A common notion among most employees is the need to conduct their projects or work activities alone. In the workplace, this can be very dangerous because it means work will be siloed. However, cross team collaboration avoids this by ensuring employees feel comfortable with each other to foster growth and success.
Research by Zippia has indicated that 75% of employees rate teamwork and collaboration as being important with more than 50% of workers saying their jobs are dependent on collaboration.
In this article, we are going to discuss the benefits, examples, challenges involved and the ways to improve cross-team collaboration.
What is cross-team collaboration?
Cross-team collaboration is when employees from different departments join forces to complete a project or activity.
This means employees can share knowledge, opinions, and ideas making them highly valuable.
Helen Keller perfectly summed it up in her infamous words. “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.”
Examples of cross-functional collaboration
Some tasks need more than one team or department to work together to ensure they are well executed. The following are some examples that show how cross-team collaboration works:
- The development team can collaborate with the manual and automation testing teams to ensure the final product that is launched to end users is bug free.
- Data analysis and research team collaborating to analyze and interpret product data for improvement.
How to improve cross-team collaboration
In theory, cross-team collaboration can seem straightforward, however, it can be challenging in practice.
A lot of emphasis is placed on this because despite the challenges it has, it is still one of the best ways to achieve success.
Let’s have a look at ways to improve cross team collaboration.
Have clearly defined goals and objectives
The top-most priority for every leader is to ensure that their team members understand set goals and objectives.
In the spirit of collaboration, let team members access the goals at their convenience using a team charter.
Through cross-functional collaboration, members will be learning new concepts and skills daily. That’s why, to keep every member focused on the task at hand, the charter acts as a reminder to everyone on the direction the project should take.
Additionally, include opinions and ideas from members to ensure every member’s voice is heard and considered.
These are some of the important elements to include in your team charter.
- Objectives
- Project’s mission and vision
- Allotted timelines
- Standard operating procedures (SOP)
- Communication channels
- Team expectations
Include supporting documentation
For effective teamwork, there needs to be a platform where all members can access and share information as needed.
Maya Angelou described this when she said, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
A great tool for this is knowledge base software. It contains all the company information and is accessible to both customers and employees.
The knowledge base has document such as:
- Self-help resources such as tutorials, how-to articles, etc.
- User manual
- Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
- Onboarding materials
Furthermore, employees can share their documentation within these platforms for other team members to analyze, use and provide relevant feedback.
Provide a unified communication platform
Teams that communicate effectively have 25% increase in their overall productivity.
This can only be achieved when employees use a single communication channel.
It avoids loss of information and confusion within teams by ensuring information can be accessed from one point.
A shared inbox can be used by all the team members to read and provide responses to email requests thereby enhancing cross-team collaboration.
Extra features such as private notes and shared tickets enable team members to collaborate with other team members that don’t have access to a ticket.
An omnichannel inbox allows agents to handle customer requests from different communication platforms in a centralized location.
These features can all be used in a collaborative environment to make work easier for teams leading to a high-quality input.
Platforms such as MS Teams, Slack, among others, are very good for cross-functional collaboration because of their numerous features and tools.
Encourage creativity and innovation
Unlike working in silos, collaboration enables team members to interact openly and in a progressive manner.
During these interactions, they exchange knowledge and ideas that upskills each member of the team.
Always promote positive engagement among team members because it makes them more productive, creative and innovative.
Focus on providing a strong leadership
A strong leader connects, inspires, motivates and guides their team to achieve a common objective.
Team members often look up to their leaders and try to follow in their footsteps. Therefore, these leaders should have the best skillsets and personal attributes worth copying.
The roles of team leads can include:
- Creating goals and targets to be achieved
- Formulation of work policies that enhance cross-team collaboration
- Constant communication of work progress
- Delegation of duties
- Decision making and conflict resolution
- Taking responsibility and leading by example
- Encouraging the team to go the extra mile
Use cross-functional team collaboration tools
When teams communicate, collaborate and share files seamlessly through collaboration tools, they become highly efficient and productive.
This is why about 56% of employers engage with their employees using these tools and social media platforms.
The perfect example of a tool you can use to boost cross-team collaboration is BoldDesk.
With a feature such as an @mention, it enables you to directly notify a team member in a conversation through emails, MS Teams, Slack, etc., thereby boosting internal collaboration.
Also, private notes and ticket features allows users to record a customer’s call logs and meeting minutes privately or add confidential notes to their tickets for easier collection and sharing of customer information.
These collaboration tools can be seamlessly integrated with third-party products allowing teams to work on a single platform without having to switch to other tools.
As a result, it makes it easier for teams to manage all their tasks effectively in a unified place.
Examples of third-party collaboration tools to use include:
- Slack: Allows teams to collaborate and communicate easily at any place and time by sharing information and integrating tools seamlessly from one point.
- Jira: A tool used to plan, manage, track and conduct follow-up for software development projects by customizing team workflows.
- Microsoft Teams: A team collaboration tool that connects teams across multiple devices. Integrated with Microsoft 365 apps, it allows teams to call, send messages, files and meetings.
- Google Workspace: Is a combination of Google products such as Google Docs, Sheets, Drive, Files etc. It can be used to store and share files with members. Also, users can work on a document simultaneously.
