Asana’s new Workload feature hopes to reduce burnout in the workplace

Asana, a work management platform for teams, is rolling out a new feature called Workload designed to help plan and balance work across groups.

The company was inspired to develop the feature because of the prevalence of burnout in the workplace. Asana partnered with research firm 4media to conduct a study across 6,000 knowledge workers from the U.S., U.K. and Australia, which showed just how prevalent burnout can be.

The study found that 82 percent of respondents felt overworked, with 80 percent of tech workers and 74 percent of marketers experiencing burnout at least once in the past six months.

Further, the study revealed that too much work can negatively impact team morale. Almost half of U.S. respondents said they had employees leave their company because they felt overwhelmed by the amount of work.

Interestingly, the study found that peak productivity is at 11am, and productivity slumps at 1pm.

Asana’s Workload feature aims to solve burnout and too much work by giving managers an overview of their teams and how much work employees are doing. The functionality bubbles up all the things your team is working on and lets you see who’s underworked and overworked so you can reallocate tasks appropriately.

Asana Business users can see Workload by navigating to the Portfolio view. Portfolios are a way for managers to organize all the different projects teams are working on across a variety of categories.

Portfolio’s main tab shows a breakdown of all the projects and tasks, but by jumping into the Workload tab, managers can see a graph showing the individual workload of all the team members on a given project. Further, Workload lets you drill down into each individual’s tasks to see what they’re working on and drag and drop work to other team members to balance things out. Asana will notify employees when tasks get reallocated.

Workload also lets managers create their own metrics. By default, it measures workloads by the number of tasks assigned to each employee, but managers can create other parameters, such as how many hours someone works.

Workload will be available for Asana Business customers starting August 1st, 2019, which starts at $19.99 USD (about $26.36 CAD) per member per month. You can learn more here.