There is significant scope for productivity improvement according to research recently conducted by Asana.

Among the findings, new hires spend 21% of their time on work that's already been completed (nearly twice as much time as their more established colleagues), and they spend 1.5 more hours in unnecessary meetings each week.

More generally, employees could gain 6 hours and 5 minutes every week with improved processes, such as more clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

"Teams fall behind when they spend too much time context switching — toggling between apps and digging through spreadsheets. It's especially painful when bringing new teammates up to speed," said Asana project management leader Paige Costello.

"Our survey findings illustrate that while it can be incredibly challenging to get distributed teams on the same page, organisations have an opportunity to save a ton of time with better ways of working. We're excited to get teams started off on the right foot in the new year with Project Overview, enabling them to quickly contribute meaningful work with confidence from day one."

Effective immediately, the first tab of every project in Asana features the most essential information for teams, including project members and their roles, key resources, and related portfolios and goals.

This, according to the company, means users have clear lines of sight into their projects' most important links, documents, and collaborators, plus direct access to remote work's most essential tools.

Project Overview also provides a way to build project briefs that integrate with a range of other services including Figma, Loom, Miro, Vimeo, Whimsical, Wistia and YouTube.

"Last year, we announced Asana Cards, enabling customers to embed Asana tasks as cards in Miro," said Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid.

"Today, we're advancing our partnership with Asana by creating a seamless way to access Miro boards directly within Asana, giving every team an easy way to collaborate and capture creative spark. A bilateral integration is just the beginning of what we look forward to bringing to our mutual customers in the future."

Vimeo senior vice president of business development Richard Bloom said "Video is an increasingly critical tool in helping teams collaborate remotely – it can improve how we communicate, share ideas, impart knowledge and give feedback. We're thrilled to integrate Vimeo's best-in-class video player with Asana's leading platform so more teams globally are empowered to use video to do their best work."