Exploring technology's role in enhancing a flexible work environment with Adam Chicktong, General Manager of APAC at Asana

Technology and the myriad of digital work tools available has provided the global workforce to embrace flexible work without the loss of connection nor productivity. However, technology can be a double-edged sword. How can organisations strive for effectiveness towards their choice of tools used in the organisation? What should organisations be thinking about when it comes to technology and how can leaders avoid letting their personal biases affect their decisions?

Listen now to our podcast chat with Adam Chicktong, General Manager of APAC at Asana as he shares with us his leadership story at Asana going into flexible work, and insights from the organisation's Anatomy of Work survey.

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Transcript

Eoin Higgins  

Welcome everybody to A Better World of Work podcast. My name is Eoin Higgins and I'm joined today with my co-host, Lay Peng. Our guest today is Adam Chicktong, who is the general manager for APAC for Asana, a leading work management platform. Prior to Asana, Adam has been the general manager for Australian tech start-ups, including ICL and Yellowfin, and has run business units internationally from multinationals, including Thomas Reuters and Tech Data. 

We're super excited to have Adam today to be able to talk about creating a better world of work. I think the great opportunity today. We'll jump straight into it. You're helping run a business, and also helping organisations to be supported. I hope the conversation today is going to be around not only what you're seeing out in the world of work, but also how you're adapting to the world of work yourselves as an organisation. 

Adam Chicktong 
Great, yeah, really excited to be here today. Thank you both for having me. As you have mentioned, general manager of Asana in APAC, and my job is to help both our customers and employees achieve their goals. I have been here for four years which has been a very exciting time, I was the first person in APAC, and I've managed to see it grow up significantly since then over the last four years. I'm just really lucky to work with a number of companies. As you mentioned, we look at it from my own perspective in terms of the future of work and how we work at Asana. I think the wonderful thing at Asana is you get to work with thousands of other organisations and see how they are looking at the way forward from a work perspective,

Eoin Higgins 
A great opportunity I imagine to see what's happening out in the world and also see what's happening internally and get the best of both worlds. Obviously, the pandemic has accelerated this shift to new ways of working. A lot of organisations have really taken a step back now thinking about the ways that they work, thinking about new ways of working and how they might change to adapt to an uncertain future. What adjustments have you made in Asana? How was the transition for you initially with the pandemic? As we have now sort of move into that post-pandemic phase, how has that experience been? What's your take with you?

Like most other people, there's been a lot of trial and error, and a lot of error on my behalf. I remember in the first week, when everybody went home saying hey, we need to meet every day to discuss what's going on. Very quickly, I ran out of conversation and things to ask people. I think it has been an evolution for us and it really does continue to be an evolution for us. From my perspective, the way you look at it was to try to simplify the process. There is people, and then there's the tools that they need to do their work. I think the most important thing to get right is that people need to be supported, both physically when they're in the office and at home and mentally or psychologically as well, so that they can do their best work. We've seen during the pandemic, the effect that can have on people's mental health and a number of other things. So I think by making sure that's is the first and foremost and then secondly, it's around the tools. Luckily for us at Asana, we've got a great tool stack. When the pandemic hit, we've got Slack for the water cooler chat and Zoom already set up for virtual meetings. Of course, Asana for orchestrating work and driving clarity across the organisation. We were lucky that we had a really good tool stack that helped us to work remotely. For us, the learning journey, as I said, we tried a number of different strategies that have worked over time, some better than others. We've really tried to learn from our customers. 

Adam Chicktong 
There's a study that we've done for a number of years now called the Anatomy of Work, which surveys thousands of knowledge workers all around the world. That really helps us to shape our own views on where and how people like to do their best work. The most recent Anatomy of Work talks about 50% of workers see the office as more of a social space than a workspace and so again, you've got to make adjustments. That's very different to how we saw it two and a half or three years ago when the pandemic hit. We see that people want to come into the office for things like group meetings, one-to-ones and social activities for sure but they prefer to do their skilled work at home. 

