Onboarding best practices

Hi there,

I will soon start onboarding my team on Asana. I was wondering if anybody can share onboarding good practices and stories. What went well, what doesn’t?
I am thinking a 30-minute meeting per week, for 5 or 6 weeks to cover how Asana works, features, etc.

Thanks for sharing.

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Hi Julien :wink:

How big is tour team? Depending on your answer, the implementation would vary because convincing hundreds of colleagues is not the same challenge as only a few.
Some posts on this community or on the Asana guide have very useful ideas, for instance:

Moreover, if you want to be accompanied by a pro, then you can use this link:
https://certifiedpros.asana.com/browse

Julien

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Best would be to already have a framework in mind at first. Knowing which are the main teams and projects. Also best to know how ready everyone is to adopt it.

I would suggest to train first the team leads who can then help the others onboard. Depending on the size of your team.

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Asana suggests to start with a small team and one simple workflow. Then add more workflows. Then add more teams.

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Hi @Julien :wave:t3:

We also have a loads of resources in our Guide to help you onboard your team. Have a look at the “Team onboarding” section here :point_right: How to use Asana, Asana tutorials, onboarding tips, and team use cases | Product guide • Asana Product Guide :slight_smile:

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The most important thing is to figure out the structure and how you want it to be used. I reloaded our entire project 3 or 4 times once we started using is, which worked fine since we only had a few users but it would have been difficult at the enterprise level. So I would onboard a core team with 1 project just to get the fundamentals set before rolling it out to everyone else.

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Great question. We’ve had to deal with this a lot as we’ve been making new hires and adding consultants to our team, and part of my job is to make sure that all of them can use Asana. An approach has worked well for me is to create a training project full of tasks, where each task teaches the person to do one thing in Asana, and by the time they’ve finished all the tasks in the project they have done everything action they need to know in order to use Asana.

The tasks in the project start out very simple, in order to build confidence, and then become more challenging over the course of the training. Completing the project takes 1 hr as part of a training, at the end of which the trainee has all the core skills.

For example, the first task in the training project is called “Complete this task,” and all the person has to do is check the check box and finish the task, teaching them that Asana is about checking off tasks. Then the second task is to change view so that they can view their completed task, teaching them that Asana has different views and that tasks never really disappear. Then the third task is for them assign themselves to a task, and then they switch to “My Tasks” and see how that task now pops up there, teaching them how “My tasks” pulls together everything assigned to you, and that assigning tasks to teammates will make that work show up in their “My Tasks” view and so on.

The training project goes on like that, and by the time they finish all the tasks in the project, they will have used all the core Asana skills, “learning by doing.” For the last section of the training, I show them the specific Asana projects and teams that they will be working in, and let them see how it works and take questions.

After the training, they can follow up with me or refer to the info stored in their training project if they forget how to do something.

This way, whenever we have a near hire or consultant, all I have to do is clone the training project and do a one-hour training with them and we’re good to go, which is super time efficient. In between trainings I update the training project template whenever we change something about the way we use Asana.

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That is awesome. Is that something that you can share as a template somehow with the group so we can utilize it?

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Yes please share it so I can put it up on Templana.com

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Oh, that is perfect. Can you share it as a template?

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I love this! I’d also love to adopt this and am wondering if you can share the template. Thank you so much for your response and providing detail!

@Nathan2 I’d also be super interested in a template of that project, if you’d be willing to share!

I just found out about asana and I’m currently setting up my team of 25 people.

This would be very helpful!