Your development team just proposed a brilliant product concept. The trouble is, the members aren’t aware of changes in the new marketing campaign.
You’re now tasked with going back and forth between departments, adding more emails and meetings to an already full plate.
Throw in time zone challenges and inefficient meeting transcriptions, and you’re soon ready to scrap the whole thing.
A better solution? Implementing solid, strategic, cross-team collaboration. This will enable your teams to communicate more effectively and reduce — or even eliminate — cumbersome go-betweens in the meantime.
Read on to see how cross-team collaboration benefits businesses, some challenges to watch for, and top tips and tricks to ensure your collaborative endeavors are a success from the start.
What is cross-team collaboration?
Cross-team collaboration, also known as cross-functional collaboration, happens when employees from one or more departments (or even teams) work together toward a common goal.
Successful project completion and goal attainment rely on the right people coming together at the right times. Strong communication and teamwork skills are essential to successful collaboration.
Employees are a big part of these collaborative efforts. Seventy-five percent view collaboration as important, while 86% of leaders note a lack of collaboration as a primary reason behind workplace failures.
During cross-team collaboration, the design team works closely with the marketing department to ensure that the organization’s latest social media posts align with the recent changes in the company brand. Or the company’s call center and help desk team up with IT to develop the appropriate scripts and responses to the new technology feature roll-out. (Incidentally, IT teams are often involved in cross-team collaboration.)
Cross-team collaboration could also be a matter of different departments meeting regularly to review company goals, review processes, and brainstorm solutions to common problems.
Why should effective cross-team collaboration matter to you?
Cross-team collaboration in the workplace matters for several reasons:
Aligning with current workforce trends
Collaboration among different teams has become increasingly common over time.
The increase in hybrid and remote workplaces is a big contributing factor, with 40% of remote-capable employees having shifted from entirely in-office to hybrid or remote roles.
As a result, workplaces themselves have changed. The widespread availability of virtual meeting spaces, chat rooms, and other platforms make it easier than ever for colleagues to connect with each other across departments.
Effective cross-time zones and cross-border collaboration are also becoming more essential, as many companies are expanding to make their workforce global.
Positive company results
Businesses that embrace both cross-team collaboration and generative AI experience boosts in their operational efficiency, output, and customer satisfaction.
In addition, top management support is a key factor in enhanced cross-functional team collaboration efforts and success.
Ineffective or absent collaboration leads to a loss in productivity. When teams and departments don’t work together, it takes them longer to achieve their goals.
Goals might even be misaligned without interdepartmental collaboration. In one study, 15% of sales professionals reported that a lack of alignment between the sales and marketing teams posed a significant challenge to their ability to meet their goals.
Despite the availability of virtual workspaces and other supports, only 49% of flex workers believe that their team works effectively in hybrid roles.
Variable collaboration needs
Depending on your business, you may find collaborative needs inherent in your workplace.
For example, project managers have numerous responsibilities to keep their projects on track and on schedule. They must also work successfully with multiple departments to achieve their goals by their deadlines.
Companies that employ worldwide need strong relationships between HR and management for recruitment, training, and development purposes.
Strong collaboration also leads to better outcomes for your business, your employees, and your customers. Among different types of healthcare professionals, patients who have positive experiences with collaborative practices are better able to manage their chronic conditions.
3 benefits of cross-team collaboration (when it’s done well)
Cross-team collaboration is well worth your time, energy, and effort as a manager. Here’s why.
1. Increased worker morale
Feeling like an essential part of a team and knowing what to expect from coworkers are key drivers of positive employee engagement. Employees who work across departments feel a shared sense of responsibility for projects and their outcomes, resulting in higher workplace engagement.
Engaged employees feel more connected to their organizational mission, vision, and values. Determining your employees’ engagement levels is critical to their long-term satisfaction and commitment to their roles, especially since this has declined in the US over the past few years.
Companies with actively engaged employees also enjoy significantly higher employee retention in the long term. And with an average annual turnover rate of 30% in the US, employers who emphasize employee engagement reap the rewards.
These businesses won’t be continually looking for top talent, either, leading to lower costs for recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training. The average onboarding cost in the US is about $4,700 per new hire, which adds up quickly if your turnover rate is high.
In addition, each time a new member is added, the team’s productivity and output are affected. Accommodating and adapting to a new dynamic takes time, especially if the employee is relatively new to the role or the responsibilities they have.
2. Better productivity and quality
Teams that work together effectively get work done faster. Not only that, but their teamwork effectiveness is positively correlated to their work performance as a whole.
With cross-team collaboration, your business can enjoy higher-quality product or service delivery with input from a more diverse group of team members. You also benefit from access to a larger knowledge pool, which is especially helpful when unexpected issues arise.
Cross-team collaboration allows you to capitalize on each department’s expertise, leading to greater creativity and more detailed insights than you’d have otherwise. Your daily processes become more efficient, with all team members on the same page. Information isn’t siloed or challenging to access. Employees aren’t scrambling for the facts or wondering why those in other departments operate differently from them.
