Establishing a smooth cross-functional collaboration across different departments is among the top priorities of business leaders in 2023. Achieving any goal at the workplace requires tremendous levels of focus. But, when team members from different departments are working on a set of common goals, cross-functional (XFN) collaboration becomes very important in achieving the right results.
Asana’s survey points out — “71% of people at companies with clear goals said it was easy to work with stakeholders in other functions, compared to just 26% of workers with unclear goals.”
In 2023, everyone in an organization eyes collaboration as a means to build an innovative and diverse workplace culture based on knowledge sharing, team spirit, and employee engagement. Asana’s latest report on the state of XFN collaboration highlights the visible correlation between a positive team dynamics and business growth. According to the survey of 9,615 global knowledge workers, 55% of respondents reported a significant growth in revenue in the last three years at their collaborative organizations. In comparison, weak collaborators pale out in front of strong collaborators in revenue generation due to the former’s lack of drive in adapting to new business challenges. As a result, weak collaborators miss out on competitive advantage in the industry.
Here are the top key takeaways from Asana’s survey results that were published in the report titled, “The Anatomy of Work- Global Index 2023.”
Collaboration Adds More Value to Work
92% of workers in collaborative teams see more value in their work compared to the weak collaborators (50%).
Cross-functional collaboration or inter-departmental collaboration refers to a synergistic approach to identifying problems, analyzing various scenarios that lead to these problems, and finally coming up with solutions within the parameters of organizational development and culture management. Meeting deadlines and sticking to a budget are among the top outcomes of any high-growth business team that fosters XFN collaboration, celebrating different perspectives and approach to problem-solving.
Asana found out strong collaborators have a shared sense of accountabilities in meeting goals and celebrating their achievements. These teams are much better prepared in effectively accomplishing any task together than the weak collaborators in the organization. According to another independent survey, 54% of employees who have a sense of bonding with their coworkers and collaborators at the workplace tend to stay longer in a company solely because of the camaraderie.
Invariably, a healthy collaboration helps teams meet their targets, and establish a competitive advantage across different departments and locations.
Marketing Collaborates the Best
When teams get quick results from their collaboration, they are more likely to value the relationships and actions that led to success, or for that matter, failure. Collaboration generates quick results — and Marketing team benefits the most from such a positive collaboration initiative that directly influences customer journeys and corporate branding.
50% of knowledge workers in Marketing function mentioned they have a strong XFN collaboration with other teams. Much before pandemic struck the economy, marketing teams were ahead of the curve, utilizing top-grade automation platforms and AI to get their job done. Knowledge workers from the IT (48%), Sales (40%), Software Development (40%), Product Development (45%), and Ops and Project Management (46%) departments also performed decently for their organization with somewhat strong collaboration than others. Asana’s finding may have put the Marketing team on the top of collaboration ladder, however, CMOs may not completely agree with the real scenario. According to a survey, 70% of CMOs lack the confidence in their existing sales-marketing models for generating revenues from the digitized customer journeys.
Whether it’s in Marketing or any other department, a successful XFN collaboration across different departments for a higher growth can only happen when all the departments co-own the corporate strategy, data, and technology. These co-ownership initiatives are critical to organizational growth and employee development.
Collaboration Prevents Employee Churn
Within the first year of pandemic, 80% of workers were using collaboration tools in 2021, compared to only 55% in 2019. The move to remote-first and then hybrid workplace definitely forced most teams to create new hubs for collaboration using technology.
While remote work has many benefits, there are at least two major disadvantages that tarnish the whole idea of going remote.
Recommended HR Technology Article: Poor Work-life Balance and Career Disconnect Force Employees to Leave their Organization
First, remote workers feel social isolation from their workplace settings, which could result in disengagement from the core KRAs. Second, remote workers tend to complain more about mental health issues than the regular full-time office-goers. Employees are more likely to quit their jobs due to mental health issues than any other reason. It doesn’t augur well for either talented employees or their organizations who have to spend more time, effort, and monies to find a suitable replacement. Employee churn is a dangerous outcome of remote or unstructured hybrid working.
Healthy XFN collaboration can solve this problem of employee churn due to misaligned workplace expectations, fatigue, and miscommunication.
According to Corel’s 2022 State of Collaboration Survey, 64% of workers claimed they could be losing up to 3 hours per week in productivity due to poor collaboration. The same report also cited that 41% of employees who have either left their job or are planning to do so squarely blame it on poor collaboration at the workplace. In short, collaboration or the lack of it is a major factor in increasing employee churn at hybrid and remote workplaces.
Asana’s survey on the state of cross-functional collaboration in the organization found collaboration brings in transparency to the whole scenario.
Workers feel more valued at their workplace when they find themselves in a collaborative environment. Technology is an enabler in such a scenario where collaborative tools can create better experiences for virtual meetings and performance management. Every team member knows who is doing what, when and how with SaaS-based collaboration platforms and apps. This leads to smoother knowledge sharing across departments within an organization, enabling team managers to set clear goals and making everyone accountable for the outcomes. XFN collaboration is particularly effective in reducing employee churn in the marketing, legal and operations departments.
Strategic Collaboration impacts Customer Responsiveness
Strategic collaboration is built on the foundations on clarity of goals, autonomy and customer-centricity.
