Introducing Status for remote work

When you’re working remotely, keeping your stakeholders informed on the progress of your work becomes even more important to keeping teams in sync and projects moving forward. Workers use an average of 10 different tools throughout the day, and any one of them might contain the information you need for your weekly status update.

That’s why we’re excited to announce our new Status feature. With Status, you can keep everyone fully informed on the progress of your work—without scheduling recurring follow-up meetings or digging through multiple tools for updates and information. Share project milestones and next steps with stakeholders in just a few clicks. In a time when many teams are working remotely, knowing who is doing what by when is imperative to success.

New Status features

Premium and Business users get a completely redesigned Status for projects. Clicking the Progress tab, users can quickly create a Status update using our best practices template, or customize it to ensure consistent updates across all their projects. Leverage the new Highlights feature to show off the work your team has accomplished, or call out specific tasks, Milestones, or Approvals that need attention. Click into past status updates to quickly see progress week over week. Asana consolidates all the data about your work in one place so you can tell a visually compelling story, which in turn enables stakeholders to easily take action where needed—all from within Asana.

Free Asana users also see a redesigned Status page that creates a narrative of their work and helps keep team members on the same page. Stakeholders can quickly see if projects are on or off track, and if needed, take action within Asana to help move projects forward.

NEW! Coming soon…

• We’re introducing Status at the Portfolio level for Business and Enterprise users who are interested in providing a status update across a group of related projects. Stakeholders get a birds-eye view of how the portfolio of work is progressing and can easily drill down into the details of individual projects within the portfolio as needed to keep everything moving forward.

• Next, keep an eye out for the addition of charts to Status for all paid users. Asana charts allow you to visualize key data related to your project, making it even easier to bring the story of your work to life.

Take remote collaboration to the next level

It’s more important than ever for remote teams to encourage collaboration and strive to bridge workplace silos, and there is increasing evidence that connectivity and collaboration are the key to successful remote work. In fact, according to the Anatomy of Work: Remote Teams survey, remote employees are nearly 2 times more likely to feel supported by their managers if their teams use workplace collaboration tools like Asana.

The new Status is just one way we’re helping the world’s teams work together effortlessly. For more tips and best practices on managing your team—and your work—remotely, keep reading to learn how other favorites like Forms and templates are helping teams connect the dots across projects so that collaboration can easily happen from anywhere.

1. Make your meetings more actionable with meeting agendas

Video meeting tools are great for getting face time with the team, but you also need to make sure key information and action items are recorded correctly. Create an Asana meeting agenda project to use alongside every team meeting or 1:1, so you can stay on topic and take notes in context—even from within a Zoom call. Use tasks as agenda items, and assign subtasks for follow-ups and deliverables as needed.

Not sure you need a meeting? Create a section in your meeting agenda project for offline or “async” action items. This way you can raise questions, tag collaborators, and assign deadlines—without meeting face-to-face.

2. Connect all of your tools in Asana

Say goodbye to searching through multiple applications to find that one important message or question, and keep all of your work connected by integrating your tools with Asana instead.

We offer hundreds of integrations to tools like Slack, Gmail, and Outlook so you can create a single source of truth for your team. Check out our top integrations for remote work on our blog.

3. Streamline work requests with Forms and Automation

Forms allow you to simplify the intake process for key workflows like creative requests or bug fixes and keep everything centralized in a single Asana project to make prioritizing and tracking work a breeze.

Once you’ve created a Form, you can make it even more powerful by creating Rules to assign requests to the right people and projects. Business and Enterprise customers can also build custom rules with multiple trigger combinations to automate even more tasks.

4. Gain visibility into project plans with Timeline

Timeline View is the best way to visually map out all of your team’s work. With timeline, you can visualize project plans, connect tasks and deadlines, and draw dependencies between tasks. Then, if plans change, Asana will automatically correct schedule conflicts.

If you need to modify a due date or deliverable, simply drag and drop within Timeline View. Even when work changes and deadlines shift, you can still keep your project on track.

5. Balance work and prevent burnout

Get a pulse on how much your team has on their plate with Workload, for Business and Enterprise customers. Quickly rebalance assignments to prevent burnout before it happens—even from afar.

Workload adapts to your team’s needs. Assign points, hours, or your own custom system to measure work capacity across your most important projects. Then, with Portfolios, get a bird’s-eye view of how your projects are progressing.

Work remotely with Asana

We’re all in this together. Learn more about how Asana can help your team work remotely in our remote resource guide. Or, if you’re just getting started, try Asana for free today.