5 Tips to Improve Cross Functional Collaboration in a Remote Team

Cross-functional collaboration is vital for the success of a remote team. Unfortunately, according to a study published in the Harvard Business Review 75% of the time, a cross-functional team is dysfunctional.

Yet, OWL Labs claimed that in 2019, individual contributors in the United States were 20% more likely than average to work remotely full-time.

The rise of remote work has ushered in a new era of team dynamics where geographical distance is no longer a limitation in access to top talent. America is particularly fast-tracking through the curve in remote working. With that in mind, finding ways to improve cross-functional collaboration between the disciplines on your team becomes increasingly important as online workers’ demand and accessibility continue to increase. The ability to collaborate well across departments is now key to ensuring that virtual teams are not only productive but also innovative and adaptable.

Ultimately, strong cross-functional collaboration in remote teams leads to better problem-solving, faster decision-making, and a more cohesive working environment that can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

Importance of cross-functional collaboration

A cross-functional team is a group of team members from various departments that combine diverse skill sets to work on a project or pursue a shared objective.

Being in a cross-functional team has many advantages, but it also has drawbacks for any organization.

A cross-functional team may feature individuals who each bring conflicting work methods and working approaches to the table.

Cross-functional collaboration promotes efficiency within the company, lowers expenses, and fosters adaptability and innovative problem-solving. Most importantly, it keeps everyone focused on the long-term objectives of the business.

Project managers and team leaders must establish ground principles for the group, lay out a precise procedure for making decisions, and promote open communication and flexibility to overcome these obstacles.

However, it’s essentially important and advantageous if executed properly.

A cross-functional team collaboration can help team members achieve the following:

• Teamwork makes the dream work
• Team members are more productive
• Team members learn from each other
• Diverse ideas and skill sets are brought to the table
• Employees can build better leadership skills

Tips on improving cross-functional collaboration

The reality is that an effective cross-functional team necessitates trust.

Building a trusting relationship with someone when you labor in the same space together is challenging enough.

When teams from various departments are working together, this challenge gets progressively harder.

We’ve compiled a list of 5 easy steps that have helped us create a genuinely collaborative environment to give you ideas on how you can improve cross-team collaboration in your company.

Clear task-handling guidelines

Clear guidelines on how to handle project tasks are vital for organizing a cross-discipline team and enabling them to collaborate effectively.

Simple organizational steps such as color-coding tasks in your team app based on ownership, or the skill sets required, and assigning sub-tasks to individual team members, help everyone know which tasks they need to focus on.

Additionally, you should also have a system in place that everyone follows for noting the priority and deadline of each task. This helps the team to work together on the most important tasks to ensure progress isn’t held up.

Similarly, get everyone on your team into the habit of updating tasks with the latest progress and marking tasks as in progress when they get started on them. This helps encourage a more proactive approach to cross-functional collaboration by keeping team members updated on what their colleagues are working on.

Chanty provides each team member with personalized feeds for their messages and tasks, making it easy to prioritize each individual’s workload while keeping them updated on other tasks that might need their skills.

Making sure everyone starts their day with clear tasks and priorities, and an awareness of their colleagues’ progress, enables them to work and collaborate more efficiently. Jumping between tasks can cost as much as 40% of your team’s daily productivity, so clear prioritization can have significant benefits.

Expand your communication methods

Your team can’t collaborate if they can’t communicate effectively. 30% of projects fail due to poor communication. There are a variety of methods remote teams can use to keep in touch. These include:

Team chat apps
Business messaging apps are crucial for the day-to-day discussions and updates that keep a project running smoothly. In addition to private and group messaging functions, team chat apps offer a range of tools and integrations that help you manage tasks and schedule work.

These features can help your team members take the initiative in organizing collaborative work by creating tasks themselves and inviting colleagues to them. For example, Chanty lets users turn any message into a task, making discussions and feedback flow seamlessly into collaborative tasks.

