This post originally appeared on Forbes on November 30, 2024.
If there was something that 81% of people spent time at work doing, yet 84% of people also agree that it's not working — wouldn't that be a strong incentive to make critical changes? According to Asana's 2024 State of Workplace Innovation report and data shared in Asana keynote speeches, that exact scenario is playing out in businesses worldwide. What is this broken activity? Collaboration. In fact, 90% of workers rely on informal networks, friends, and unspoken understandings to get things done. Despite the strong connection between collaboration and business results — the report finds that people in highly connected workplaces are 90% more likely to understand how their work adds value and helps achieve company objectives — businesses struggle to know where to start to improve collaboration. This struggle is because collaboration is largely invisible. It's hard to fix something you can't see.
"Collaboration feels invisible because it happens in so many different places, physically and virtually, where it's very hard to end a day knowing exactly how much you've collaborated with different teams and with different customers," says Dr. Rebecca Hinds, Head of Asana's Work Innovation Lab. "It's often hard to understand what a collaboration is. Therefore, I think it's the combination of it happening in a lot of different areas and the fact that, unlike most other aspects of work, there's no natural way to track and understand it in the aggregate. So we're left with an unclear understanding of just how much we collaborate."
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