How Does Asana Make Us More Accountable?

Behavior change is hard. Actively changing another person's behavior is even harder. But there are plenty of companies out there that have been able to crack that code. They understand that people don't always or even rarely act rationally. I'm Kristen Berman, co founder of Irrational Labs. Over the years, we've helped countless companies understand and leverage behavioral science to increase the health, wealth, and happiness of their users. The idea behind the Science of Change was to create a podcast that demystifies the psychology of decision making. So here's how it works. Each week I get to chat with visionary product and organizational leaders to uncover their insights about user behavior and how.

They'Ve managed to change it.

I matched this up with some of the latest research in the field to get to the bottom of our core psychologies. So let's dive in and unlock the secrets behind the Science of Change. The Science of Change podcast is presented by Set sa, the world's number one revenue execution platform.

Work works. It gets us to do small things like show up on time or respond to boring emails. It also gets us to do bigger, more challenging things, like launching new products that never existed before. Work helps us create habits and track progress. It also allows us to learn hard things quickly. Today I'm talking to Paige Costello, the core product leader at Asana, an application that helps codify and amplify some of the key components that make work work. Did you ever hear your friends say, I just can't muster up the energy to get my presentation done for tomorrow's meeting, so I'm not going to do it? Or I'm supposed to send this weekly update and I keep forgetting. I think I'll skip it. Or even worse. I told my team I'd deliver this project, but I think I'll ghost. Those are things we just don't typically say. Why are we productive machines in some domains like work, but fall flat on our faces in other domains like diet and meditation? We tend to take this incredibly salient productivity gap for granted. We assume it's all related to money. We think my work pays me to do work, so I do work. We think it's the money that makes us productive worker bees. But let's take a look at what work actually is. We have daily or weekly meetings where team members report everything they did yesterday and will do today. We have other meetings with key stakeholders that require presentations that we prep for weeks in advance. We have progress trackers that send out status reports on project timelines and share deadlines that make us look bad if we miss them. The Craziest thing. Work looks like this at almost every company around the world, regardless of culture or domain. Most companies have agreed on this structure. And what is that structure? It's basically a massive group accountability system. And that's what I wanted to dig into with Paige. Asana's chief reason for Bing is to help make teams more accountable and above all, more productive.

You can think of Asana as a tool that helps teams coordinate work together. And so if you're working with a team of people, it's hard to get stuff done, it's hard to stay aligned on what you're trying to achieve when you're doing it, who's involved, why. So when you think about Asana's role in helping teams plan and achieve their work together, it's really more about creating clarity. And so we think a lot about who is doing what by when and why. Teams today have a ton of tools for getting their work done. They have what they use to communicate, so their slack, their email, phone calls, zoom. They have their content that they're creating, so their documents, their spreadsheets, their figma files, and then they have the actual game plan for, you know, what needs to happen and who's involved. And that coordination layer is what Asana is effectively trying to help teams with. Because today work happens cross functionally, but teams tend to use functional specific tools or tools that don't really scale and create a lot of work about work. And so when you think about the experience of using a spreadsheet to track a plan, it's out of date almost immediately. And then the actual experience the sales team has is that they don't have visibility into the progress against the plan. They don't understand what the plan is. And then you have other tools that are historical, like I would call them kind of more legacy project management tools. And these tools effectively make it someone's job to track risks and dependencies. And it's really hard for the team to engage with, adopt and use. So Asana has a very unique data model that makes it obvious what work is assigned to whom. And so you'll see someone's face assigned to a task. And that's one key aspect of how Asana helps teams keep work on track, is the accountability aspect. And the other aspect is around dates and time horizons. So when a task has a assignee and a due date, it's very likely to be completed, actually 2.3 times as likely as a piece of work that isn't assigned with a due date, an assignee, or either of Those procrastination is.

A challenge we all face every day.

Most of the tasks we tend to put off are higher in immediate costs, they take our time, and the benefits only occur in the future. In other words, these are the tasks that seem unappealing to us in the now. For instance, cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S. but good news Preventative screenings facilitate early detection and are one of the most effective approaches to reducing cancer mortality. However, bad news participation in preventative screenings is shockingly low. Researchers led by Ayelek and Izzi tested whether deadlines, both with and without monetary incentives tied to them, could motivate more people to get screened for colon cancer. What's interesting is that people whose invitations included a shorter deadline and no incentive were just as likely to get screened as those who were given a financial incentive and a longer deadline. So deadlines work.

