👥 Top tips on setting up your teams in Asana

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1

Teams in Asana should basically reflect your organizational chart; either departments, units or groups of people that usually work together.

There are no ‘sub-teams’ in Asana so you would simply need to create separate teams for those. For example:

Marketing | Copy
Marketing | Design

Consider the below when creating your Teams in Asana:

  1. Do not create more teams than you need; start small and scale when needed.

  2. Use emojis for your team names so they are visually easy to find, or upload your own company branding to use as your team’s icon.

Below example using emojis:
:megaphone: Marketing
:money_with_wings: Sales
:package: Product
:triangular_ruler: Design
:sparkling_heart: Customer Success
:handshake: HR
:balance_scale: Legal
:trophy: Exec/Leadership
:gear: Operations
:desktop_computer: IT
:books: Finance

  1. You can also consider setting a unique colour to each team’s Overview page, to give them their own unique ‘brand’ in Asana. These colours could also follow any current colour coding in your organizational chart so it is familiar to users.

  2. Teams in Asana have evolved into ‘groups of people’ that are used to easily share work/objects with, such as:

  • Projects
  • Portfolios
  • Custom field access
  • Universal dashboards

  1. You can also set Teams in Asana as the ‘Accountable’ team for a Goal.

  2. You can also add Teams of people to Workload views and Capacity Plans.

When creating a new team:

A. Do not invite all members yet, until the team’s Overview page is setup and your workflows are built (and you have something for them to find there)

B. The ‘Team privacy’ should be set to ‘Membership by request’ - that should be the default for all teams so that they are discoverable (searchable) and will show up in the Browse teams page. This helps provide awareness to avoid other users from creating duplicate Teams, leading to confusion.

C. If you are on an Enterprise plan, make sure to check the ‘Endorsed’ option under Team status. Note, you need to be an admin to do this.

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2

Great all-in-one post on teams, @Richard_Sather!

I generally recommend the opposite as a default–set up your teams as Public or Private, and avoid Membership by request for the most part.

To carry out your other recommendations listed here, which I agree with, I find it’s best to have one or two folks responsible overall, and one or two for each department, and better as a designed experience than self-serve. But I’m sure a can can be made otherwise, and for certain non-department-oriented teams Membership by request is appropriate.

Thanks,

Larry

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3

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Org Structure- Does creating the department level and group level teams make sense?

4

Thanks for the great feedback, @lpb !

The main reason I recommend setting privacy to ‘Membership by request’ is to make sure only the true department/group/unit members are added to their appropriate teams. A while back, when projects could not be shared across numerous teams, you would end up adding many members to numerous teams just so that they all had access.

I think it’s important that members actually reflect reality and not spiral into chaos by setting to Public, for example, where anyone can join.

5

I still think Private is more likely to achieve this than Membership by request, though I agree with you that Public would be worse than both.

Thanks,

Larry

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6

You said absolutely everything that needed to be said, great post

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