Athena takes delegation to the next level with Asana

Highlights

• Quicker response times: Internal help desk response times dropped from 5 days to 12 hours improving employee satisfaction. 

• Onboard clients faster: Closing deals and onboarding new clients is quicker and error-free leading to happier clients.

• Eliminated missed work: Projects and forms eliminate lost tasks and missed deadlines allowing for rapid project completion. 

• Reduced admin work: Excessive email, meetings, and work chats are reduced creating more time for deep work. 

Athena is the dream service for busy leaders, pairing them with highly-trained virtual assistants who can organize calendars, launch podcasts, plan birthdays, and much more. The company's mission is to empower remarkable individuals with expert help so they can live more meaningful lives. 

The remote-first company has thousands of clients around the world and over 1,500 staff in the United States and the Philippines. When Athena were going through a rapid growth phase, project management challenges emerged. Critical tasks were often missed since work was managed across spreadsheets, emails, and chats. This resulted in help desk support delays, contract creation discrepancies, and wasted time spent deciphering project statuses. 

To solve these challenges, the finance team adopted Asana to centralize and manage payroll queries. Their response times improved so quickly that Athena implemented Asana across the company as their work management solution. 

Discovering the benefits of Asana 

The finance team initially chose Asana to manage payroll requests about banking, pay dates, and taxes. Tracking these requests over email was challenging–many fell through the cracks and the team was overwhelmed. 

Using Asana transformed the finance team’s work by: 

• Offering a clear overview of request statuses for easy tracking and prioritization

• Reducing back-and-forth emails and chat messages, freeing up time to action requests   

• Streamlining workflows so tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines are clear to all team members

Inspired by the finance team’s success, Maribeth Villon, Co-founder and Head of Administration, and Ben Organ, Director of Engineering, championed Asana's company-wide implementation. 

Our finance team started using Asana to manage payroll requests, speeding up response times. We then rolled it out company-wide to improve project management and collaboration so we could execute faster.”

Introducing a new way of working

Athena's commitment to a fast-paced, learning-focused culture led to a quick implementation of Asana. Leaders like Maribeth and Ben introduced the platform to their teams, emphasizing the importance of managing work in one place to drive efficiencies. The 2023 Anatomy of Work Index highlights that 62% of the workday is lost to repetitive tasks, but improved processes can save 4.9 hours per week. Employees recognized Asana made tasks easier to manage and helped them complete work faster. Adept at using technology, employees found it easy to use Asana without much formal training because the Asana Help Center answered their questions. 

We operate at a fast pace. Thanks to Asana’s intuitive interface, everyone quickly adopted the platform and started using it to manage their everyday work.”

Life with centralized project management 

All employees at Athena now use Asana to manage work, from employee onboarding and offboarding to product development. Now that their workflows are organized in one place, teams work faster and are more efficient. 

Here's a glimpse into how teams across Athena are using Asana:

• Employee onboarding and offboarding processes are streamlined using Asana templates so no step is forgotten. Every action item is captured, from email creation to resource allocation. Virtual assistants are now ready to work from day one without any technology or administrative issues. 

• Contract creation now takes half the time thanks to automation. Through a HubSpot integration, closed deals immediately trigger a contract creation task assigned to the Athena support team. Before Asana, contract creation took 48 hours and sometimes contracts were forgotten. Now, the process takes less than a day, and a contract is never neglected. 

• Internal help desk requests were initially exclusively managed in Asana, boosting response times from 5 days to under 12 hours. Recently, Zendesk was introduced and integrated with Asana, enhancing the sophistication of Athena’s help desk support for employees. 

• Product development is managed using Asana Kanban boards. Each product has a board listing bug fixes and development goals. Plus, there's a master board that shows the status of every tech project in flight. This helps the engineering team plan sprints, better allocate resources, and complete projects faster. 

• Client delegation is managed using Asana. The Athena app integrates with Asana by turning new tasks for virtual assistants immediately into Asana tasks. This integration ensures assistants never miss a request.  Many clients also prefer using Asana directly with their virtual assistants. 

Asana has allowed us to be more responsive. We’re able to prioritize important bug fixes and feature requests. With a clear view of all the work in development, I can easily understand our capacity and plan more effectively.”

Building more efficiencies with Asana 

Teams at Athena will keep using Asana to manage their work and collaborate, both internally and with clients. Leaders like Maribeth and Ben aim to streamline workflows further by introducing portfolios, refining automations, and exploring integration enhancements. It's all about speeding up workflows and ensuring everyone, from employees to clients, gets the most out of their work.