How to make cross-functional collaboration a daily reality
Despite all your hard work and effort, do you sometimes feel like your projects just disappear into a black hole? Do you have insight into what other people on other teams are doing? If the answers are “no,” then you might be a victim of business silos.
Silos have become a dirty word in the business world—and with good reason. Disconnected communication and disparate systems prevent teams from coming together and discovering new ideas. Marketing, sales, product development, and other functions, work separately on their own projects. They rarely speak to each other, which increases the likelihood that they’re working on redundant tasks, addressing outdated objectives, and completing projects late.
When departments don't communicate well with each other, it costs money and hurts businesses' ability to be agile and innovative. Team-based working improves communication and problem solving by bringing together people with different skills and expertise to address specific goals.
If you look inside your business, you may find disjointed processes and poor communication running rampant. Your leadership team may be investing in new tech tools designed to eliminate silos—but without making foundational changes to the way your teams work, you won't see the full benefits of improved efficiency, productivity and innovation. Ready for better ways to collaborate? Follow these best practices.
Five Tips for Better Cross-Functional Collaboration
1. Assess your culture
Collaboration is critical to creating an agile business where people on different teams work together to meet core objectives and discover new opportunities to differentiate.
2. Practice what you preach
If you want your teams to collaborate across functional lines, you need to connect with your peers. But only 61% of leaders do this. C-suite executives and senior leadership must emerge from their own worlds and responsibilities to connect with their peers about performance, goals, and ways to uncover new opportunities for collaboration. You’ll be happy you did.
3. Establish clear goals and roles
When silos are eliminated, it can be hard for teams to know where they fit in. The result is disorganization, because nobody has an overview of what everyone else is doing. To keep this from happening on your team, get everyone on the same page about the company’s vision. Then assign each team member a task or sub-goal that supports that vision and make sure that everybody stays in touch as tasks move forward.
4. Consider employee rewards and recognition
Rewarding employees for working together and achieving goals has become more commonplace than rewarding them for doing their job well on their own. To that end, many companies are changing how they evaluate and reward employees.
5. Provide the right tools and techniques
Now it's time to empower your team with the right tools. Many teams use a digital work management tool as a centralized hub for all team-based work. Workflows are developed for specific teams and projects, and can be further customized based on specific tasks and checkpoints. This makes completing tasks and tracking deadlines much easier, and allows all team members to equally contribute to conversations and review cycles.
Conclusion
Companies that want to see cross-functional alignment must rethink how their teams set goals and measure results. They must also reimagine how they communicate and collaborate, supporting anytime, anywhere working that boosts productivity and inspires innovation. A digital work management solution can help you achieve all of this, and more. In Chasers we thrive by transforming organizations for a digital and cognitive future, we promote collaboration in each of our processes, and we dream to transform our industry with world-class opportunities for talent around the world. Book a tour today and discover how our team can help you.
