The Top 4 Roadblocks to Your Team’s Productivity and How AI Can Solve Them, According to Asana’s Head of Corporate Marketing – InstantFollowerz

You open your computer on Monday morning and have several Slack messages about the campaign you’re launching on Tuesday.

After you respond to them, you check your inbox and see that you’ve been tagged on some slides for the same campaign.

When you’re done answering, jump into a Zoom call to talk with stakeholders about any last-minute tasks that need to be completed for launch. Several interested parties would like you to email a follow-up to the meeting, so you will do so.

But others would prefer that you tag them in the appropriate Google Docs, so you do.

Suddenly it’s 1:00 PM and you haven’t done anything important on your to-do list to get this project off the ground. Your whole day is jumping in and out of various messaging apps, slides, and Zoom calls, just trying to keep everything in sync.

Sound familiar?

I spoke with Jake Cerfhead of corporate marketing at Asanato break down the biggest challenges most teams face when it comes to productivity in 2024 – and how you can solve them.

What teams are doing wrong when it comes to productivity

Jake empathizes with the chaos that can ensue when you don’t focus on creating effective processes for the productivity of the entire team.

“It can get chaotic,” he told me, adding, “Before I joined Asana, I thought about how I spent my time coordinating with people—and it was a mess. We’d be on email, Slack, and Google Docs and slides. And you never really knew who was doing what and when, and it was all too easy to lose sight of the goal we were all looking for.”

Which sounds painfully related. Fortunately, he has some tried-and-true tips for cleaning up your team’s processes and creating more scalable options for improving cross-functional collaboration.

1. Every team leader needs to know how their work stacks up against corporate goals — and needs to make that clear in their workflows.

People always want to know how their work is connected to broader strategic initiatives. They want to feel seen, appreciated and to know that they have an influence. A big part of a leader’s job is to make sure people are working on the right priorities and are aligned with the goals that move the needle.

That’s what makes a product like Asana so crucial. It’s easy for Jake to make sure he’s not micro-managing his team on certain tasks, because in Asana he can see how each sub-task of his team is responsible for scaling to the company’s 2024 key goals.

In addition, to resolve conflicting goals across departments, it can be helpful to use one centralized productivity tool that highlights company priorities from the top down.

“As a leader, a big part of our job is making sure people are working on the right things, helping to unlock team members and enabling them to have a North Star. It’s good for productivity because when people feel like they’re working on things that matter, they do better,” says Jake.

He adds, “You don’t have to get so bogged down in the details. You can tell team members what and why, and they can figure out the rest. But clarity about big-picture goals unlocks productivity up, down and across the organization.”

If you’re dealing with productivity issues, start by making sure every leader is aligned with the company’s top 2024 goals—and then task them with showing how all of their team’s projects are progressing toward that end goal. If the task doesn’t fit, it’s time to consider refocusing on fulfilling activities.

2. Assign your AI a “role” to increase your team’s productivity.

There has been a lot of talk about AI in the past two years, but people are still skeptical about the improvements it can bring to their daily lives.

In fact, 62% of marketers worldwide believe that humans should use AI in their roles. For Jake, artificial intelligence proved to be much more useful teammate but only a tool.

“My life changed drastically when I stopped boosting AI with generic requests like, ‘Please write this blog post‘, and instead honed in on who I wanted the AI ​​to be: ‘Please write this blog post as if you were a technology writer at a large SaaS company.”

Jake strongly recommends giving AI a “role” when using AI for productivity.

“When teams are working on an important initiative and you give each AI bot its specific role, the result is much greater. Say you’re writing a blog post — you can assign an AI to be an editor, fact-checker or content strategist.”

“Or,” he adds, “if you use tools like Asana, you’ll have access to an artificial intelligence that’s one of the world’s greatest project managers. It can help you unblock issues and triage requests and make sure people are working on the right things.”

Ideally, the productivity tools you use already have built-in AI capabilities. If not, see what plugins or external tools you can use to increase efficiency.

3. Use AI to reduce busyness.

The antithesis of productivity is busyness.

If your team is bogged down in small tasks, they probably don’t have the energy or time to focus on the big goals that make up the majority of your team’s impact.

That is the main obstacle – i one that can be solved by AI.

Jake offers an example of content repurposing as one opportunity to increase productivity. He says, “With AI, you can give a keynote and ask the AI ​​to draft a blog post about the keynote. Or, you can take your main script and ask the AI ​​to design the presentation itself.”

He continues, “Finding new ways to increase the longevity and impact of your content is one of the best ways to use AI.”

In addition, Jake encourages marketers to leverage AI for content creation as well as more creative outputs such as manager reviews, sending feedback to teammates, brainstorming, role-playing scenarios, and more.

4. Have one centralized workspace where teams can work cross-functionally.

Ultimately, none of this is possible without creating a strong foundation for effective, scalable cross-functional collaboration.

Remember those slides and Google Docs and Slack messages and emails I mentioned earlier? Why not try putting more of your work in one centralized place?

“Productivity is all about visibility,” says Jake. “Your team should row in the same direction. Having a tool like Asana has been really helpful for our team’s productivity – you need a place where you can set your goals and then track all the team’s work and hold people accountable.”

“Plus,” he adds, “it’s critical that you use the same centralized workspace when setting strategy so that you have alignment around the tasks and initiatives that will help you achieve your goals.”

In other words, jumping between 30 different messaging and content creation apps and tools is not conducive to long-term productivity. As a leader, it’s your job to figure out how to centralize as much as you can in one place—and then use AI to supercharge it all.

To learn more about how HubSpot and Asana are helping marketers increase productivity, take a look HubSpot and Asana integration available today.