For IT professionals and business leaders who are looking for universal technology to meet the needs of each user involved in cross-functional collaboration, the idea of ​​a “single application to solve all needs” ignores the reality that effective collaboration in our world is a multifaceted work. How could it be any different? Instead, the secret to success lies in the social elements involved in cross-functional work, and in finding ways to strengthen communication through the use of existing systems.
Given the amount of technology created to improve team communication, cross-functional collaboration should be easier than ever. With it, we can immediately contact colleagues from any office, department or branch. We can share documents around the world using Google Disk. We can assign tasks and collaborate with projects in Asan. However, introducing new software into your team is not always a sufficient measure. You probably have other barriers to overcome that are more personal in nature.
At InVision, for example, collaboration tools play a key role in coordinating work between products and marketing teams. However, they also emphasize the importance of ongoing communication, a clear division of responsibilities and well-known knowledge of upcoming product launches.
General definition
Simply put, cross-functional interaction is when people from different teams or functions (marketing, sales, engineering, HR) within a company come together to work on a common goal, project or task.
It can be anything: from everyday duties such as customer support and social media marketing, to one-time projects, for example, sales or the development of a new customer conversion function.
Benefits
Cross-functional collaboration can open up opportunities for companies to work as efficiently as possible. So why are we fighting? And why do we hardly manage to do this, even when we all agree that we want this?
How to achieve effective interaction
Lack of understanding of what your colleagues are doing creates a barrier to collaboration between teams. To solve this problem, regularly discuss the summary of your team’s upcoming work with your entire company or create a place where others can easily get to know this information.
Diversity development
It is easy to capture one person from each department and develop a team, but if you really want to maximize the effectiveness of your team, you must create a group that will be diverse in several areas, and not just in the area of ​​their work. Such a group is called a cross-functional team.
Resistance to meeting recalculation
When working with large, diverse, fragmented teams, it can sometimes take several weeks to schedule each meeting for a meeting. Regular meetings also turn from the moment when your team starts working on its usual tasks, which disappoints its members. For these reasons, it is important to limit the number of meetings for joint functional cooperation, using the minimum amount of time. Make sure you use new technologies such as communication and collaboration tools. KaiNexus, for example, uses tools such as Google Docs, GoToMeeting and, in fact, KaiNexus. Continuous Improvement software is a great way to get teams to work together between meetings. This makes your other meetings more productive, and also helps in the search and analysis of problem areas of cross-functional interaction.
When you absolutely need to meet, there should be a strict agenda, a single notebook and a clearly defined method for documenting subsequent tasks. Often, employees set a timer on a mobile phone to limit the discussion time of a single topic. The surefire way to make sure the meeting ends on time is to remove the chairs from the boardroom!
Seek genuine interaction between people!
Turning your cross-functional groups on to see what impact they have creates momentum and ensures team stability. People want to know that their efforts matter. By showing them their results, they will be more interested in continuing to participate. On a larger scale, developing a standard way to measure the impact of each cross-functional group can help you truly understand and understand the dynamics of continuous improvement throughout your organization. Proper measurement improves the visibility and transparency of continuously improving cross-functional interactions between employees in your company.
Attracting Leaders
Most organizations have people who are born leaders no matter what position they hold in the company. They are ideal people for solving problems of cross-functional interaction, and therefore they must be involved in the team in the first place.
Encourage senior executives to make your company's goals publicly available, so everyone, not just management, needs to know the company's priorities. If you are an individual contributor, be sure to know how your projects achieve broader goals (you can use the clarity of the pyramid to help portray this) and let us know why your personal initiative supports global collaboration.
Promotion of merit
All of these and other strategies can be undermined if employees throughout the organization are not recognized and rewarded for their collective efforts. This is a matter of competent cross-functional management.
It is not difficult to find financial incentives based solely on the goals of one department. This creates a conflict over employee salaries and provides predictable poor results. In order to improve cross-functional communications, leaders should set goals and incentives that require this, and reward people for improving the overall system, and not just one part of it.
Difficulties in Distrust
Cross-functional collaboration includes teams from across the organization who are tasked with working on a single project or finding a solution to a particular problem. Theoretically, that sounds perfect. Different approaches to skills are given for approaching a project from several angles. Sounds like a thorough, efficient method, right? But not so simple! After all, some people don’t even know how to spell “cross-functional interaction”. This method is a kind of innovation in management, and therefore has its drawbacks that have yet to be overcome.
When employees and managers consider an organization to be a group of dividing, divided groups, the result is “tribalism” or the emergence of competing “blocks” within the company. When there is a lack of trust between such “blocks”, any cooperation fails.
Leaders can help overcome the conflicting interests of these divided groups and create a culture of trust by aligning common goals and incentives for the entire organization as a whole rather than encouraging the selfishness of individual employees and departments. If distrust is an obstacle to collaboration in your organization, try starting with a few small teamwork tasks to get quick results. Seeing results can help build trust.
Cross-functional management and communication between employees
Here you need to move a little away from the classics. Traditional problem-solving approaches often do not work in cross-functional settings. Recent McKinsey studies show that companies that try to reorganize their cross-functional processes with traditional solutions such as lean and reengineered business processes fail.
Successful approaches to cross-functional problems are based on the unpacking of various elements necessary for this kind of work. Process management is not the basis of this type of work, the only key to success is communication.
Cross-functional communication
From millennials to baby boomers, modern workers have different expectations regarding access to information, and this already difficult situation became even more complicated when they all fell into cross-functional groups that are gaining momentum in modern companies.
Instead of reinventing the way you communicate with your cross-functional teams, find opportunities that allow groups to continue to work in their current modes and find ways to connect them to the common work, so that everyone can work in their preferred mode, communicate through their preferred channels communication, and have the right to receive the right information at the right time.
Connecting tools that are consistent with how people naturally communicate and learn, gives everyone the opportunity to contribute, and increases the likelihood of success for each member of your team.
Cross-functional interaction issues
Natalie Poorsky, Creative Kingdoms Development Director, took this precise approach to integrate the work of her software developers and content creation by connecting workflows from Smartsheet and JIRA.
Creative Kingdoms, a subsidiary of Great Wolf Resorts, works with organizations such as the Kennedy Space Center to develop image-based software that can integrate the expertise of many professionals into its customers' lives. Traditionally, the various teams involved in creating content for the games have managed their work with various tools. Siled work did not allow teams to communicate with each other at the right time in order to most effectively fulfill customer orders.
Natalie was at the epicenter of this effort and described the problem as “a truly unique situation in project management, because we use the Agile development methodology in the JIRA and Waterfall methodology with our team of content makers.” Group work was incredibly complex, consuming time and making many mistakes.
Instead of abandoning Smartsheet and JIRA and looking for a new solution, Natalie worked to find a way to connect the two systems, rather than asking her team to find new ways to work. By combining Smartsheet and JIRA, content is still being promoted like Waterfall, product development is managed by JIRA, and different groups can see the entire life cycle of the work, not just its individual parts. Team members are now confident that they always look at the latest information about the project, continuing to communicate in their preferred style with the whole group.
Thanks to improved cross-functional collaboration and communications, Natalie expects 10% resource savings next year. To repeat its success, you only need to pay attention to the phenomenon of cross-functional interaction, and try to use this unique strategy for organizing the workflow.