VoIP and video calling
VoIP and video calls can take up too much time as a daily communication channel, however in critical discussions and personal meetings these can enable team members to communicate with more clarity and understand each other better through intonation and facial expressions.

The ability to take screen recordings and share a screen over video calls is a vital collaborative tool, enabling team members to demonstrate features, changes and feedback visually to the rest of the team.

When you are talking and seeing the colleague you are communicating with, it is easier to get your point across. 87% of remote workers feel more connected to their team thanks to video conferencing.

Text messaging
Texting is very useful for sending out critical alerts, updates, and reminders to your team. In a study by West Virginia State University, participants were 4 times as likely to prefer receiving important updates and notices via text.

By scheduling important messages and integrating an SMS app with your other productivity tools, you can ensure team members never miss an important message. To avoid disrupting employees’ private time in a remote team, make sure to use a texting app that automatically takes time zones into account when scheduling messages.

Each communication channel offers unique benefits, so make sure you use each to its strengths.

Create a culture of knowledge sharing

A key component to successful cross-functional working is unobstructed knowledge throughout teams. Having members from each team contribute insight and expertise keeps the departments intertwined and avoids information becoming walled up within itself. This not only enables the information to be more shared, but also creates the team a more effective problem-solver and innovator. Each member brings something unique to the table, and the more that is shared around, the higher the collaborative decision-making.

One of the best ways to facilitate this is by setting up spaces for knowledge sharing. Experiment with establishing channels where people can share valuable articles, tips, or good project experiences. These could be as simple as a Slack channel for best practices or even something more formalized such as a knowledge base accessible to everyone. The idea is to make it easy for people to share and find what they need.

Incentivizing the practice will also increase participation. Recognition and rewarding people who contribute valuable information, either through shout-outs at team meetings or through a more formal reward system, enforces the notion that knowledge sharing is an important aspect of the team culture. When people understand that their contributions are valued, they’re more likely to continue sharing, and therefore it becomes an organic and sustainable aspect of team dynamics.

By building a culture where everyone shares knowledge, you build a better, more robust team that can bounce back from adversity faster and better.

Create teamwork opportunities for cross-functional collaboration

Improving cross-functional collaboration in a remote team requires proactively scheduling meetings and discussions between the different disciplines in your team. In addition to opening group discussions in your chat app to solve specific problems or work on tasks, give weekly updates on project progress.

Encourage team members to do the same, updating the team with their milestones and roadblocks. This makes it easier for employees to see where a colleague needs help and step in before the project falls behind schedule. A brief weekly check-in meeting with your team helps your team stay motivated in addition to avoiding delays.

An off-topic chat channel is also important in a remote team. It enables employees to build relationships with each other, which can impact their willingness to share ideas and feedback. Isolation can be a major communication challenge for remote workers, so encouraging friendly conversation is also important for maintaining a healthy and productive team.

Reward achieved milestones and goals within each project

Rewarding goals and milestones helps foster team spirit by giving the team opportunities to notice and congratulate each other’s work and achievements.

Everyone enjoys getting recognition for their efforts, and in addition to the boost to morale and productivity, this also helps team members see how their work fits into the bigger picture.

Furthermore, individuals will have more confidence to provide their input in group discussions, enabling the team to benefit more from their skills and perspectives. While you can’t always put every suggestion into practice, making it clear you value everyone’s input will lead to team members sharing their ideas more often.

Teams that communicate effectively are 4.5 times as likely to retain their best employees.

Encourage cross-department pairing or mentorship

Pairing team members from various departments is a good method to build a more unified and powerful team. When people of various functions meet and interact with one another, they have a firsthand understanding of the role, problem, and priority of one another. Such interaction not only generates mutual respect but also encourages better communication between departments.

Pairing or mentoring allows employees to leave their usual area of activity and get a broader idea of how the business operates. For example, a marketing individual is able to better understand the technical details of the business through being paired with a developer, and a finance staff member is able to understand more about what customers require through being paired with a sales person. These interactions create a more holistic view of the firm, encouraging workers to think beyond their own functions and collaborate better.

