As a team lead, sharing regular status updates and progress reports with project stakeholders and executives is all in a day’s work. That’s because reporting is an essential part of communicating impact, getting ahead of potential pitfalls, and highlighting wins. The problem is, too many team leads spend too much of their time gathering the facts and figures needed to show where work stands.

At Asana, we’re big fans of reducing work about work—that pesky 60% of our workday that we spend on rote or duplicative tasks. Think of every time you’ve searched a document for a specific data point, spent precious time chasing for the right stakeholder or approver, or sat through a status meeting that could have been a written report. For team leads, reporting on work and sharing progress metrics is just another facet of work about work.

A Censuswide study found that only 24% of decision-makers at surveyed organizations were confident in their data literacy. That means over 3/4 of respondents might be making business decisions based on potentially inaccurate data interpretation. Data literacy is the ability to accurately read, analyze, and apply data. It’s a crucial skill for team members of all levels.

Want to learn more about data? There are over 200,000 results when you search for “data books” on Amazon. We’ve separated the wheat from the chaff, and reviewed some of our favorite books that will help improve your data skills.

The Splunk Audit API App for Slack makes it easy to identify usage trends, detect security threats and drive data-based decisions

Business is a battle, and the companies that best optimize their resources tend to win. But without a clear look at project-level data, it’s impossible to distribute those resources well. The right project management software shows you how and where your resources are spent. Organizing, executing, and analyzing projects is a lot easier when you can find it all on a single platform.

Not that long ago people used to call customer support whenever they had a question about a product. However, now that they have access to the Internet, they often try to find an answer themselves before submitting a ticket or picking up the phone. After all, no one wants to make themselves look silly by asking a question that is already answered on the company’s website.

Providing good customer service is an art. Typically, someone calling into a customer support department is already angry and frustrated with the services your company offers, and it is the job of a skilled customer support agent to diffuse that issue and help that customer leave satisfied and smiling. Blindly fumbling about or taking a one size fits all strategy toward the happiness of your customers is a perfect recipe for failure.

All our activities, online and offline, leave an almost imperceptible electronic trail. Traffic cameras “see” you cross a junction around the same time each weekday, your phone lets your favorite coffee shop know when and how long you visit through their “free” Wi-Fi. The data collected by these devices or from our interactions with others tend to end up in a data archive somewhere, unused and unanalyzed.

Customers expect a personalized experience from your company. And when they don’t receive it, roughly 71% of customers1 will express frustration with your business. So how do you create personalized offers that wow your customers and lead to improved customer loyalty and greater sales? By tapping into powerful customer service analytics. Advanced analytics allow you to gather more valuable customer information.