So deadlines and accountability are like the secret sauce of bridging the intention action gap, which in behavioral science is one of the things that prevents us from getting most things done. We have the intention to do it, but our action is not always there. Can you talk more about why you think deadlines or having a date due in Asana has driven more productivity or success for people entering their tasks?

Well, I would ask people to reflect on their own work experience. How many times have you been in a meeting where at the end of the meeting you had some action items but they didn't yet have someone who had volunteered or been voluntold to do them? What about when they're due by? It's very awkward not to know. And the amount of action that's really spurred by giving it someone who's responsible for it. And a due date creates alignment within the team around what's happening by when, which then actually creates stress relief for the teammates to know how to sequence their own work or how it relates. And so because Asana is effectively not an individual's to do list but an visualization of what's happening when it's happening by and how progress is happening against it when I can see, Kristen, that you have a due date for next Thursday, I I don't have to ask you about it in our meeting. I know that you're going to be working on that for Thursday and so it reduces some of the uncertainty and murkiness around how work moves forward as well as can create an opportunity for me to realize that in order for you to be successful with that task you have due Thursday, I need to finish my work sooner or that that's a dependency for me and I can just let you know by making a connection visually in the tool.

And many times when we set dates and deadlines for ourselves, we are optimistic. So we think we are going to be a little bit faster than we actually are. How do you help people set accurate dates or deadlines and or what do you do when they will inevitably miss them?

Well, the first hurdle is from no deadline to a deadline and then the second hurdle is once you've got the deadline, is it accurate and how do you keep the whole team up to date with how that might move or change? We do have a handling of if a data is slipping, how do you want to move related work or communicate that that is changing to the audience that cares about it. But I wouldn't say that Asana takes a really proactive stance to help people manage their time because we believe firmly that by creating visibility into it, Asana supports viewing how work is happening over time and what is changing, how overdue something is, how many times it's been passed along, which creates the insights that help teams make those decisions. But we try not to be big brotherly about how people move work along.

So maybe we actually dive into there because I think a little bit of some of the behavioral science lens tends to be maybe more paternalistic. One insight is that people work better in the mornings or have more deep work ability in the mornings versus the afternoons. So are there any things you do to help people figure out their optimal productivity or their optimal team productivity that can move them in that direction?

Yeah. Well, we have a lot of tools that help individuals start their day with the right intentions and then hold to that focus around what they're trying to achieve, what's meaningful to them that day. I think one of the biggest differences is not just having that like you can be very productive working on the wrong things. And so Asana is actively thinking about what the goals are for a team and trying to help people connect goals to their work so that they're making the right local decisions and moving the work forward as it relates to some bigger purpose or thing that they're trying to achieve. I'm trying to think about how to answer your question. I want to make sure I get there.

Yeah, I think some of it is to your point is like people wake up in the morning, they have lots of things they could do, they have to figure out the most important one, the most urgent one, and that's just a hard thing. And work makes it harder because you have lots of noise coming at you.

Asana tries to help surface what's most important for you that day. It also gives you visibility into work happening around you and tries to help you prioritize, like what you might most need to know about or things that have changed since you were last in the product. I do think that there's an opportunity to be more opinionated about how to help people do that. I would say right now our web and mobile apps really lean in the direction of help people get the information out of their heads and then create a way to prioritize and organize that such that the effort to pick up work or pick up where you left off is lower and they can just dive right in, pick up that most important thing and know what to do with it. There are definitely nudges and mechanisms we recommend to help people be more successful in doing those things. Like the difference between a task that starts with a verb like review the deck for the all hands versus a task that just says all hands deck is much easier to encounter, work through and tackle because there's a an actionable body of work. And so there's definitely more to the story of like how do you help people truly not just prioritize, but get the work done that they're trying to get done.