Employees who use cross-team collaboration report having more equitable task distribution, as the burden is lifted from individual employees and departments. Members from across the teams divide tasks in pursuit of the common goal.
Ready for additional insights? See how effective cross-team collaboration works for design and user experience, operations, and marketing teams.
3. A positive workplace culture
In a positive workplace, employees know that their input, perspectives, and knowledge base matter.
They also acknowledge and recognize others’ contributions. And supportive team behavior and communication are positively associated with function and performance. In one healthcare-based study, the consistent interactions between PCPs and specialists led to better team performance overall.
Employees who feel that their workplace emphasizes strong communication and interdepartmental collaboration are more connected to their colleagues and their roles. They better understand how other teams and departments contribute to the success of each project, as they have access to more information. And if miscommunication or miscues occur, they’re more likely to address the issue positively.
Collaborative colleagues demonstrate increased empathy and understanding with others when they have access to the big picture. It’s much harder to assign blame or point fingers when you’ve connected your coworker’s face to their name (and maybe even know how they take their coffee).
3 challenges of poorly planned cross-team collaboration
While cross-team collaboration has distinct advantages in the workplace, you should be aware of the negatives if it’s not handled correctly:
1. Slower (and potentially poorer) output
When cross-team collaboration isn’t addressed effectively, it can lead to confusion over various processes, especially if roles and responsibilities aren’t clearly identified. Teams may become frustrated as they wait for responses to their questions and concerns. Similarly, time-consuming identification and correction of miscommunication leads to inconvenient delays.
Teams and departments may not understand where to access the information they need or who in other departments to go to with questions. They may waste time tracking down information as they pursue the most suitable sources.
Without clear leadership, there may be a lack of clarity around individual roles and responsibilities. In addition, the misalignment of values, goals, and objectives from one department to another can lead to more time wasted as members struggle to course-correct.
2. A change-resistant workplace
If employees aren’t used to collaborating across teams, you might see stubbornness, resistance, or insecurities in them. It may feel unnatural for them to work with others outside their department or team, especially if trust hasn’t yet been established.
If employees aren’t brought into collaborative spaces correctly, they may act as bottlenecks. Information may be slowed or miscommunicated due to biases, uncertainties, or frustrations with previous encounters.
Management may need to invest in additional training or professional development programs to support collaboration efforts, build trust, and support effective communication strategies.
3. Inefficient systems
As teams and departments become proficient in their own tools and materials, being asked to change can be frustrating. Projects can also stall when team members are introduced to new tools or asked to replace their preferred ones, with extra time spent trying to get everyone up to speed.
Organizations with multiple systems are left with informational silos that create frustration (and frequently cause miscommunication) as employees try to put everything together.
Here’s a helpful hint: Investing in a single platform like Lark puts everything at your fingertips and keeps everyone on the same page through one centralized platform. Colleagues can easily switch between apps to collaborate through meetings, chats, email, shared documents, and more.
4 cross-team collaboration best practices you should implement for your next project
If you’re ready to invest in cross-team collaboration within your company, put these strategies in place to give you the best chance of success:
1. Implement strong leadership
Effective collaboration across teams or departments begins with solid leadership.
Start with the team members. Be selective about who participates in your cross-team collaboration efforts. Send out an employee survey to discover who has previous experience with working across teams and who would be interested in participating.
Determine whether your team members would benefit from professional development to get them up to speed. You could address hard skills, such as technical training with a new centralized software program. Your training could also tackle essential soft skills, such as tactics for successful conflict resolution.
Diverse, inclusive, and equitable practices should be at the forefront of your leadership team’s minds. Team members should be made to feel comfortable sharing their ideas and perspectives with others. Address generational and cultural differences and how these can contribute to more successful teams.
Team leaders should establish an open-door policy, including virtual spaces for hybrid and remote workers to share any questions or concerns they may have. Identify and resolve issues swiftly and consistently so that your workers know you stand ready to provide support when challenges arise.
Consider how you’ll celebrate individual employee, team, and interdepartmental wins. Recognition matters to your employees. Twenty-eight percent of employees note that they’ve received their most meaningful and memorable recognition from their managers, so ensure your management team is honest, individual, and specific.
2. Establish common goals
Get your team members on the same page through project kickoff meetings.
If you haven’t already, outline the company’s mission, vision, and long-term goals. Explain how each team project contributes to the business’s long-term success.
Write down the business’s long-term and short-term goals and post them in shared spaces for easy access. Commit to reviewing them regularly during team meetings to maintain a tight focus.
Come up with SMART goals: goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Clarify each member’s accountability for their individual and shared goals.
Lead by example, too. Complete your action items on time, and be transparent if you run into issues to motivate your team to do the same.
Provide team members with shared platforms for seamless collaboration. Employees should be able to connect on project statuses, report concerns, and stay on top of deadlines via email, shared chat spaces, and virtual meeting sites. Use a shared calendar so employees can share their availability with each other and read meeting agendas beforehand.
