Asana: How many hidden taxes is your business paying?

It’s a question that every leader has asked themselves at one point or another.

According to Asana’s State of Work Innovation Report, which surveyed more than 2,500 workers, the rise in remote and hybrid work has caused employees to become disconnected and less productive while using tools that are outdated.

Globally, only 13% of the workforce now experience 9-5 workdays, with 59% enjoying a hybrid set-up, and 81% relying on asynchronous communication – when one person feeds information to another, with a time lag before before the recipients take in the information and offer their responses.

As a result, businesses are seeing four ‘organizational taxes’ that are inhibiting productivity: Capacity, resilience, connectivity, and velocity. 

To understand these taxes in greater detail, UNLEASH attended Asana’s exclusive Work Innovation Summit Productivity Roundtable to find out more.

Identifying the four corporate taxes

The capacity tax

Although hybrid and remote working has been found to be the more desirable methods of working, businesses are struggling to keep on top of workload management and engagement.

Globally, 75% of employees feel they have unmanageable workloads, causing them to take at least one day off in the past six months.

According to Asana, this is known as capacity tax, where businesses pay due to overloaded teams.

Workers are overloaded with too many meetings, too many technologies, too much collaboration,” says Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work Innovation Lab at Asana. 

“We also see a heavy reliance on high performers within the organization, so employees say that their teams rely on just a few high performers to get work done, meaning there’s a massive inequity appearing in the workplace.”

This can influence some employees (65% globally) to engage in what’s known as ‘productivity theater’, where they perform tasks to appear busy without actually doing meaningful work. 

Consequently, this causes a divide in employees, causing some to become high performers, and others to become low performers.

In fact, 38% of employees said they’ve seen high-performing colleagues demonstrate stress due to over-reliance on their work at least once a week.

The resilience tax

Ineffective change management, as well as poor behavior from colleagues and bosses, can cost businesses a resilience tax. 

This can come in the form of colleagues taking credit for others work (52%), or being overly protective over their area of responsibility (80%).

What’s more, 68% of survey respondents complained that their manager can be unavailable or unresponsive when they need guidance, while 60% felt micromanaged.

Organizations are wanting to adapt to all these changes that are happening in the workforce, and they’re wanting to do so more quickly than they did in the past,” Hinds adds. “However, they are stuck by these outdated ways of working.”

To reduce this, employee retention needs to be key, yet Asana’s study found that only 45% of workers expect to be at the same company within six months. 

The connectivity tax

Communicating in an ever-changing world which is digitally led and predominantly remote is challenging for any business. 

It’s therefore somewhat inevitable that some employees will feel disconnected and have to fend for themselves – this is known as connectivity tax. 

So much so, 45% of employees struggle to remember who’s responsible for what on their team, with 42% admitting they’ve worked on the wrong task due to a mix-up.

In fact, 90% of workers source information from their networks or friends rather than official channels of communication. 

Connectivity tax is essentially the disconnection that we see in many organizations,” Hinds highlights. 

“We know that people – especially across teams and functions – need to be collaborating to bring forth great ideas to drive innovation.

“But what we see across the board is far too few employees are able to see how their own work connects to company goals, and we see that to be a massive driver of engagement within organizations.”

The velocity tax

“Velocity is essentially the speed with which ideas, work, decisions can flow through an organization,” Hinds explains.

Velocity tax is therefore a direct result of technology and process bottlenecks that hinder productivity, with 93% of employees reporting the need for innovation in workplace technology. 

“This tax happens within organizations because people want to move quicker and they want to adopt new ways of working, but they’re constrained by these outdated ways of working. 

Information is in too many different silos, and they’re spending a lot of time trying to piece together all the different aspects that are required to move work forward.”

Consequently, employees are having to search for information, rather than having one secure place that holds all the information data. Therefore, employees are losing 9 hours each week. 

What’s more, 78% of respondents had limited accountability for completing tasks, only adding to the velocity tax.

So, how many taxes is your organization paying?