It's important to give people the tools and the structure and the support they need to be able to do that. I think that there is a couple of things and flexibility is key - allowing people to be flexible in the way they work. Then when we think about an office-centric environment, it's also how do you encourage people, and how do you make the workspace a place that people want to be in.  

From our perspective, what we've learned from a balanced perspective, is we don't want to demand that people should come in every single day or anything like that.. What we say to the folks is hey, come in on the day when you've got your team meeting, and people like to come in for team meeting. We ask them to come in on the day when they do team meeting. We like to do something fun on another day, which could be something as simple as a team walk, Donut Day, board game afternoon, or have a big team night out to give people a reason to come into the office is really important. Of course, when you work from home, how do you support people by giving people the physical infrastructure - the home office setup, the tools, and making sure that they're okay, physically and mentally, so that they can be the best versions of themselves. 

There has a number of iterations over the years. I don't think we've got it perfect yet, that's for sure. I think the key is to keep evolving and making sure that the teams have the support that they really need to do their best work. 

Eoin Higgins 
I really like the perspective that you have about is that it is evolving. If you think about it in pre-pandemic, ways of working are always evolving, we're always testing and challenging.  I think perhaps things have been accelerated, it's been more of a catalyst to do it but there's maybe a greater level of uncertainty. It's never a set and forget. You're always trying to challenge the way you do things, you wouldn't be a successful organisation otherwise. My sense is we're still in that phase of trial and error and a lot of experimentation. 

I'm curious about what you're seeing out there for the organisations that you're supporting? What are some of those challenges? Given your role is across APAC and it is a very diverse set of markets within that region, are you noticing anything different in the different markets, challenges or the way in which organisations are approaching it?

Adam Chicktong 
Yeah, for sure. Some of the biggest challenges that we've really seen is things like -  we've talked little bit about mental health. At the start, I think it was all around getting the right tool stack and giving people the right tools to be able to do their job. Then, I see people struggling and they still do today with the balance between when does work, stop and start. That's something that when I'm working from home, I always particularly struggle with. I find it impossible. There's no natural break in the day for me to switch off. I am a husband and father to three boys. How do I switch off and become dad at a particular point in time. I still find that really quite difficult.  

In the Anatomy of Work survey, the one thing that really showed up this year was that issues like burnout and impostor syndrome have become a huge issue over the last year or two. There is some pretty staggering statistics that showed 75% of Gen Z and Millennials suffered burnout at least once in the last 12 months. That's a lot. That's three quarters of your workforce and 24% experienced burnout four times or more during the one 12-month period. That’s got to be addressed. It really does.

To your point on how do we see these challenges? When we look at it regionally and what are the differences, again, for impostor syndrome, it's something we have seen much more prevalent in Southeast Asia, Singapore as well. Whereas burnout is something that we're seeing more in Australia. We've got to take into account cultural nuances. We've look at our business in Japan, burnout doesn't rank as highly there but if you have a look at the way they've always work. and to generalise a little bit about Japanese work culture, I don't think burnout is the number one thing that they're thinking about all the time. There's the old analogy of being chained to the desk and working all the time so it probably is a problem there but culturally, it's not something that they identify with at this point in time. I think there is a number of differences. Understanding each one of those differences for your organisation and the organisations you work with is important.

When I looked at a couple of really specific things down just to Asana as more and more folks come back into the office, we've got a pretty healthy mix of people who like to work from home and like to work from the office. But, when I look at our Singapore office, they seem to be in the office every day and nearly all of them. That's not a demand that we're putting on the team but I think what we're seeing there is a really young team out there. 

Singapore is a very expensive place to live and you have multiple generations living together. So do they want to be working from home with multiple generations over there or like a designated space in the office? We're seeing a lot of them in designated space. In our Tokyo office, it's the same type of thing where culturally, working from the office has always been a really important part of their business. We see that a lot there. Whereas when we look to our US counterparts where remote work has always been a part of the work culture - there are 50 big cities in the US as opposed to in Singapore where it's one city and one country -  so they are used to remote work. We certainly see differences in the approach that each of the regions have, and a lot of that comes down to the under underlying cultural differences. 

