Asana, a leading work management platform, recently unveiled new research and announced the release of new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The company conducted a survey of 3,000 workers in the UK and US to explore their attitudes towards productivity, innovation and AI, all of which will shape the future of work. I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Rebecca Hinds, Head of The Work Innovation Lab at Asana. Here is the link to listen to the interview.
Rebecca heads the Work Innovation Lab, an innovation think tank that collaborates with two dozen professors globally.
“Work today is so complex and dynamic, that executives need more research, insights and data to navigate all the changes at work. This week, we are launching the work innovation score alongside a body of research on how organizations can leverage AI to boost organizational productivity. Based on your Asana data, we use AI to understand what healthy collaboration and what are the ones that are harming innovation. It can assess your company’s innovation potential based on your use of Asana.”
This metric assists executives in evaluating team collaborations, identifying organizational silos, particularly in the current shift to remote work. Moreover, it can uncover individuals who are overburdened with work and those who are at risk of experiencing burnout.
4 key drivers of innovation
There are four key metrics that drive innovation within organizations:
Cohesion:
How well employees are working with one another
Velocity:
How quickly work can move through your organization
Resilience:
How stable is your organization if individuals leave their organization or switch teams
Capacity:
How much bandwidth your employees have to do their best work and if they are overloaded or underloaded, in order to help balance that load within the organization.
How productivity and innovation share a symbiotic relationship
While these are innovation metrics, they look closely related to productivity metrics.
Rebecca highlighted that “innovation is not only about product innovation. Just as important, or even more important, is how you innovate your work processes. Productivity is so top of mind for executives. To boost productivity, you need to innovate how you work.”
Business leaders are facing immense market pressures and significant changes in the way we work. As a result, they are now giving more importance to productivity than ever before. According to Asana’s data, 99% of the respondents believe that organizational productivity is crucial to their company’s leadership team. This percentage is higher than those who prioritize revenue growth, which stands at 92%.
How the Pandemic led to changes in productivity metrics
Productivity has been top of mind for executives for decades, but since the Pandemic, it has changed how we measure it. Rebecca mentioned knowledge work is much more difficult to measure. Metrics do not always reflect the quality, the impact or the values of the work done. “When we moved to distributed work, it has been increasingly difficult to measure how work is happening. Before executives could gauge how work was being done, regardless of whether that gauge was accurate. Losing that face time with the employees in the office, there is a need to find something that will give executives and leaders more confidence that work is actually happening.”
A disconnect between executives vs. employees in terms of innovation
There are two clear disconnects between executives and employees when it comes to levels of innovation
- While 91% of executives say fostering an innovation culture is important, only 12% actively measure it.
- 45% of executives rate their organization as fostering an innovation culture among employees. Yet less than a quarter (25%) of employees rate their company’s innovation culture as very or extremely innovative.
There is a clear and urgent need for better ways to measure collaboration within organizations. 89% of executives say it would be valuable to understand better how well employees work together to prevent burnout and promote more focus.
The impact of context switching to increase focus
It has been observed that companies are heavily investing in collaboration tools, which is leading to a significant overload. Research suggests that employees are switching between apps around 1200 times per day, resulting in an increase in context switching or “time fragmentation”. If you get distracted while switching between apps, such as replying to a message while working on something else, it can take you 20 to 30 minutes to regain focus on the original task. Rebecca highlighted, “It is important for companies to help employees build that focus time into their schedules”.
Hinds summarizes that “AI enables such powerful value in terms of increasing productivity.” AI can help to understand how work is being done to help companies monitor and adjust team resources based on historical and future capacity. Organizations need to find ways to understand and identify challenges like silos and bottlenecks before these challenges cripple the organization.
Read the full article here