To improve your project management, head to Lark Meegle. This inclusive platform makes it easy for employees to refer to goals, track project progress, and share concerns.
3. Instill ownership and accountability
It’s not enough for the team to know a project’s long-term and short-term goals. Employees also need to feel a sense of connection and responsibility for their role in the project.
Draft a team charter to clearly define each team member’s roles and responsibilities at the outset to avoid confusion later. Charters may also include the team goals, including projected deadlines and anticipated timelines for achieving various objectives.
Identify any knowledge gaps and whether additional team members need to be brought in or training should be provided. Address frustrations with member assignments and work with them to proactively problem-solve and resolve conflicts.
Understanding how their and others' roles contribute toward a project’s success is a key factor in successful collaboration. Whether the people involved are from design, marketing, or software development departments, they should feel like a cohesive team that’s working toward a common purpose.
Make processes transparent, too. Even if they’re not connecting through a shared project, regularly bring employees from different departments together to review goals, streamline processes, and share concerns.
For example, host a cross-functional team meeting with the HR and IT departments. IT may learn that HR is struggling to onboard new hires efficiently and brainstorm a technological solution to streamline the process. This puts both departments on the same page and focused on improvising efforts to train (and retain) the company’s newest employees.
4. Invest in robust technology
Automation and a powerful, centralized platform can save the day. Here’s how Lark can help employees collaborate successfully, whether they’re connecting across teams or departments.
Lark Meetings & Lark Minutes
With Lark Meetings, you can easily schedule video and audio calls to keep team members on the same page. The platform also adapts to mobile use, so you can even catch a meeting from your phone if necessary.
Lark Meetings also lets you share status reports, team charters, and other documents, plus allows each participant to edit them in real time.
Enable meeting translations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, along with live subtitles, to support your global, diverse workforce.
If you have asynchronous or absent workers, Lark Minutes keeps them updated. Each virtual meeting is captured in an accessible transcription. Team members can review, search for information in, and collaborate within the document when their schedules allow. Any participant can also easily translate the meeting notes into their preferred language.
Lark Messenger
When you’re ready to ramp up team collaboration and productivity, turn to Lark Messenger. This platform enables text communication between team members (and across departments) to forge connections and get quick answers to questions.
This centralized communication platform connects directly to emails and calendars for easy reference and scheduling. Turn comments directly into task items with deadlines. Create threads for project-specific needs and celebrate your team wins with real-time, virtual applause.
Lark Docs
Create, store, and share documents for cross-team reference and input with Lark Docs.
Send weekly project status reports with graphs showing the completeness of tasks and projected finish dates.
With Lark Docs, you can access documents from one location. This means team members won’t waste time searching for or repeatedly requesting necessary help or information. Send your documents to chats for input and get notified when team members comment.
Do you already have a preferred document in Word, Excel, or PDF format? Upload it directly to Lark so that you won’t have to start again from scratch.
Lark Base
Use Lark Base to create a custom dashboard for knowledge gathering and easy visualization. Lark Base helps your team save valuable time through automation, resulting in smoother communication and information transfer among team members and departments.
Select your data views, whether you prefer List, Kanban, Gantt, or Gallery, to see how your collaboration efforts and projects are going and make adjustments when needed.
Upload any necessary documents and use one of Lark’s free templates to streamline your processes. For example, create a project roadmap, manage issues with a project problem checklist, or set goals based on your business type.
Lark Meegle
Lark Meegle is the only project management-focused app your company needs.
Create optimal workflows where each team member can view the project status at a glance and make the necessary adjustments over time. Within each project, you see the critical details, including the requirements, deliverables, and team members responsible.
Managers can quickly check team members' daily workloads and adjust tasks accordingly. Eliminate tedious and time-consuming task entry with the Meegle automation. Plus, set up triggers, conditions, and operations so that tasks are assigned and pushed forward seamlessly — and without missing a step.
Use Meegle to review your data and gain actionable insights into developing trends and patterns. Create data-driven visuals and reports to share with your team and maintain progress.
Lark Calendar
Promote inclusivity and avoid time zone issues with shared calendar information. Managers can easily review participant schedules and plan meetings based on their availability with Lark Calendar.
You can even create meeting groups and promote preparation by sharing the agendas with the involved individuals beforehand. And with the calendar subscription feature, you can create or share public calendars to keep interdepartmental teams in the loop.
Elevate your collaboration efforts with Lark
Implementing cross-team collaboration within your organization improves employee connections, fosters a trust-based culture, and ramps up productivity. Get started by establishing clear goals, roles, assignments, and responsibilities so that everyone is on the same page.
Then, streamline your efforts even further with Lark. This comprehensive platform has everything your company needs to get your departments in touch, from informal chats to virtual meeting spaces to shared documents.
Even better? With each of your teams using Lark, you won’t have to spend time training them in other apps or tracking down documents.
Try Lark now and watch your interdepartmental collaboration soar.
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