I love that the idea that you can buy the wording and the framing of the task will make me more likely to do it or not do it or maybe procrastinate versus do it immediately and whether other people can see it right.

Like if you have a to do list that's on your desk and you didn't get to item number three today, no one really knows except you. But in Asana there is more of an opportunity to reprioritize and share plans publicly and then renegotiate or re contract if you're not able to get to it. And just knowing that other people know what you're working on and what your priorities are helps you adhere to them as well.

By increasing visibility and identifying personal responsibility, Asana provides a great defense against the theory of social loafing, which is the idea that team members do less in.

A group setting than they would individually.

One reason why social loafing can happen in collective tasks is people don't pull their own weight when they are being judged as part of a group. By assigning work to individual team members and making it visible to all, Asana can help make everyone feel accountable for their own action and outcome. Making behavior public is really important for minimizing free writing and decreasing social loafing. This is because people are extremely sensitive to the possibility of being evaluated to the extent that even the most subtle cues of someone watching has an impact on their behavior. Accountability is really just expecting you might have to justify your actions to others in relation to a pre existing norm. And it works. Accountability systems which make our behavior public have been shown to work within voting, school attendance, handwashing, charity donation, and many other domains. In one study, voters in Eli, Iowa were told that if they didn't vote, their names would be published in the newspaper. This drove up voting rates by 6.9%. In another experiment, a local YMCA told members how much their peers were going to the gym. They then told these members that their attendance would be disclosed publicly the next month. This this increased attendance from 17 to 23%. But sometimes accountability isn't about involving other people. Sometimes it's about removing other people. One study looked at email behavior and found that people tend to respond and respond more thoughtfully and thoroughly to emails sent to a single recipient rather than the group. The researchers showed that the more people on the email, the lower proportion of responses the sender would get.

Yep, you made a nice comment on kind of review a deck, which is a small finite task. How do people break down kind of big projects into tasks? And do you have any pro tips for people looking to basically get better at how they think about kind of messy big projects and putting them into manageable pieces?

The most successful tasks are tasks that take less than two hours to complete. So if you're looking at your to do list and you have these boulders that keep getting passed week to week, it's probably because you haven't broken down that work into something that you can create traction on. And so the advice typically is create a task and then break it into some subtasks so that you can see that those pieces amount to the ultimate outcome of like the parent task. Asana also has support for these other levels of abstraction on work and ultimately the goals or objectives you're trying to achieve. And what that enables is you might start and think something's a task and then realize it's a project and you can just convert the task and its subtask to be a project with tasks. And that enables us to do what we need to do because we constantly underestimate, like you said, time, but also the amount of work something actually requires. And so having that flexibility to change shape shift kind of our to do list to better match the problem at hand is quite helpful.

Also is the loop that gets people excited. You know, I completed A task and then other people see that you've completed a task? Or is it the formal invite that goes out that says you're now on Asana? Has there been kind of a growth hack that you guys has surprised you on what works to drive new people to be more engaged?

Yeah, Well, I would say seeing work happen, like seeing work that you added actually get completed by someone else, or seeing someone else add work and complete it themselves, is really compelling and makes the team see the bigger picture. And the usefulness of Asana as a collaborative work orchestration tool.

What are the things that drive engagement and anything you've learned about how you increase engagement to a task or is increasing engagement to the task?

Yeah, one of the things I most love about the way we think about solving problems for customers is we're very focused on what they're trying to achieve, which is often just getting the plan done or hitting the goal. We're not trying to drive views of a task or views of a project or views of a portfolio or an objective. What we really want is the work to be completed. And that's a very different frame of reference for what is considered valuable. And like what we're constantly running experiments to drive. We do find that when there's a certain threshold of an organization that's very actively engaging with Asana, like four or five days a week, then the entire work graph or like manifestation of work data in their instance is more alive, more fresh, more actionable and more usable. And then there's this really positive retention and expansion dynamic. And so we're very conscientious of getting that enough of the organization using it in a healthy way, such that people pop into a team and can see the work that's happening, can add work, and the feedback loops on the work itself are the types that get the work done.

So we do look at weekly completers.

