. It provides a visual representation of a project's timeline and breaks down individual tasks. These charts are similar to Gantt charts, but structured differently.

Action items are follow up tasks that you create from a meeting. They should be clearly defined with a description and a deadline, and help bring the conversations you have in meetings to life. Here, we’ll show you the benefits of creating action items, how to create them, and potential mistakes to avoid. It's the end of a successful project kickoff meeting and your team members are ready to move forward to execute everything that was decided in the meeting.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) is a phenomenon that states that roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. In this article, we break down how you can use this principle to help prioritize tasks and business efforts. When you get into the office in the morning, what's the first thing you do? Most people grab their caffeinated beverage of choice, check their email, and prioritize their tasks for the day. But what techniques do you use to identify what needs to get done first?