Mentorship initiatives are especially money well spent for establishing long-term relationships between departments. They provide a structured means through which workers can learn from each other, challenge things, and share pointers. Not only can a successful mentor advance the career of his or her mentee, but he or she also helps get his or her mentee oriented with the big picture of the company. This can lead to improved coordination between teams and improved cooperation.

Through buddy pairing or mentorship, the employees will be more at ease requesting help, sharing ideas, and stepping in where others require help. Such a collaboration creates a closer team relationship and eventually delivers better project outcomes.

Scheduling in a remote team

Remote teams give you access to talent across the globe, but you also need to consider time zones. In a small team, having a 10-hour time difference between team members could be a major productivity killer if their work needs lots of feedback or input from other team members.

Wherever your team members are located, try to coordinate at least a few hours of crossover between team members’ working hours. Otherwise, team members could be waiting until their next work day to get a reply to each of their messages.

On a cross-functional task or project, that can make even simple tasks take far longer than they should.

In a global team, holding meetings or group discussions can mean that someone has to get up early or attend the meeting late in the evening. To some extent, this is a necessary sacrifice, but don’t expect your workers in distant time zones to make that sacrifice every time.

This can leave them feeling treated unfairly or a less valuable team member, making them less willing to share ideas and collaborate.

Remote working technology potentially gives you 24/7 access to your team, but it might not be a good idea to use it this way. If your team members feel expected to be online and available to reply at any time, they could find it difficult to relax and recharge.

85% of remote workers chose remote work to have greater flexibility with their time, so avoid encroaching into your team’s offline time outside critical situations. According to a 2019 Buffer survey, unplugging after work is the biggest challenge for remote workers.

Why you should implement cross-functional collaboration

There are plenty of ways to keep a remote team focused and working together on a project. Improving cross-functional collaboration involves providing the tools to communicate effectively in every situation, setting clear expectations and responsibilities, and building an environment that encourages and supports open communication and discussion by recognizing and rewarding achievements.

When used correctly, cross-functional collaboration can significantly increase both productivity and innovation. It combines diverse expertise from multiple departments into cross-functional teams to creatively solve a given problem or project. Innovative ideas would be unlikely to come from a team made up of people from just one functional area. Collaboration makes participants work together for a common interest, which motivates individual employees with a heightened desire to participate in whatever is put forward.

With a global team, you can avoid potential efficiency problems by scheduling your team’s time so they can communicate and making sure everyone feels treated fairly to avoid demotivation. The cross-functional collaboration will also make the team more adaptable and flexible. Exactly for these reasons, cross-functional teams, with their wider access to people’s expertise and knowledge base, have the potential to respond to many different challenges and changes and adjust strategies as they are more resilient in times of change.

Besides, working across functions improves knowledge sharing and encourages continuous learning. When team members from different functions work together, they often get exposure to areas they would not normally be exposed to, thus widening their horizons about the business and developing their professional skills. This does not only benefit the individuals but also the team as a whole, making them more versatile and skilled.

Most importantly, successful cross-functional teams foster closer, less fragmented relationships within an organization, which can lead to a more inclusive and collaborative culture. Cross-departmental collaboration will also boost team morale; people get excited when they can work as part of a diverse mix, where many different kinds of people bring different kinds of strengths to their work.

Final note

Improving cross-functional collaboration between remote teams is the way to ensure productivity, innovation, and team spirit. You can keep your team aligned and motivated by establishing crystal-clear guidelines on each task, extending channels of communication, and holding regular check-ins. Recognizing achievement while respecting time zones further solidifies collaboration, building an effective, cohesive remote team. Armed with the right toolset and methodology, cross-functional collaboration could be your panacea for getting your remote team working at full capacity.

Ready to take your remote team collaboration to the next level? Try these tips today and your team will thrive, no matter where they are.