We do think about just what it takes to move the work forward. And we're careful about not trying to encourage people to create more work than they have to. We don't want to gamify it in such a way that they're creating five tasks where they only needed one because they're trying to up their point total. We really want to make sure that Asana is a tool that helps people focus on the work that's most important for them and their team to be successful.

Yeah, that is an interesting observation. So our team uses Asana and sometimes I'm like, do I get a report on how many things I've completed? I feel so productive. Will somebody tell me? And in some level, if you told me, which at least we may not be on the premium tier enough for that reporting to happen, but if you told me maybe the next week I would want to do more and this may or may not be good for the project or my work life balance. So how do you view telling people about their progress and giving them feedback on their productivity? Is that a part of asana?

Yeah. Yeah. Reflection is a really powerful habit for teams and individuals to improve how they work and to become more productive. We do support people to look back at how much they completed over the week, but we set a time horizon that doesn't encourage too much micro optimization on the part of the user.

Researchers led by Francesca Gino asked a group of over 500 employees from a wide range of industries to spend the first few minutes of their workday writing down the tasks they wanted to accomplish throughout the day. These people were also asked to complete the tasks in the order they wrote them down. Two thirds of the employees were asked to check off the tasks as they completed them and half of that group was instructed to write down a couple of quick, mundane tasks, like responding to an urgent email and put it on the top of their lists. People were asked to track their work like this for two weeks. The results? Those who completed a couple of short tasks first and then checked off others as they completed them, were the most satisfied with their job. They felt the highest level of motivation and overall accomplished the most throughout the week. It seemed completing the first task quickly gave them the boost they needed to get through the rest of their work.

But there is the caveat.

Focusing for too long on our urgent small tasks can be another form of delaying the real work. So it can be a slippery slope.

And for the manager, how do they. Because they're the ones, at least in your premium features, they're the ones kind of doing the bigger, longer term planning. What type of feedback works to give to somebody who's at that level trying to move the puzzle pieces of a roadmap or a complex plan? What feedback do you give them?

Yeah, well for that level, normally it's helpful to say like what percent of our goals are on or off track? How much of what we set out to achieve in Q1 did we actually achieve? Being able to dig in from not just the objective level, but to the underlying work creates visibility that has a much more well rounded and robust expression to a leader. Because as a leader you don't just want to know about the team health. Like is the team engaged, are they delivering, are they staffed? You also want to know who did what we say we do actually happen, and if not, why not? And often these are reported on in separate tools where people have some way they manage their okrs and some way they manage their teams and projects. And Asana is thinking about how to help teams work together more effortlessly to achieve their missions. And in doing so, you have to have those in the same view. And so as a leader or as a manager, the reporting and insights that we provide are more in knitting together the status like the classic red, yellow, green, with the progress and achievement factor on kind of the micro level of the work as well as the metric outcomes, for example, that you might have in your goals.

And so one thing I could imagine is if I'm a manager and I see somebody has not met their deadlines, how much should I be nagging them versus Asana acting as intermediary or bouncer, or what's your guidance for kind of acting as the enforcer for when things are maybe off track?

Well, I think there are a few things. One is just basic expectations. If you know when something is expected of you, it's easier to meet those expectations. I know that sounds straightforward, but you'd be amazed how much work gets generated or like ideas or action items come from something without a deadline and those are far less likely to get accomplished. I would say that deadlines. We ran a study called the Anatomy of work with 10,000 knowledge workers across seven countries and right now 25% of deadlines are missed. So it doesn't mean that if there is a deadline, it won't be missed, but the power of a deadline is that it creates an expectation and a shared view of kind of how work is going to proceed on a given timeline. So effectively you can better understand the workload of yourself, your team, and even anticipate issues. And so when you know that a lot of work is going to pile up next week, you might be able to load, balance and move work across or act to a different time or to a different person. So there's a lot of power in being more specific about deadlines for many reasons. But the most important reason is just that when you have that clarity on when something is expected, then you can have a conversation around it and it's more likely to be achieved. I would say that your question around, like, you know, on the balance, should it really be the tool doing the nagging or the manager doing the nagging? I would say a healthy balance of both, but really it Creates an opportunity for it not to be in someone's imagination, that someone's behind on their deadlines or head on deadlines. It's really a data driven approach for the whole team to see how work is progressing. What's typically behind and why makes a.