When we go out to see and talk to some customers in some countries about burnout, they're like burnout, what's that? Don't worry about burnout, how do I get more out of them? Whereas we go and speak to other people, they're like, no burnout, this is a significant issue. We need to battle that. We need to combat that out. What do we do about that? From our perspective, so much of it comes down to support, and those types of things but it comes down to providing clarity. 

I think people get really overwhelmed whether they're working in the office or not. They're getting more time on email and video calls. They get overwhelmed with the amount of notifications they're getting all the time. Particularly, when people are working remotely, where does the responsibilities lie and who's in charge of what? I think by trying to understand who is doing what, by when and giving real clarity to folks is an utmost important thing. 

To summarise, we see that employee mental health and well-being has been a real challenge, and people understanding the balance. When do I start? When do I stop? Whose responsibility is this? That feeling of being overwhelmed when they're working remotely by the amount of notifications and those types of things are giving. Those are some of the key trends that we've really seen over the last couple of years. 

Ng Lay Peng
Adam, I'm interested to know what are some of the mental wellness or mental well-being kind of programme that you guys have in place at Asana? Especially, you've highlighted so much differences across all the office so how can organisational policy cater to everybody? 

Adam Chicktong 
Yeah, for sure. We try to be quite intentional about what we do. We try to give flexibility, but at the same time, we try to give guidelines on how to help people. From a mental health perspective, the company offers a lot of additional benefits which we are very lucky about. Everybody has access to coaching through organisations that they can work with external to Asana, whether it's for their own mental health or whether it's for their career development. All employees have access to those facilities. 

I think your physical well-being has a really big bearing on your mental well-being as well. There's gym programmes, yoga programmes and all those types of things to help people be healthy both mentally and physically. We try to bring a sense of belonging. It's a really important thing, particularly when you're remote. I think it's difficult compared to when you're in the office, it's quite natural to have some sort of sense of belonging, but how do you get that sense of belonging when you're working remotely? We do a number of team activities, both remotely and also in person that involve people and get different teams to work with each other so you're not just isolated to yourself. 

And then again, just providing that type of clarity. Understanding who is doing what and by when. I don't want to sit here and sell it all the benefits of Asana, but at the same time, when people understand what success looks like and how they can be successful in their job, I think that's a really important thing for mental well-being as well. If we had a look at burnout and why are people experiencing burnout, a lot of people talked about the sheer volume of work they're doing now, and the amount of emails and notifications. 

From a tools perspective, simplifying that as much as possible is important as well. I've talked about being intentional, again, that flexibility is key but at the same time, there's no sense in saying, hey, come into the office, say two days a week and have people turning up on different days. So we have a no meeting Monday in Australia, in particular. It's different by region by region. In Australia, we've got a no meeting Monday where we try to limit meetings so people can have free time, so that they can work on the skilled work they were paid to do and not focus on the work that people can get sort of tied up in day and day out. Then we try to make Tuesday a great day for team meetings. Why don't you come in on Tuesday so you can spend time with your co-workers. I used to like Fridays is a day to do activities but I think people really like Thursdays now. We try to do an activity on a Thursday, whether that's remote - we've played a lot of online board games and those types of things to keep the team connected - or in person, as it was last night for us here in Sydney. 

Those types of things are really important. I would say, again, it evolves. You've got to treat it like it's a product and like a product, you've got to bug check it and fix it. You're got to have people working on it all the time, you got to be looking at it. It's really important that it's a constant evolution. 

Eoin Higgins 
I think there's so much that you've gone through there. What comes up for me is, I couldn't help but think about this is a dilemma that emerges when we look at flexible work, and look at choice. When you mentioned about how when I'm working from home, how do I prioritise today and have those demarcations between personal time and work time? What I'm trying to work through and I'm curious to get your thoughts on that, is when we give people a lot of choices, that can be empowering and fantastic. It gives a lot of possibility as to how you want to live your life, it gives you a lot more flexibility, but it also can be overwhelming, such as when you were talking about emails. Also the freedom of choice can be dizzying as well. Because if you can do anything, where do you even start? 