- Trello: A tool that has simplified collaboration via task managements and workflow customization especially for virtual teams. They can collaborate using visualization tools like lists, cards, and boards.
- Miro: This is a virtual whiteboard platform with tools for project management, sharing presentations, exchanging ideas and planning for teams.
Engage in team building activities
The key reason for holding a team building activity is to create long lasting connections among team members.
These activities are particularly designed to bring teams together by engaging in fun exercises.
The bonds created over the fun activities can be moved over to their daily work activities for a smooth team collaboration.
These team building activities can be conducted for teams working remotely and physically through break rooms, sports, online and offline challenges, camping, etc.
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to measure the success rates of your cross-team collaboration.
These KPIs are measures that are meant to confirm if the set collaboration objectives and goals are met over a specific period of time.
For efficiency, the set KPIs must be adjusted regularly to meet shifting demands and maintain consistency.
Some of the KPIs to measure include the level of team engagement, project performance, average resolution time, and employee productivity.
Collect feedback regularly
Feedback is one of the best ways to obtain valuable insights from your team.
You can collect them using surveys, feedback portals, team discussions or meetings, interviews, feedback form, among others.
Handle critical issues one at a time from the feedback raised by team members. The insights gained informs the company on ways to make internal team collaboration easier and better.
Training sessions on collaborative cross-functional teams
When members have a good rapport with one another, teams function at their best.
Upskilling the team through training to help them achieve this by understanding the value of working together as a team.
These are some of the skills cross team collaboration workshops add to your team.
- Teamwork
- Better communication
- Flexibility and adaptability
- Leadership
- Problem solving
Learning more about the organization and the different departments simplifies the process of knowledge sharing between teams.
This creates a workplace built on trust and positive relationships.
With these skills, the team will feel empowered to collaborate easily and work towards achieving a common goal.
Importance of cross-team collaboration
There is power when people join forces to do a task or share their experiences. Here are the benefits that comes with cross-team collaboration:
Drives innovation
Innovation comes when people create a valuable product that is unknown. Through collaboration, employees can create reliable products that aligns with your company’s goals.
This is because cross-functional team collaboration gives them the motivation, tools, the communication channel to share ideas and knowledge and promotes a cultural workplace that values growth.
Improved communication and engagement
Teams and individual employees share positive and professional relationships when they can communicate effectively.
This can only be achieved when the employees understand their purpose and intentions.
As such, the communication will be clear, direct to the point and purposeful.
Higher team performances and productivity
A study by Zight has indicated that teams that work well together are 50% more productive.
Collaboration enables employees to improve on their soft skills such as problem-solving, adaptability and inspires employees to create healthy competitions.
This drives them to set personal goals and targets to improve their overall performance ratings.
Increased job satisfaction rates
Cross team collaboration creates a positive emotion for employees in connection to their work activities.
It becomes easier for them to share ideas and provide feedback meant to improve their working conditions.
With a supportive work culture, employees feel valued and appreciated for their duties leading to high employee satisfaction rates.
Challenges of internal team collaboration
Cross team collaboration is not a walk in the park. To make it work, there are lots of obstacles that most teams go through.
Let’s look at some of these challenges.
Conflicting targets and needs
When the team members have different goals and objectives, moving forward harmoniously becomes a problem. This reduces team productivity.
Consequently, the projects will be of a low quality, takes more time to complete or, in the worst case scenario, it will be completely abandoned.
Lack of proper leadership
Leaders are the point of focus for any team because they provide motivation, inspiration and direction for a successful cross-functional collaboration.
A proper leadership knows how to utilize their available talents making every team member around them better and more productive.
Without a proper leadership, there will be no ambition or desire for growth within a team.
This makes it difficult to achieve the set goals, objectives and no vision to lead the project to succeed.
Restricted access to information
Restricting access of information to a particular group creates a form of information barrier.
While it may be important to regulate the flow of information within the organization, it can negatively affect cross-team collaboration.
Teams won’t be able to communicate freely because of the knowledge barrier created.
It affects the nature of communication shared between teams. Without this, it becomes extremely difficult to collaborate.
Zero trust
Evidently, cross-functional collaboration requires a certain level of trust within teams to coordinate effectively. The problem, however, is that it may take time to fully trust a team that you’ve never worked with before.
This affects the efforts placed in working together and may reduce productivity significantly.
Lack of commitment from some team members
This happens when some member(s) of the team lack dedication to the project.
Meaning they will have to depend on fellow team members’ hard work.
Without the morale and interest to give their best, it becomes extremely difficult to successfully complete a project.
Embrace cross-team collaboration and boost productivity
Cross-team collaboration is an asset to create harmonious workplace by close interaction, sharing knowledge and ideas among teams to meet a common objective.
It may sound easy on paper, but it requires a lot of commitment to make it work.
At BoldDesk, we aim to build creative and highly productive work environments through cross-team collaboration.
That’s why we provide top features such as an omnichannel and shared inbox to streamline collaboration via communication, management of tasks, and many more.
For further information, kindly contact our support team to learn more on how to use our help desk software to build a work ecosystem that values collaborative cross-functional teams.
Also, try it out today with our 15-day free trial or schedule a live demo.
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