Ton of sense since Asana does cater to so many different domains and roles. How are norms set? So you can imagine my intuition on how much I should comment or like something is different than other somebody else's. How do you help people create the norms when they're first starting?

Well, it helps to have a tool that supports it. So I know it's a little bit surprising, but having a tool that supports a consistent approach to how work is organized for particular teams or groups. So for example, a template that can be used for one on ones or a standard way of onboarding a new employee to your company means that when you do that again and again, the process becomes more seamless, more clear and can continue to improve. And so what I would say is norm setting requires that the tool supports norm, not just norm setting, but adhering to norms over time. So also for example, saying if you're going to add work to this project, you it'll need this custom field. So for example, if you have the set of teams in this group and you add a new team, you don't need to go rework that field, you just add a new team to that field. And everywhere that there's a project that's using that field, they've got the latest up to date information. That really reduces the cost of updating and keeping plans accurate. Because if you were doing that in spreadsheets, you would go have to update hundreds of spreadsheets.

It seems like Asana is actually a collection of these small decisions. Whether it be what field do I add for this task or am I commenting on something when the work is completed or not completed? How do you guys think about A B testing these small changes and has there been any interesting A B tests experiments that you can share?

We tend to do our A B testing at the domain level so that individuals on the team don't see different things and have surprising experiences. But I would say that when we run tests, we look at the things that I was describing earlier around the healthiness of the adoption of the whole team as well as the likelihood to complete work. Because it's really important that the customer benefits that people are trying to get from using the product really bear fruit for them. And so when we're a B testing, we're really looking at those results makes sense.

And there are probably some people who really dive into Asana and their power users. And this is kind of any feature or tool you'll have. Your power users. How have you gotten people who are not power users? I'm not a power user confession. There's lots of people on my team who are. How would you get me to explore different features which will obviously benefit me if I use them and yet for some reason I'm just not using them. How have you helped people explore or use new features?

Yeah, well, it really comes from harnessing the power of the people who are champions and user like people who are power users can demonstrate what it looks like to successfully use the tool. So for example, having them create a project for one on one with you, wherein your one on one agenda is right there and you can easily add things you want to talk about might lower the burden or fear factor that comes with any new tool or system that you might be trying to apply. So it's really about making it work, lower stakes and creating a place where someone who has more confidence or enthusiasm can really lead the way.

Great.

And there's something called the appreciation feature.

Can you explain this feature?

Oh yeah. So I've talked a little bit about how individuals, teams and organizations get work done and think about moving work forward. One of the ways that like right now, I would say it's very important for teams and I would say executives are paying a lot of attention to the engagement in their teams and how people feel and whether they're feeling motivated and seen and appreciated. Last year we added a feature for just micro appreciations and product where effectively someone could just click a little button to send an appreciation on a task or in a message. And effectively what that did is it just gave a low effort way for someone to engage with work and say I see this, this is awesome, or I appreciate it or thank you without requiring us to put words in people's mouths. And what's amazing is when you do that, people will use it. I think internally at Asana, people have used them like almost 95,000 times in the last year. So it just shows you that there's so much power in the small ways that you can kind of nudge engagement. That's a positive loop and it's exciting to create the small ways to give feedback to teams about the impact of their work.

Compliments do in general tend to stimulate significant amounts of liking and plenty of research supports this. Servers received a larger tip when they.

Compliment complimented a customer saying for example.

You made the right choice after someone placed their order. Candidates receive more job offers if they complimented the interviewer during the interaction. And the good news for Asana, providing public facing compliments can be more effective at increasing trust than private compliments. The warning, it may not go both ways. Warmth has a positive effect on trust, but your position in the organization can mediate this effect.

Supervisors are more likely to be trusted.

When expressing warmth to subordinates than subordinates are when expressing warmth to their supervisors. Is there such a thing as too.

Many compliments if you're basically giving. If everyone's giving, you know, a good job, we've all been on those mass emails where everyone piles on and says, congrats, good job. How do you keep these appreciations more authentic and less kind of surface level?

Or does that matter?

