How to achieve cross-functional collaboration and improve remote work (WFH)

Team collaboration and communication have always been great indicators of a successful enterprise, mainly because they enable two of the most valuable things for any kind of business: speed and agility.

Now that every company is forced to rearrange their operations to remote work, collaboration across departments can be heavily affected by these changes.

However, if done right, cross-functional partnership in a remote workspace can become a victory factor for many businesses in the outcome of this corona crisis.


How to achieve cross-functional collaboration and improve remote work

Benefits of cross-functional collaboration

When organizations engage in large-scale projects, the absence of consultation and collaboration between co-workers can lead to wastes of time, resources, a poorly executed project and even complete failure.

Essentially, cross-functional collaboration is nothing more than putting different types of employees to work together and harvest each one of their strengths, with the objective to achieve a result that an isolated team would never get.

Unique Perspectives

One of the greatest outcomes of this jointed workforce is all the different perspectives that you will get for every individual participating in the project. That’s the key to innovative solutions and agility to overcome barriers.

Knowledge sharing

Creating situations for teams with a totally different set of skills to work together also allows the growing of these employees into a more complete professional. Sometimes, a simple conversation can unlock a spark for knowledge and become an eye-opening experience or even an opportunity to explore other areas that maybe one could never imagine being working with if it wasn’t for cross-team collaboration.

Build teamwork culture

With novelty comes the challenge to overcome the unknown. Studies point out that this kind of attitude gets stronger when doing it with a partner or in a group. Especially if other members of the journey share the same inexperience as you.

So putting people that barely talk with each other but are bonded by a common result can increase engagement, improve communication skills, and even develop a sense of partnership.

There are a lot of other benefits of cross-functional collaboration but the real potential comes with the implementation of platforms and services specialized in to facilitate and incentive this kind of interaction.

Although 75% of team leaders and employees rate teamwork and communication as pivoting for the success of projects, not every enterprise has tools to enable cross-departmental collaboration in their priority list. Until 2020.

Dawn of the “Working from Home” era

Even before COVID-19, digital transformation was already demanding businesses to step up and rethink their work practices, starting with the migration of its workspace to a more online-friendly environment.

With coronavirus causing the majority of the global workforce to stay home, many companies had no time structure an easy transition as the remote work became something imperative for businesses to keep running.

After the lockdown was imposed by many governmental agencies, the concept of “working remotely” - that used to divide fierce opinions regarding its efficiency - turned into something trivial and sustainable (no surprises here).

But the consequences of starting the WFH (working from home) era so abruptly are already perceptive.

Challenges of collaboration in WFH

When taking co-workers out of their usual office space and restraining interactions to exclusively digital platforms, some of the things that were just light-weighted concerns can turn into bigger issues.

These are some of the most common teamwork problems that can jeopardize the whole work process if not taken care of.

  • SILOS

When companies have teams working apart and not being able to build interconnected relations, some silos may be formed in the office. With this separation being fortified during remote work, the tendency is for these silos to grow and become even more evident.

And that leads us to another related issue: the lack of communication.

  • LACK OF COMMUNICATION

Without the daily face to face conversation, the coffee break, and other similar interactions only possible in physical workspaces, communication between employees is limited to online chat and video meetings.

If that kind of system wasn’t part of your company culture, it can get tricky to get everybody involved and engaged. And this brings some challenges, especially for team leaders looking to establish new directions.

The good news is that no matter the size of your team or how challenging remote work can be, with the proper tools and right approach is easy to create an infrastructure to facilitate collaboration all-around your organization.

Tips to create effective cross-functional collaboration in the WFH

1. Create alignment on organizational directions

To expect high rates of performance from employees, team leaders need to assure that everybody is on the same page. To achieve that and engage co-workers, maybe they can start by being clear about business strategy, or open a direct communication channel. Another good step is to share the company goals and clear KPIs with the rest of the group.

2. Implement tools that enable easy collaboration and communication

With the emerging need for infrastructure to support remote work, companies find themselves in an ocean of options, from simple project administration platforms to more comprehensive systems, like devolute.cloud.

Devolute.cloud is the most complete PaaS (product as a service) platform for business process management (BPM) because it gathers all the essential tools to create an agile remote workspace. Besides that, teams gain even more agility to collaborate, thanks to the automation of any cross-departmental process or task.

3. Promote Ownership and Responsibilities

This is not a new practice among big enterprises, but emphasizing accountability during WFH can be the best trick to guarantee engagement and pro-activeness from employees in cross-team projects.

To improve collaboration between departments can be less challenging with the right mindset and few methods like increasing transparency on duties; monitoring KPIs on a daily basis and keep regular interaction within all involved personal.

Devolute.cloud remote cross-team collaboration tool

With our core-product Dashboard, devolute.cloud enables teams of any size to effortlessly work together, thanks to the automation of workflows, individual or group tasks management and the integration of essential collaborative tools (Google Drive, Sales Force, Slack, Zoom).

All of that in a single and easy to operate low-code platform, with a unique developer-friendly approach.


IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE BEST REMOTE WORK AND COLLABORATION SOLUTION, SIGN IN AND TRY OUR DEMO!