So I'm curious about your own personal experience that you've touched on, or how you help your teammates and your organisation through that? It sounds like you're giving them the right flexibility and you're trying to encourage them into the office. How do you help them through that? I know you've touched on it with clarity. Just talk to me a little bit more about what's your thoughts on that paradox of choice or the dilemma of choice?

Adam Chicktong 
Yeah. I'll take it from a business perspective first, and talk about my personal view on it later. From a business perspective, we definitely started with too much choice, asking people to go home and do their stuff. We don't want to check up because we don't want to micromanage you. We don't want to be that type of organisation that sits over the top of you and checks what you're up to. That is really important for us. At the same time, how do you understand what's going on in the organisation when you're not having those in-person conversations and those types of things? Again, we touched on clarity. We became even more intentional around goal setting and about the measurement of key metrics in the business so we could understand what success really looks like. We set a lot of OKRs and goals, so there's no ambiguity when you get to the end of the month, the quarter, the year or whatever it is. Have you achieved your goals? Are these the goals? Then not only your goals, how do they ladder up to the team? How do they ladder up to the organisation? 

The lack of transparency and visibility in terms of the part that you play in the business, it gets exacerbated when you're at home working by yourself because you don't know where you connect into the business and whether the work you're doing actually having an impact on the business. Being really clear and intentional with your goal setting is important and being able to report back on that. It's not reporting for the sake of checking in but reporting for the sake of whether are we aligned, and are we moving in the same direction, or are we all pulling together, which can be very difficult when you're all in different locations. That is certainly one part to the clarity. 

What you've also got to do is be intentional, like hey, we're going to be on the off in the office on these days, so we can come together? It's great to say we want you in the office, say two days a week, but at the same time, if those days don't overlap, then there's almost no purpose in coming into the office if you're not getting to work with your co-workers. Again, being pretty intentional about that is really important, through down to how do you communicate with each other. 

I always felt sorry, particularly in the early days of the pandemic, when we had new people start work. So much of learning was done by osmosis. You would sit in a room, hear people talk and you would just be able to pick up things. Not only that, you could turn around and ask people around you, so you shared the questions around. Whereas when you're at home by yourself, you don't want to be a burden on somebody. I don't want to be pinging somebody constantly and asking questions. So again, being clear in terms of setting up how people communicate. What's the best choice of communication with each other. Should you use email, Slack or Zoom someone? Is it a face-to-face meeting? Should you use a work management tool like Asana, and set a due date and a time and all those types of things on it? Being really clear about how you communicate with each other, is extremely important. How do you get the balance right? 

It's really important to lead by example as much as possible. If you're logging on and doing work 24 hours a day, it does set that agenda that this is what it's required to get ahead and that's not what the case should be.  Being quite intentional about how you work and the example that you want to set for others is really important. At a high level from business perspective, it's about providing clarity so people can understand who's doing what, by when, and what work they're doing, and how that affects the organisation. 

From a personal perspective, all that sounds great and wonderful. I must admit I still really struggle. I've been working for 25 years now. I'm not sure if it's just because I've been working in a particular way for 25 years but I personally love the office. I get energy from being in the office. I know that's not everyone. Some people we are introverted, extroverted or whatever but I personally love being face-to-face. I love coffee walks and the water cooler chats. I love just being around other people, it really gives me energy. I find that when I work from home, I get to about three o'clock in the afternoon, and I'm exhausted and tired from sitting there in the one room, not having conversations with other people. Whereas In the office, I can continue working to whatever time because I'm having different types of communication and bouncing off other people. I think that will always be a part of me and that I just couldn't handle a fully remote role. 