I mean, the way the feature was built is that they layer and they don't notify you independently so that it doesn't generate a bunch of noise and it can kind of stack more like a reaction. I will say that there's, there's value in like highlighting behavior that you do want to reinforce. So even while it might be irritating potentially to receive those good job or nice work, the problem with that isn't the good job or nice work. It's that you may or may not understand what it is that that person is trying to instill and say that this is worth repeating. Here's what's good about this. I really appreciate how specifically you articulated the problem you witnessed and that this plan to make a difference next year is so tight. And here's what I like about it. It's like the precise feedback that's embedded in appreciation that often creates that behavior change. And so at least encouraging. Having a tool that is a collaborative work management application means that there needs to be the set of things which we want to remind people to make a habit around in their work lives. And even if you don't use the appreciation nudge, it just reminds you that when work is happening, there's always an opportunity to give feedback to the people who are doing it and to better create that feeling of momentum and progress so that people know, so that it's not cricket, so that they know that they're doing the right things or you can even be more specific about what's working and what you'd like to see.

Again, I'm going to end with a question that we ask all guests. So basically the first feature film that was ever introduced really was taken from one camera angle and you look back in hindsight you're like, why would they ever film something from one angle? You should just move the camera around to get different angles. And what was happening is they were using the mental model of photography. Taking a picture was so intuitive from one angle and they just adopted that mental model for film. Not at the time really realizing you should walk around. So in hindsight that's obvious to us. What will be in hindsight obvious to us? Let's say if we fast forward 10 or 20 years about task management that we're doing now, that in the future we'll look back and say, oh my gosh, I can't believe we did it that way. Or it's so obvious today that we should have done something different.

Yeah, such a powerful question. I do think that when we look back, it's going to feel like looking back to when people saw hipchat and Slack as competitors and we're asking questions about why would we use Work Chat? Why do we need Work Chat? Do we really need Work Chat? Work messaging, do we need that? Do we want that? And now I think you'd talk to most people who use Slack and they'd say, well of course, what do you mean why wouldn't we use Slack? I think that's the future of collaborative work management. I think it's going to be surprising to us that we didn't have a standard platform where cross functional teams could engage on what the plan was, what they were trying to achieve, who was doing what by when. Yeah, I, I really believe that it's going to be fun to look back on.

Asana solves a real problem.

Planning.

We don't have good intuitions on how to plan work. We need help. So what does Asana do to help us? It moves our work, our daily tasks into the public. It gives what we do visibility. And when we know that people can see and observe our behavior, we start to anticipate what others will think and we end up modifying our behavior, usually for the better. This has become more important than ever as our work lives have settled into home life and we no longer see our co workers come and go or have those impromptu sinks in the hallway about that upcoming project. Asana provides us with what David Labeson calls private paternalism. Most people call it accountability. Work helps solve our self control problems with incredibly effective accountability systems. Work makes our behavior visible to other people and helps motivate us to get things done. Want to launch an incredibly complex product.

That requires building new innovations?

Create a small team and commit to a public launch. With aggressive timelines. Just look at Google's developer day or Apple's keynote launches. Apple commits to launch a new iPhone.

Model on a certain day and by.

Golly, they do it. This is just a massive accountability system that helps employees do something they said they would do. Personal goals are in the private sphere and that's where we struggle again. Think about weight loss, meditation or finishing that novel in the public sphere. We understand there is an underlying norm about what should happen. We think I should show up to this meeting prepared. We self regulate on the basis of anticipated consequences of going against that norm. The very thing that allows us to be productive is changing. I'm excited about Asana and its role in helping us keep it more public.

The Science of Change podcast is presented by Setsale. Act on the moments to lead to a sale. Visit them at Setsale co or on LinkedIn to learn more about the world's number one revenue execution platform. If you like behavioral science and want to learn how you can apply it to your work, head to irrationallabs.com we have a variety of courses available. Use discount code podcast for 20% off this podcast is produced by Irrational Labs and StudioPod Media. Our executive producer is Rachel Roberts. All episodes are written by me, Kristin Berman and Ying Lin with expert script editing by Jack Buer. Special thanks to Lydia Troup for fact checking and citations.