Almost all organizations require diverse disciplines to release their products and services to their customers. To achieve such a feat, organizations recruit different individuals with differing skills and expertise.

These individuals must collaborate by either working collectively or as an individual, presenting outputs to their fellows. This is where the term cross-functional collaboration comes into play.

What is cross-collaboration?

Cross-functional collaboration is a process where a group of people with distinct functional expertise or from various job functions unite together to work towards a shared goal.

Why is cross-collaboration important?

Even under the most favorable circumstances, there are hardly any projects that require just one person or a group of individuals with the same skills, wisdom, and experience.

Here are a few benefits of cross-collaboration –

• Higher innovation gets achieved because of multiple heads pooling in their ideas into a common project.
• Knowledge sharing is getting promoted, which helps employees grow and gain new skills for their organization.
• Employee engagement is increasing as individuals stay motivated while working together to achieve a shared goal.
• Better communication skills as people are pitching their ideas to their fellow team members.

Steps To Improve Cross-Functional Collaboration in Your Organization

Here are some steps that you can follow to promote a healthy cross-functional collaboration in your company and achieve optimum results –

1. Break the Silos

Organizational silos form when personal or departmental objectives develop into such a priority that they become selfish goals, leading to employees losing sight of company goals and purpose.

Here are some ways through which an organization can break silos and promote cross-functional collaboration –

Form Shared Accountabilities

Once you have established a unifying vision in your company, it must get translated into the mundane behaviors of teams and individuals as everyone feels accountable for the expertise delegated to them.

Encourage Team Collaboration

Joint meetings, chat sessions, and focus groups can help provide employees with opportunities to know people from different teams and how they can assist each other, to achieve company goals.

Have Leaders Promote Collaboration

People on different teams will not collaborate but remain in silos unless their leaders exhibit collaborative behavior.

Company leaders must set an example to demonstrate that they anticipate cross-functional teamwork as-well-as information pooling from their employees.

Zippi is a work management platform that can drive productivity in teams and promote effective task management. This platform offers seamless collaboration through the following ways –

1. Individual and group conversations
2. Polls for swift decision making
3. Giving recognition to deserving colleagues
4. Share media, learning content as-well-as business documents

2. Implement a Collaboration software 

With a collaboration software in place, you can achieve –

Boosted efficiency and workflow

Collaborative software encourages team efficiency as it can help you directly contact fellow members via instant messaging built into the software.

There is a reduction in errors as documents get saved automatically into the online system.

Also Read: How to drive faster Business Execution?

Introduction of Automation 

Using collaborative software means that you are eliminating the need for obsolete paper-based systems. Paper records of documents can get misplaced; therefore, working from an online platform is an effective way to record and manage data.

Boost Client-Customer Relationships

If a group of people is managing a particular client's work, you can log into the collaboration software to check everybody's status report.

Collaborative software can provide your clients with regular updates, so they do not feel that they have to chase you for updates or information.

With Zippi, you can allot projects and individual tasks to employees, create lists, boards, and calendar views, and attach documents seamlessly for effective communication.

3. Make project-based Workgroups 

A company handles different projects that demand diverse expertise and the supervision of various personnel. You can form workgroups by sorting people as per their experience and knowledge in a particular domain.

By forming project-based workgroups, you can –

1. Divide complex tasks into elementary steps.
2. Manage time effectively
3. Improve understanding through discussion.
4. Gather feedback on performance.

Zippi is one such platform that lets you automate workgroups for different projects, add unlimited users to any task along with the ability to restrict broadcasters.

4. Drive actions via communication 

Since communication and collaboration go hand-in-hand in establishing reinforced collaboration amongst team members, it is imperative to have no communication barriers across the hierarchy of your organization.

Better communication amongst teams can help –

1. Increase productivity.
2. Enhance the quality of services or products.
3. Increase levels of trust and commitment.
4. Boost employee engagement and creativity levels.

5. Link Goals For Cross-Functional Projects 

As clients approach companies with varied requests, cross-functional projects are now a common thing in any organization. While working on such projects, you must link goals amongst different teams.

For instance, two teams, such as marketing or product development, will come together to develop a product that delivers optimum performance but also can be marketed easily and can reach out to a greater audience.

With so many tasks to handle simultaneously, you can use Zippi for your organization as it offers real-time visibility, lets you track individual progress, and connects you to business outcomes.

6. Encourage Open Feedback From all Stakeholders 

It is imperative to know what stakeholders think of your organization and what are the primary shortcomings as per their perspective.

Be sure to prepare professional questions to gather insightful feedback and indulge with them in a friendly tone.

Inquire them about open-ended questions to enable them to expand on their answers. Ask questions that evoke a balance of positive responses and some negative ones as well.

While gathering feedback might seem like a daunting task at first, Zippi makes it easy as it is the 1st app in the world to have inbuilt conversations on a project. This feature empowers you to provide qualitative feedback via conversations.

Related: How Amara Raja embraced collaborative work management with Zippi?

7. Track Collaboration Results 

Your job is not merely to bring teams together and associate common goals for better cross-functional collaboration, but it also involves tracking collaboration results.

Tracking results is an effective way of tracking progress and eliminating the factors that dampen organizational growth.

While tracking results and progress, it is sometimes necessary to give your employees a nudge. You can achieve such a leap via Jinie, which is your personal executive assistant.

Jinie nudges you about the work priorities and ensures that you adhere to the timelines. It drives prioritization on work, integrates with any CRM, ERP, HR, Business Systems, GSuite, and O365, and gets powered by AI.

Finally

As the demand for diversified projects is surging, organizations must promote cross-functional collaboration to deliver optimum results to clients.

This article will help you understand the significance of cross-collaboration as-well-as some efficient ways to implement it without creating a ruckus.