 Pre-pandemic, I sort of thought to myself, 'hey, that'd be great'. Now, I understand that that is just not me and I'm not able to do that. But how do I get the balance right? I think it's trying to be much more intentional with yourself about taking breaks and scheduling those breaks. If I'm getting energy from other people at work, it doesn't mean that I can't do it here, whether it's going out for a walk or whatever it may be. Typically when you leave the office, you do less work after that. I got into a routine when I was fully at home and leaving the office that I'm sitting in by going for a walk and trying to break that cycle. Again that's me personally. I understand that a lot of people are very different from that and they love the remote work. Full power to them. If you can do that, it's fantastic but for me, I need to bounce off other people and I like the energy of an office. 

Eoin Higgins 
I'm reminded of a panel discussion I did recently with some business leaders. We asked them to think about their own biases, their own place and their personal preferences. You've talked about your personal preference and it sounds like you've got a good level of awareness. I'm curious about how you balance your personal preferences. Were you biased in towards what you felt was best for the organisation? How did you work through that? Obviously, you're a business leader and you need to make decisions and guide the business in the way you think that's best for success. I'm curious, how did you play with that, about your own personal preference and try to get the right balance for everyone?

Adam Chicktong 
Yeah, I don't have too many strengths. One of my strengths is understanding I have a lot of weaknesses and that my opinion is not always the right one. A lot of the time when I'm doing something, I know that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right way to do it. When I work, I need to work other people, and with different people than myself so I can gather a broad view of opinions. I'm very conscious of my own very many shortcomings as well. In terms whether my personal preferences shape it, yes, probably in the first couple of weeks. You over orientate to getting stuck in. I want to talk to people all the time so I'm like hey, let's have 3,000 calls a week,  and people are like whoa, this is a lot, Adam, and I don't need to speak to you that much. For sure, at the start, there was an over orientation, then when you sort of learned that this is wrong, you probably twist back a little bit too far the other way and you'll go and do your stuff, off you go.

From my perspective, to stop the bias, and look, there's probably unconscious bias in there to a certain extent but to stop the bias, it's trying to understand the people and what works for them. We have made a lot of data-driven decisions, from the Anatomy of Work to the internal surveys that we do and that really shapes our business. We are big in terms of internal surveys, and not doing surveys for the sake of it. We do an engagement survey at least every six months and that becomes almost like a North Star that we drive towards based on the feedback from the teams. What I'm more interested in is the feedback from the teams than my own personal opinion because I know my personal opinions are wrong a lot of the time. These engagement surveys are not just for the leadership team across the region but also globally. That becomes our charter for the next six months. 

I remember when I started at Asana, one of the feedback was, hey, I don't have enough clarity, in terms of how I move to the next row level, so that became a huge piece of work that we worked on for the next six months. Now that's not a concern of the team to they understand what they need to do. Obviously, when the pandemic hit, people were really worried about their own personal safety and about coming back to the office and what that looks like. That became a priority of the business. Soon after that, people talked about hey, there's a lot of ambiguity, I don't understand what I should be doing. How do I prioritise? Again, that become another body of work we work on for the next six months. So, really understanding the team and what their requirements are - that's how I stop my own biases from  taking over, and just making sure that people have that space where they feel really comfortable to raise that as well. I do know that as a leader, if you have an opinion, people will tend to try to, or not even try to, a lot of the time they will say yes or they will agree with it, whether it's their real opinion or not.  

Giving people a really safe space that they can give feedback and making sure that the feedback is then actioned is absolutely critical. That's how we try to get around it from a bias perspective.

Eoin Higgins 
It's nice. So I'm hearing clarity and the importance of clarity. I know we haven't used a word but it sounds like trust is a huge part of it as well. Somebody can trust that they might be able to challenge Adam and that's okay. You know?  

Adam Chicktong 
Yeah. 

Eoin Higgins 
It sounds like you're doing a lot of the right work. Now we talked a lot, rightly so, about how people connect and getting a sense of belonging, what you're doing in that space and what you're seeing out in the market in relation to that. Obviously, technology plays a huge part in all of this. It always did but now, it is increasingly becoming indispensable in how teams come together, stay connected and collaborate. What should organisations be thinking about in terms of technology?

