We know companies spend too much time in meetings but fortunately, an effective project management set-up can help.
Whether you’re an agency, service company, or any other team using Asana, an effective project management tool can improve your companies’ workflows to be more streamlined and efficient.
This post will dive into how effective organizations use Asana* to reduce time spent in meetings and increase time spent serving, selling, or supporting clients.
*We’re partial towards Asana, but these philosophies apply to any project management tool you may use
Increase Productivity by Cutting Your Meeting Times
Long, unproductive meetings are one of the most common time-robbers managers face.
Sure, team meetings are sometimes a necessary communication vehicle for team collaboration, morale, and brainstorming. But lengthy meetings can delay deadlines and hurt employee morale.
Think about it this way: an hour-long meeting with 8 people is essentially an entire day’s work! Could that time be used more productively? Could that time be spent developing code? Working with clients? Selling to more customers?
Often, managers use meetings to obtain project statuses, share information, discuss project issues, and hold team members accountable. A successful deployment of a project management tool can take these discussions away from a meeting so you can focus on the most high-impact topics. This time can then be used to discuss blockers, challenges, and strategies.
Or, better yet, don’t hold the meeting at all!
No More Status Meetings
If your Asana is set up in a way that is transparent and clear, all the information you would gather at a status meeting is already available at your fingertips. Depending on your specific industry, we also recommend opening up “view-only” permissions so teams can get a sense of what is happening across the organization.
(Quick note – you may find that setting up Asana is the easy part. Building a culture and systems to ensure that the data is always up to date is the bigger challenge.)
So, instead of another boring roundtable where everyone says the status of their tasks, traditional meetings can be a platform to discuss strategy, roadblocks, and high-level topics.
Continuous Updates
Speaking of updates! In addition to better status meetings, by making Asana updates a part of your team’s daily workflow, you’ll get consistent access to the status of any project or task — no need to wait until weekly meetings to see a current project’s status.
As long as your team members or clients have permission to see status across projects, they can see key updates across the organization.
Taking it one step further, we recommend using Asana’s reporting tools or a 3rd party product like Velocity to create reports to highlight the most relevant information in a way that makes easy to digest.
For example, you can generate a report that provides a snapshot of the number of open tasks sorted by team members. As you’ll see in the example below, tasks are color-coded by priority. This is a great way to check updates at a glance, save time, and keep your team on task.
Better Meetings
We’d love to say Asana can help meetings go away entirely, but unfortunately, that’s probably not entirely true.
Sometimes you simply can’t avoid a meeting, or a meeting is the best medium to talk through a problem or brainstorm. When you do have meetings, Asana can make meetings more effective and productive.
Asana has a great template to help create meeting agendas directly on the platform to prepare your team members.
Asana can also help facilitate meeting follow-ups. While some people have their own note-taking preferences, Asana connects your team to a central source to keep track of action items for the entire team.
Asana Features to Utilize
Although these are core features of Asana, they contribute to helping customers reduce meetings and teams run more effectively.
Team Collaboration
Asana gives your team members a central place to communicate and collaborate on project progress and goals.
Slack or other messaging tools have their own value. Still, by keeping discussions connected to a specific project, conversations stay focused and relevant.
Managers can catch up and contribute to project activity by browsing through team collaboration messages held directly in the relevant task.
File-Sharing
One of the most overlooked features of Asana is its ability to organize files, documents, and information in one central location.
Teams no longer have to waste time digging through old files or asking which file is the most recent version.
Integrations with Figma, Canva, and more make it easy to share and view files created in these applications.
Mobile App
With the ability for team members to access Asana from the convenience of their mobile phones, colleagues can check statuses, update projects, or comment on a task wherever they are!
We especially encourage this for quick check ins before big meetings and presentations to ensure your data is up to date!
Actionable Tips and Takeaways
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- Be aware of permissions. The tradeoffs between privacy and transparency are difficult, and will vary depending on your organization. We’ll often see teams keep everything open for the wider team, but things that include sensitive information will be left in a separate project.
- Data outputs are only as good as the inputs. Make sure your team has a plan in place to make sure that tasks are updated regularly. (Integrations can be helpful here too!)
- Make gathering insights easy for your team by creating dashboards.
- Leverage integrations with products you already use. Here are some of Asana’s most popular integrations.
- Get the whole team involved. When Asana is used across teams, you can ensure transparency and alignment. That means less time in meetings, more time with clients, and better results all around!
As you can see, Project Management platforms increase productivity and save time. Asana allows teams to create custom solutions that make their work-life simpler and more manageable.
As always, we’re here to help you get the most value out of your Project Management tools and software. If you want to explore more ways to increase productivity and reduce meetings, we’re here to help: [email protected]