Asana is a work management platform whose mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling the world's teams to work together effortlessly. Lia Bruno, Head of IT, Technical Program Management (TPM), and IT Operations at Asana, works within the IT department to help oversee the processes, policies, and operations that are documented internally.

When Lia joined Asana, there was a small team of admins managing company-wide policy and process content on a custom, internally built wiki they used alongside Asana. All changes and additions had to be made by admins. As Asana grew rapidly, the volume of change requests took too much time away from the other more critical skills-based work they owned. The team realized it was time to add a more scalable content sharing platform to its tooling suite.

The team hoped to improve the user experience of finding and engaging with company-wide resources by centralizing documentation in one place. They wanted to provide a streamlined user experience so every employee could self-serve company-wide content.

Ease of use enabled rapid adoption and a smooth rollout

Once they decided to implement Slab for sharing internal process and policy content, the employee communications team rolled out the tool in partnership with engineering and IT teams. In the first wave of implementing Slab, they migrated company policies and processes.

Over time, the content has expanded to include team-specific information, resources, and private team content. "We wanted all of our internal policy and process information to live in one place and be easy to update," Lia says. Slab became that place and freed up the team of admins to work on more impactful things.

Lia and team found Slab easy to use and were able to quickly onboard admins.

"Slab is so easy to use—it's simple to learn, so you can begin building and creating right away. The launch team’s ability to adopt it so quickly speaks volumes to how fast it can make an impact."

Carefully selecting tools to maximize impact

As a mission-driven company that aims to help everyone understand the why in their work, making information accessible is core to Asana's DNA. The team takes a deliberate approach to knowledge sharing and tooling—in fact, it uses Asana for most things and only incorporates other tools that are integral to specific workflows.

By introducing Slab to every employee during onboarding, new team members know from the beginning that it's the place for company-wide process and policy information. While team members get up to speed on general policies, it's easy to browse team topics and discover other content they might be interested in. They can join to follow, comment, or thank authors for topics of interest.

Curating an onboarding experience with Slab and Asana

To create a seamless onboarding experience, new teammates use Asana and Slab for onboarding. When new hires join, their onboarding journey begins with a comprehensive checklist in Asana. This centralized hub enables them to review, discuss, and complete tasks and milestones. As they navigate through their onboarding checklist, Asana becomes the go-to platform for communication, progress tracking, and collaboration.

The interaction with Slab during onboarding occurs in two key ways. First, it serves as a knowledge hub, providing detailed insights into company-wide policies, procedures, and documentation. Second, it complements the onboarding tasks in Asana by offering additional references to specific content. This could include vital information such as benefits details for their specific country, an overview of Employee Resource Groups, expense policies, or guidelines for activating badges when visiting other Asana offices.

Many Slab posts guide the reader back to Asana for specific actions – to complete an Asana form or access an Asana resource. For instance, a new hire exploring the PTO policy in Slab might discover instructions for submitting a time-off request along with a link to the HRIS. They'd follow the link to the HRIS, enter their PTO request using the instructions in Slab, and then leave the rest to our HRIS <> Asana integration as it tasks their manager with reviewing the request.

This integrated strategy ensures that the onboarding experience is not only efficient but also comprehensive. By leveraging the strengths of both Asana and Slab, Asana creates a dynamic onboarding environment where every aspect of the process is not just managed but elevated, embodying the company's commitment to helping teams thrive effortlessly.

Moving Asana's IT knowledge base to Slab to increase engagement

Lia noticed that as Slab usage was rising, the use of their IT service desk knowledge base was declining. Since most Asana employees were already using Slab, her team decided to move their IT knowledge base into Slab.

"We wanted to meet our internal users where they are, providing a better experience navigating and engaging with IT support articles, so we moved to Slab. This allows us to reduce clicks and application transitions as a new user can easily jump from onboarding content over to using IT. The fewer places someone has to look for an answer, the faster they'll find it."

Now, Slab houses IT’s knowledge base for Asanas to search for IT-related information and a support library of FAQs and resources on performing IT-related tasks. They also keep their internal run books in private sub-topics only available to the IT team.

The IT team’s commitment to making information more accessible has paid off – the volume of IT Help Desk tickets has decreased as team members are better able to self-serve. Of course, Lia’s team is always looking to improve their internal knowledge base, so they cross-reference metrics in Slab Insights with IT request tickets. When a new piece of information is shared in their internal knowledge base, they can measure how it’s impacting related tickets and adjust the topics to make the information more discoverable.

By using Slab insights with ticketing data, Lia’s team is able to constantly improve their IT knowledge base, making it easier for the rest of Asana to find the information they need to troubleshoot independently.

Creating information hierarchy for better discoverability

Asana also uses Slab to house team-specific information across the company. Each team has its own topic, which contains public posts about a team's mission, key details about working with them, and private sub-topics to store sensitive information. Access to private sub-topics is managed on a granular level by adding people individually or via a group in Okta.

Team topics strike a great balance of providing the right amount of visibility–allowing other teams to access the information they need–while more granular content that might clutter an employee's search is hidden. The result is an empowering amount of information for those who want to know the basics about another team or dig deeper into their own team's private knowledge base. "When we ensure that content is relevant to those searching for it, we build trust that Asana team members will find accurate and relevant information in Slab," Lia says.

AAsana also uses post verification to inform team members that something is up to date. Every team has guidelines around re-verifying content, which gives others the confidence that content is relevant. As a result, employees can trust what they're reading.

Data-driven content strategy

With Insights, content creators have a better sense of which content is valuable and can continuously improve their internal knowledge base. Lia's team also uses Insights about highly viewed posts to drive traffic to other content by housing them nearby or adding links. For example, an onboarding post about setting up your workstation might include links to a catalog of software available to all employees.

When posts are performing very well, her team looks to further leverage the content by adding it to other topics or expanding the information with additional posts. With data in hand from Insights, Lia and her team can think strategically about where they put content so that every employee can find what they need.

“We want all of this information to live in one place and for it to be really easy to manage. Slab enables everybody to manage their content more effectively and also makes it easy to find.”

Enabling collaborative content creation with enterprise-level permissions

With Slab, creating content is a collaborative process. Before, if Lia wanted to work with someone on an IT help article, she would have to sit with them and look over their shoulder. This slowed things down because Lia couldn't make edits herself—and felt disempowering for everyone. Working together on drafts being updated in real-time helps content get published faster. "Slab is faster and more agile than our previous tools," Lia says.

To ensure the right team members have access and the ability to edit when necessary, Asana uses granular permissions with Okta. Because this process happens automatically as employees are added or removed from Okta, permissions are effortless, and the Slab experience is tailored to everyone from their first login.

Ease of discovery reduces friction and increases efficiency

By centralizing information that most or all employees need to use in Slab, Asana has enhanced the discoverability of that content. Now, every employee knows where to look for policy and process knowledge: Slab. While people may visit Slab for something specific to their team, they often end up exploring other topics and finding something new—further expanding the reach of content in Slab and providing transparency across the organization.

This level of discoverability and centralization of knowledge saves Asanas across the organization time when it comes to searching for internal content around policies and processes. Knowledge sharing has always been core to Asana’s mission and products—by empowering people with the information they need, work becomes more effortless. With Slab, Asana can move faster and collaborate more effectively by centralizing information—as they help the world's teams do with their own product.