01732 759725 31 magazine HYBRIDWORKING common cause is a lack of effective work management. Reducing ‘work about work’ should be a key priority for every business. To do it, business leaders and their teams should focus on strategies and work management tools that can provide clarity over everyone’s roles, responsibilities, deadlines and goals and, in doing so, give them more time to focus on the work they were hired to do. In this context, the work management space can be used to ask quick questions without pulling the whole team into an hour-long status call; to provide better guidance on when meetings are necessary; and to reduce demand for them in the first place by ensuring that everyone knows clearly what work they need to do. Hybrid working is a far more familiar concept than it was 24 months ago. Even so, many fail to recognise its nuances. Now is the time to connect with your team and identify the hybrid model that best suits your mission. By focusing on team structure and keeping sight of the wider issues involved in the future of work, organisations can be confident of striking the right balance and look forward to sustainable hybrid working long into the future. Going with the flow Asana has enhanced its work management platform for teams with the launch of Asana Flow, a suite of new tools and features that enables teams to build, run and improve cross-functional workflows. Alex Hood, Chief Product Officer, Asana, said: “Companies today are organised functionally, but the real work that moves an organisation forward is done cross-functionally. Almost two years in, the work-fromeverywhere era has shown just how difficult cross-functional work is when it’s siloed across teams and tools. Without a shared tool to see how their work connects across the organisation, employees are spending more time on work coordination than the job they’ve been hired to do – leading to lower engagement and rising burnout. Asana Flow’s Workflow Builder makes it easy for anyone to set up start-to-finish workflows, while being comprehensive enough to effectively coordinate business-critical work across teams.” The core component is Workflow Builder, powered by AsanaWork Graph process mapping, which enables customers to design and build connected workflows up, down and across an organisation so that teams can see clearly who’s doing what and by when. Additional functionality is provided by: Template Library, which enables users to share standout workflows or access best practices inspired by other companies; and App Components, which integrates more than 200 essential work applications into the Asana UI and Asana workflows, supported by a developer toolkit for customised integrations. Work Graph’s intelligence also powers Universal Reporting, which includes the ability to measure and optimise workflow performance over time, for example by analysing how long a task takes to complete or by identifying any process bottlenecks. To help employees, especially those contributing to multiple workflows, visualise and prioritise the most urgent tasks, the suite also includes the Asana Home intelligent, customisable dashboard. Its key features include: n My Priorities: Quickly spot delays and focus on priority projects with a centralised view of upcoming personal work; n People: Assign a task, send a message and view shared work with recent, frequent and favourite collaborators; n Projects: See how work in key projects ladders up to company goals; n Private Notepad: Write notes, link tasks and track quick ideas without leaving Asana; and (coming soon) n Recommended Projects and Tasks Assigned to Others to surface even more insights. www.asana.com Platform and function Will Hale, Northern European Leader at work management company monday.com, highlights two trends shaping today’s hybrid working world After almost two years of hybrid working, work platforms will become the norm with regards to how we work. “The pandemic has been a real catalyst for changing the way the entire world works. The terms ‘flexible’ and ‘hybrid’ are now mainstream and have evolved to give employees more control and flexibility over their day. However, the flexible and hybrid working we know now is not the same as it was in the early days of 2020. “To cope with the overnight shift in ways of working, businesses cobbled together a few tools to get work done; Zoom for meetings; Outlook for email; Google Docs for editing, etc. But now, enterprises are realising they need a centralised platform or operating system within which all work can happen, no matter its nature or scope. As we enter the third year of pandemic-era work, we’ll see even more adoption of these types of systems to accelerate platformed collaboration.” 2022 will be the year of no-code and (very) low-code working. “Low-code and no-code are not new concepts to the tech industry – they have been around for over a decade in some shape or form. Historically, the application of code to products has remained the territory of IT or at least people/teams with some technical experience. However, in recent years, the opportunity to use nocode and low-code tools has opened up to include regular business users. If you look at the likes of Wordpress or Canva, they produce high quality content that requires no technical skill. “Low-code and no-code builds are set to become even more mainstream in 2022. In the world of work, teams will no longer buy pre-fab tools and platforms, but instead choose those that give them the flexibility to design the workflows and processes they want, customised to the nature and breadth of their work and teams. It is this ability to work your own way that will allow teams to define the next generation of distributed work.” www.monday.com Will Hale
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