Adam Chicktong 
Yeah, so of course, understanding local culture and requirements is the first step because each country and each region might have a slightly different approach to what they consider as hybrid working and what their requirements are to work from home. Sometimes, internet access, even here I'll be honest, I've struggled for years with decent internet here in Australia. All those types of things can play a part in it. 

Take into account how, where and where your teams work, and also how they like to show up to work. I don't want to generalise too much but if you're running a sales team with a lot of extroverted people, they might want to get together. If you're running a support team, and some people are more introverted then maybe they don't. First of all, understanding the needs is a really good starting place to understand what does your tech stack looks like and what do you really need to prioritise. When we talk about technology, again, we've talked about clarity a number of times here, and technology needs to be an enabler. Particularly when you work remotely, there can be too many applications and people are app switching all the time. This will lead to context switching which doesn't lead to great work because you're constantly getting communicated, and it's impossible to get in the flow or in a zone. 

It's not a matter of collecting Pokemon cards where we're just trying to get them all. What we're trying to do is consolidate down into a tech stack that can be used for defined purposes, to help your team work together to gain clarity and understanding in terms of who's doing what and by when. Too many tools with undefined purposes can leave the teams feeling really overwhelmed. 

So let's talk about work management tools in general. Instead of it being an email where you send to ask a question, in a work management system, you would have a due date and it would be visible unless you mark it private. It would ladder up to a piece of work that you're doing so that other people can see where it is and how it's being prioritised. Just that type of clarity in itself is amazingly empowering for an organisation. 

When you've got a work management tool, it acts as the single source of truth for your objectives, work in progress and key results. You can go into the one tool or system to see everything from the smallest little tasks down to the biggest key objectives and goals that your organisation really has. Whether you use Asana or another work management tool, there's got to be a single source of truth that pulls all this together and really gives the teams the visibility that they need to do their best work. 

All the time, people talk about culture and the different ways to build that, but a really important part of culture building is that people know their place in the organisation and how they can get to the next level. If people don't have transparency and visibility through the organisation, it's very difficult for people to understand. 

Certainly, having some type of work management platform is super critical for people to integrate the tools wherever you possibly can. You don't want to have to switch between applications unless you absolutely must and when you switch, you want that integration to be tight. You don't want them to appear as completely separate or isolated tools which you've got to copy and paste from one to the other. You need to streamline the processes in between them as well. It's about optimising whatever tech stack you've got and continuously improving on that. I remember at one organisation where we implemented ISO 27001, which is a framework that gives you the tools to show you how to optimise to get to where you need to tomorrow. It doesn't need to be a huge rip and replace where you go and you start from scratch.  

Understand what you need, map what you have today, how to get to the next stage and just take incremental steps along the journey. You don't need to rip and replace and start from scratch. You've probably got a lot of tools in place but how do you optimise that journey and experience for the teams in the organisation is important.

Ng Lay Peng 
Adam, we've talked a lot about like the good of technology and how it can connect us better, especially when it's used together with trust and transparency and having a good culture. But, technology can be a double edged sword.

Adam Chicktong 
For sure.  

Ng Lay Peng 
There are many companies who are monitoring employees on their computer to know how much they work. There are also very clever apps like the mouse wrigglers - they make it seem like they are working while they're not. So what are your thoughts on such technology and how can these organisations overcome the lack of trust or to build those culture of not micromanaging?

Adam Chicktong 
That's fascinating, I've never heard the term or the software, mouse wrigglers, but as soon as you say it, visually, I can understand what you're talking about. It's obviously some type of application that keeps your mouse moving so it looks like you're working. Maybe I'll download. No, I won't download there. 

