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Asana: Enabling effortless coordination of work with Google Workspace

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Asana helps give teams the clarity they need to accomplish more with less by integrating Gmail and Google Workspace more closely with the Asana experience.

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Asana helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Asana has more than 126,000 paying customers and millions of free organizations across 190 countries. Global customers such as Amazon, Affirm, Japan Airlines, and Sky rely on Asana to manage company objectives, digital transformation, product launches, marketing campaigns, and more.

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Gmail
Drive
Google Chat
Google Meet
Calendar
Docs
Sheets
Slides
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Asana helps give teams the clarity they need to accomplish more with less by integrating Gmail and Google Workspace more closely with the Asana experience.

Google Workspace Results

Asana add-ons in Google Workspace make it much easier for teams to communicate and coordinate their work.

• Users have downloaded the Asana for Gmail add-on 2.6 million times.

• Asana has seen almost 3.9 million downloads of the Asana for Google Workplace add-on.

Leading work management platform and Google Cloud partner Asana helps individuals, teams, and organizations orchestrate all their work, from the smallest daily tasks to the greatest strategic initiatives. Asana creates clarity throughout organizations using its proprietary Asana Work Graph® data model.

The Asana Work Graph data model is a fully connected and up-to-date map of the work in an organization. It’s what sets Asana apart from other companies and enables it to provide clarity at every level of an organization, regardless of size, structure, and complexity.

Asana also brings value to customers through integrations and strategic partnerships. Last year, it launched Asana Partners—an ecosystem of over 260+ integrations with strategic partners such as Google, Salesforce, Slack, and Adobe—all available on one platform to manage work. Rather than building integrations simply to check boxes, Asana prioritizes integrations that give teams what they need, whether that’s through new solutions for communication, reporting, marketing, design, IT, or other professional disciplines.

And thanks to Asana’s Developer Platform and the Asana API, partners can build apps that bring ideas to life and help teams do better work, faster.

Delivering the three C’s of effective collaboration

“We're able to bring essential information into one central place, so teams can achieve balance over burnout.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana

Asana believes that effective collaboration depends on three C’s: content, communication, and coordination. Most organizations have already made significant investments in content and communication, but coordination often goes overlooked. Teams have historically had to use workarounds like sticky notes, emails, spreadsheets, and status meetings to keep everyone aligned on a project.

While hybrid and remote work trends have afforded greater flexibility for employees, work is still proving incredibly challenging for global businesses. According to Asana's Anatomy of Work Index 2022, workers are spending 58 percent of their time on work about work and time for strategy has decreased 27 percent year over year.

This lack of coordination causes knowledge workers to miss 15 percent of their deadlines and prevents teams from properly aligning on business goals. The result? Longer hours, higher burnout rates, and lack of organizational alignment. Asana aims to solve this customer problem by serving as the coordination layer that teams need and as an essential tool for enabling the new way they work.

A high percentage of Asana’s paying customers, particularly organizations with cross-functional teams, already use Google Workspace to communicate and collaborate on their work. They also use Asana to get clarity on who is doing what by when. “While the work might be happening in Google, the coordination, tracking, and accountability happens in Asana,” says Strand Sylvester, Product Manager at Asana. The company saw a clear opportunity to connect the two tools, giving teams the clarity they need to accomplish more with less.

Building on its strategic partnership with Google, Asana created Gmail and Google Workspace add-ons to help Asana customers effectively coordinate their work across different tools and reduce the distractions caused by context switching. “We're able to bring essential information into one central place in Asana, so teams can achieve balance over burnout,” says Sylvester.

Bringing organizational clarity to the inbox

The Asana for Gmail add-on lets customers track their actionable work and next steps using Asana Tasks from directly within their Gmail inbox. This way, they never have to miss a beat when they’re going through their email and need to make sure they turn the right emails into actionable tasks. Once a task is in Asana, users can also see a preview of the original email, reducing the need to switch tools in order to confirm the necessary details.

Users can also quickly find an Asana task in Gmail and use the add-on to create new tasks that aren’t yet tracked in Asana. The Gmail add-on gives teams a single source of truth to create clarity and accountability so they can stay focused on what needs to be done and when. To date, users have downloaded the Asana for Gmail add-on almost 2.6 million times. Many Asana customers report that the add-on has made it easier to stay in sync and accomplish more as a result.

One such customer is Vox Media’s branded content studio, Vox Creative, which creates compelling, original content for dozens of Fortune 500 brands and organizations. Vox Creative uses Asana for Gmail to communicate quickly and effectively about client feedback. For example, when the Vox Creative team receives client feedback on campaign work via email, they use the add-on to share the client’s feedback directly with the designer as a comment on the relevant Asana task.

Keeping work on track with everything in one place

Just as Asana for Gmail brings clarity to the inbox, the company’s overarching Google Workspace add-on enables better coordination between Google Workspace and Asana. With this add-on, Asana users can attach Google Drive files directly to their work in Asana so they have everything they need to collaborate and work in one place. Asana has seen almost 3.9 million downloads of the Asana for Google Workplace add-on.

Two notable Asana customers have used this add-on to achieve more effective collaboration. Wikimedia Foundation, the powerhouse nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, aims to bring about a world in which every human being can freely access reliable, neutral information. Wikimedia Foundation’s Online Fundraising team uses Asana to manage all of its global online fundraising work. The Donor Relations team can sync the task for a specific email fundraising campaign to their Google Calendars and know exactly when fundraising emails for that campaign will be sent. This way, they are prepared to answer any donor questions they may receive.

Viessmann, a global provider of climate control solutions for living spaces, chose Asana to lead its digital workplace transformation. Google Workspace acts as a central hub for Viessmann’s files (Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides) as well as communications (Gmail, Google Chat, and Google Meet) and scheduling (Google Calendar). Asana keeps everything connected in one place, helping teams stay in context and focused on their work. Viessmann uses the Google Workspace add-on to strengthen the coordination between these two essential productivity solutions, maximizing their value in the process.

Creating a better experience for Asana customers

“We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana

By developing the Gmail and Google Workplace add-ons, Asana made it much easier for teams to find and collaborate on work. Because emails, documents, and slides are now more accessible in Asana, teams that use both Asana and Google Workspace can more accurately track their projects. With less time spent on work about work, teams can enable greater creative ideation, improve employee engagement, and align more effectively around business goals.

The result is a better experience for Asana customers. Sylvester explains, “We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.”

Not only did Asana customers benefit from these add-ons, but the partnership did as well. Asana found Google to be a responsive partner as it was developing both of these add-ons. “At our request, the Google API team even added a new API to solve for our use case,” says Sylvester.

As Asana looks for ways to help teams collaborate even more effectively in the future, it expects to continue partnering with Google on new enhancements to the Asana experience—for example, by syncing Google Drive comments with tasks in Asana. Recent updates to the Asana for Google Chat application help Asana users organize their work even further, allowing them to search, create, update, and complete tasks all from within a Google Chat conversation. And as Google continues to build out features and functionality to help people collaborate, Asana will help its customers add structure and accountability to their work.

*Google Workspace was formerly known as G Suite prior to Oct. 6, 2020.