How to increase remote team alignment with Goals

Chances are, your company and team priorities have changed since the beginning of this year. And you’re not alone—45% of global companies say their goals have changed at least once since moving to remote work. Without a clear communication strategy, it can be difficult to know how these new priorities impact individual work.

Communicating team goals and aligning as a team is already hard to do when you’re working together in the same office. Add remote work into the mix, and team alignment gets even harder. When team members lack clarity, they can’t prioritize high-impact work. In fact, according to recent research, lack of clarity on organizational goals leads to: 

• Confusion about priorities and where to focus efforts

• Lack of team motivation

• Difficulty working with team members and lack of overall alignment with the team

Luckily you can bring clarity and alignment to your team with Goals in Asana. Here’s how:

View all public goals in one central location

The first challenge to remote team alignment is knowing what your team and organizational priorities are. Without a centralized goal management system, some teams might have their goals in a spreadsheet, others might track them in a slide deck. When information is siloed, it can be nearly impossible for team members to know what work to prioritize. 

With Goals, all of these priorities live in Asana. In the Goals overview tab, you can see any public company goal, or filter by relevant Team goals. The overview tab gives you a high-level picture of the goal title, owner, due date, and progress. If company goals change or team members need to check in on a goal for whatever reason, they can do so right from the Goals overview tab. That way, remote teams can stay aligned no matter where they’re working.

See how work connects to team and company objectives

Another challenge to team alignment is knowing how individual work connects to priorities. Today, only 26% of global knowledge workers have a clear understanding of how their individual work contributes to company goals. 

At Asana, we solve this problem with the pyramid of clarity—a framework for connecting everyday work to strategic objectives. We built Goals with this framework in mind. That’s why you can connect supporting work to any goal, and view those supporting projects and Portfolios directly from the goal page. This type of connection is key for remote teams, who might lack some of the context or clarity that comes from working in the same office. 

Knowing which company goal your project supports can be a game changer for remote team morale, especially when it isn’t immediately clear how the work might connect. For example, if one of your company goals is to increase brand awareness by 10%, your social media content calendar is contributing to that goal, along with other initiatives like brand campaigns and product announcements. But by connecting your social media content calendar as a supporting project under your company’s goal of increasing brand awareness by 10%, your social media managers are better informed, and can therefore make better decisions.

Connect Goals to daily work

Beyond viewing Goals at the project level, it can also be helpful to connect goals to specific tasks, deliverables, and milestones. Bringing big-picture objectives into your team’s current work can help your team align and focus work on your company’s most important priorities.

But when Goals live in a spreadsheet, getting that context can be difficult and time-consuming. That’s why you can @-mention Goals in any task comment or status update. By @-mentioning Goals right where work happens, you can reduce the gap between company priorities and daily work, so your team always has the context and clarity they need to excel—no matter where they’re working from.

Increase team alignment with Goals

We do better work when we know how our work contributes to company objectives. And collaboration software helps teams get there. In fact, employees using a collaborative work management tool are nearly twice as likely to say they have a clear understanding of how their individual work relates to their company-wide goals. 

If you’re interested in learning more, check out our ebook on how to set great goals. Or, sign up for a free Business trial to get started with Goals in Asana today.