I'm with you, and you've got to get the balance right. Well, it's two thing. You've got to get the tools and streamline, and build the culture around that as well. If you're using a work management tool or other tools, I think what really helps people is transparency. Now, it's not transparency from how many hours have you work today, but it's transparency from are you achieving your goals, irrespective of how long it takes. If your organisation is based around tasks and goals and OKRs, that's the important metric. It is not how many hours somebody is working, What you want to do is you want to use the technology to help you to achieve your goals, and not necessarily measure the input that is going into it. What you're after is the output of people achieving their tasks and their goals. It's also a cultural thing because when we talk about Asana and adoption of Asana or work management platforms as a whole, culture plays a huge part. 

I know that when we walk into an organisation that has maybe been around for 100 years and done things in a particular way and when we say, hey, this is going to create transparency across the organisation. There's a lot of executives folding their arms and sitting there asking how much transparency is this going to? Being able to build a culture where you can be transparent where there is trust amongst everybody that you can make suggestions, that is just as important as getting the tool stack in. The tools by themselves will not enable this to work. You also need the culture and the people pulling together in the same direction. It's a goal-oriented organisation that is focused on your OKRs; it is a mission-driven organisation that is supported by a culture that allows people to fail and raise their hand to ask questions. That transparency needs to be seen as a great thing, as opposed to something like hey, I'm trying to protect my own patch here. I think that you've got to combine the two, otherwise it can become almost like this micromanagement where people feel they are being tracked all the time. Then people will go and find these mouse wrigglers or that sort of thing. It's definitely a combination of the two that you've got to get it right.

Ng Lay Peng
Yeah, I really love our conversation today. I think we focused on so many important parts - clarity, trust, being intentional, communicating and finding the right moments to bond together. The human relationship is as important if not more so than what technology can enable us to perform. So, Adam, our last question for you today, what does a better world what means to you? You have so many great things that you share with us today and I would imagine the future of work could only look better from here. 

Adam Chicktong 
Yeah, a better world of work, for one I think it's an extension and continuation. What we've spoken about today, we're still so much in the infancy, we're still trying things. Obviously, there's an optimisation that will need to occur over time. 

That aside, from my own personal perspective, a better world of work is that you're able to do your best work in whatever way shape or form that may be and you're able to enjoy yourself at the same time. There's that saying, I don't know who said that, you probably both know "if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life" and that's true. But, let me tell you something. I want to be an NBA player, I want to play for $50 million a year in the NBA, or the Premier League but I don't have the skills to do that. There's a lot of things but don't get me wrong. I love my job, but I would also like to be the owner of a tropical island. Again, I'm not able to do that.  

Whether it's through your own means or whatever your own skills, you're not able to do truly what you love all of the time. That's a reality that you need to find a balance in there. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. I think people strive for I have to love what I do. Yes, that would be wonderful but you've also just got to enjoy what you do, be proud of what you do and be connected to what you do. 

I think for me, for 99% of people, that's absolutely more important. If I think about my career or where I work, what I'm most interested in is yes, everybody wants to make money and they want this or the other, they want some type of life balance but you really just want to look back on the time, or while you're at the organisation and have said that was a great place to work. That was a wonderful place and I really enjoyed my time there. Nothing would make me prouder if the people at Asana or wherever work they have before then to just looked back and said that was a fantastic place to work. We did some great things together and we really enjoyed ourselves. 

Now we can talk about how that works, it's clarity, there's tools, there's enablement, culture, trust and all these types of things. I think at its most simplistic state, you just want to look at what you do day in, day out, be proud of it and enjoy yourself. That's what a better world of work means to me. 

Eoin Higgins 
Nice. So what I hear is achievement and enjoyment. 

Adam Chicktong 
That's it.  

Eoin Higgins 
How do we have a better world of work

Eoin Higgins 
Adam Chicktong, you've been a really great guest today. I loved the way in which you've shared, the authentic way in which you've shared and being a little bit vulnerable about your own practices. I really appreciate that. Great episode. Thanks so much, Adam Chicktong, General Manager of APAC for Asana and also budding EPL football star for the future. It's been great to have you on the show.  

Adam Chicktong 
Absolutely, 

Adam Chicktong 
Thank you both very much. Cheers. Thank you.