Let’s discuss customer-centricity first.
Customers seek instant attention from the business teams they interact with. The services-driven industry relies on streamlined communication channels to answer all the relevant queries from customers. However, employee churn, absenteeism, and exhaustion could impact the quality and pace of service delivery. Organizations that prioritize XFN collaboration could reduce customer churn by putting the best employees on the front-lines, giving them a strategic role to not only meet organization goals but also design a successful customer response center.
According to the survey, 87% of knowledge workers say they are well-prepared to meet all their customer expectations when the individual goals are linked to company-wide goals. Goal-setting is the roadmap that gets employees to accomplish the tasks. For this, clarity of goals is very important.
What’s clarity of goals and how does it affect business growth?
Performance management and collaboration at workplace go hand-in-hand. While managers opt for performance management strategies to measure employee’s quantitative participation at the workplace, collaboration is all about interpersonal dynamics and accountability. That’s why strategic collaboration is embedded within performance management approaches that have a clear goal-setting agenda. SMART goal-setting is the ultimate result of strategic collaboration and performance management in a successful organization.
Now, when we talk about autonomy at workplace, Asana found employees were likely to share more information with the key players in the organization when their individual targets were linked to the company goals. Empowered employees not only share the correct information with the management, but also do it by passing the information to the right people at the right time. XFN collaboration is truly empowering for autonomous knowledge workers who can easily correlate their goals with workplace dynamics.
For instance, Asana’s survey points out — “71% of people at companies with clear goals said it was easy to work with stakeholders in other functions, compared to just 26% of workers with unclear goals.”
Autonomy could also mean giving each worker a choice to pick a technology that empowers them in doing work more effectively. It’s safe to say that workers loaded with extraordinary volume of work would choose automation tools to ease their lives– especially when it comes to making decisions quickly, and for collaborating with cross-functional teams on important operations and projects.
But, only strategic collaboration can’t bring you the results you hope for. It has to be tactical too — especially for the senior business leaders in the hierarchy.
Adding XFN collaboration to achieve organizational goals with velocity can overwhelm the top and mid-level managers. They could be spending 4-5 hours every week attending unnecessary meetings, replying to emails on weekends, holidays, or on vacations, and worse, missing out on important mission-critical assignments, just to make the collaboration work for others.
In complex workflows, AI can really help customer-centric teams. In an HRTech interview, Zendesk’s Yew Hwee Ng said – “The use of AI is meant to complement the human workforce, allowing them to be more consistent, better understand customers and glean actionable insights. Customers who implement Tymeshift can now track agent activity, productivity, and efficiency in real time. Visibility into agent activity and automatic tracking in Zendesk will now allow support teams to save valuable time previously spent on manual workforce management tasks by automatically creating schedules, forecasts, and real-time reports. This eliminates significant amounts of manual workload, thus freeing up time for agents and admins to work on more meaningful tasks.”
Down-side of Relying too Much on XFN Collaboration?
XFN collaboration could mean working with a large number of people. Getting a consensus on an agenda and goals could be painfully time-consuming and unproductive for high-growth teams, particularly the client service ones. 41% of respondents surveyed by Asana agree that XFN collaboration slows down the decision-making process. 47% of C-level executives said making decisions quickly was a major challenge in dealing with cross-functional projects.
Business leaders have a solution for this — “ruthless, ruthless prioritization”, and leverage data. Agility, flexibility, and autonomy are keys to succeeding with cross-functional ‘smart’ collaboration.
Initiating a centralized XFN collaboration approach could involve these steps at an enterprise in 2023:
- Goal-setting alignment
- Holding people accountable
- Communicating with people across all functions
- Making data-driven decisions
- Defining the role and responsibilities across multiple functions and locations
- Working with teams located across remote, hybrid, and on-site settings
Where do we go from here with collaboration?
Technology could be the biggest catalyst for organizations that are lagging in collaboration between the cross-functional teams.
Did you know that 64 percent of employees attribute the difficulty in collaborating with other teams to a lack of integration between their organization’s tools and processes? According to Microsoft, 59% of employees cite that their collaboration tools do not exactly align with how they and their team works to achieve goals. Every department wants to ultimately attain 100% digital transformation. As employees become hungrier for digital tools such as automation and time scheduling apps, it could also mean different teams are using different apps and solutions for their internal needs and wants. This could be problematic for large-sized companies that could be dealing with 16-20 apps at a time for the same set of tasks. It could create unwanted silos.
Collaboration tools such as Asana, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Trello, Slack, and others could save nearly 5 hours per week by improving business processes and reducing friction in communication. For workers that are using more than 16 apps can save up to 9.6 hours every week if processes were improved. However, relying merely on technology platforms and apps alone can’t guarantee 100% efficiency with collaborative strategies. To meet workplace goals collaboratively, 85% of workers mentioned collaborative tools as a major element for accomplishing tasks. 9 out 10 employees are looking at automation tools to ease the pressure of doing mundane tasks and instead free up their time to perform mission-critical activities.
So, what exactly does the current plan look like for improving workplace collaboration in your organization? Share your views and insights with us, and mention your favorite HR Technology tools in the “collaboration” category.