What is cross-functional collaboration? Purpose, benefits, and examples

In today’s complex, fast-moving organizations, breaking down departmental silos is critical for successful cross-team alignment. Whether you’re onboarding new talent, launching a new campaign, or building a product, aligning diverse expertise across departments helps drive collaborative innovation.

That’s why cross-functional collaboration is central to Wrike’s platform, enabling teams to break down departmental, digital, and geographical boundaries to keep work flowing. Read on for a deep dive into the meaning of cross-functional collaboration and how Wrike can help teams unlock its benefits:

What is cross-functional collaboration?

Cross-functional collaboration is the deliberate coordination of team members across different departments that might typically operate in silos, such as marketing, product, design, HR, and legal.

Rather than each team jumping in for their specific tasks, departments work together from the start of the project to the end, working together on a single objective. This facilitates more simultaneous collaboration and proactive planning by allowing teams to share context, concerns, and solutions in real time.

The goal of cross-functional collaboration is to enable innovation, eliminate complex and costly hand-offs, and speed up results by making it easier to catch unexpected challenges earlier on in the project lifecycle.

For example, picture an organization working to get a new e-commerce site to market. With cross-functional collaboration, they can create one shared workspace where multiple teams like marketers, designers, engineers, and legal can work together to shape messaging, build the user experience, and ensure compliance. This comprehensive approach to collaboration leads to faster launches and fewer unexpected issues cropping up as the project progresses.

In this guide, we’re sharing everything you need to know about what cross-functional collaboration is, why it’s so beneficial, and how Wrike can help you make it happen while avoiding major hiccups and headaches.

Key takeaways

• Cross-functional collaboration brings specialists across departments into one comprehensive, shared digital workspace.
• This approach helps unite teams toward one goal, cut down on departmental silos, improve collaborative decision making, and ensure timely delivery for happier customers.
• Wrike helps operationalize cross-functional collaboration by centralizing communication, files, reviews, and reporting in one easy-to-access platform.

3 essential benefits of cross-functional collaboration

The meaning of cross-functional collaboration should be clear by now: It’s a way of bringing departments together for synergistic work.

We’ve touched upon some of the reasons you might want to instill a collaborative mindset in the workplace, but what exactly could you gain from exploring collaborative work? Let’s dive into the following benefits of cross-functional collaboration:

1. Create an environment of innovation
2. Boost employee engagement
3. Streamline work processes

1. Create an environment of innovation

One of the best ways to foster innovation within your company is to promote the cross-pollination of ideas. Relying on a single person or group of people to drive innovation excludes the input of different perspectives.

While the sales department might have some fantastic ideas for product features that sell, the marketing department could refine those ideas to appeal to a wider audience. This is an example of cross-functional collaboration at its best: Drawing upon different viewpoints to create a greater, more complete end product.

2. Boost employee engagement

One of the largest problems companies face in the digital age is low employee engagement levels.

One of the best ways to improve employee engagement and create a sense of purpose for each individual is teamwork.

It may seem counterintuitive that working with someone else helps you focus on your own work, but the evidence is there — research shows that connected groups drive roughly 23% higher profitability than their counterparts. Expand the scope of teamwork to include team members from different departments, and you’re on to a winning recipe for higher engagement levels. Working towards a shared goal under the guidance of strong leaders can be rewarding for employees.

3. Streamline work processes

Cross-functional collaboration is integral to streamlined work processes because it allows teams across departments to work out of one shared flow in a centralized digital workspace. In giving everyone complete visibility, marketers, developers, finance, and any other team involved can review the same project, timelines, and assets.

This visibility makes it easier to:

• Understand roles and responsibilities
• Identify duplicate work
• Surface potential delays
• Expedite hand-offs
• Centralize conversations to cut back-and-forth
• Make data-driven decisions

With everything living in one place, teams can more easily collaborate on projects, leading to faster delivery times, fewer risks and delays, and happier customers.

 4. Develop an Agile framework

The Agile enterprise is on the rise, and for good reason. Evidence suggests that Agile companies, which successfully incorporate elements such as collaboration into the workplace, enjoy greater productivity and employee engagement.

Cross-functional collaboration is a pillar of the Agile framework, but it also underpins other methodologies. Incorporating collaboration into your company’s work dynamic can help drive progress across departments.

5. Appeal to talent and stakeholders

Cross-functional collaboration can have a profound impact on the internal organization of your company. It can promote innovation, engagement, and higher productivity — ultimately improving your organization’s appeal to top talent and key stakeholders.

Most people would prefer to work for a company that runs like a well-oiled machine built on collective work principles and effective collaboration. That is generally more appealing than an organization that leaves individuals to their own devices with little direction or support. After all, the ideal company is one in which all individuals contribute and move in the same direction as a single, cohesive unit.

The challenges of cross-functional collaboration

Cross-functional collaboration can work wonders for your business, but it isn’t all smooth sailing. In fact, it can be a logistical nightmare to coordinate projects on a company-wide level, involving various departments.

Setting up communication systems to link the chain from one department to another, sourcing the right collaborative tools, and establishing performance metrics are all problems you will have to overcome in the pursuit of cross-functional collaboration.

Three of the greatest obstacles to effective cross-functional collaboration are:

• Working in remote teams
• Social loafing
• Misunderstandings

Working in remote teams

With the widespread adoption of hybrid and remote work, modern teams rarely work out of the same location. With teams and employees scattered away from a single place of work, everything becomes more difficult — from communicating to working effectively.

As such, you need to embrace the remote work environment for any collaboration effort to be a success. Hold regular virtual meetings, make the most of collaborative tools, and check in regularly with each team leader to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Social loafing

Social loafing is the tendency for individuals to contribute less to a project when working in a team versus working alone. The phenomenon can happen for many reasons, such as:

• Unclear role responsibilities: When responsibilities are unclear, important tasks may slip through the cracks or time may be doubled up across members or departments.
• Lack of individual evaluation: People may feel less inclined to contribute if they are less concerned with being individually evaluated.
• Appearance of insignificance: People may feel that their role on the team is too small to make a noticeable difference.
• Vague project goals and KPIs: With unclear direction and success metrics, people may not know what is expected or needed to accomplish them.

To avoid these issues in the workplace, you need to create clear performance metrics that track not only a team’s progress with a project but also each individual’s contributions. Collaboration software like Wrike allows you to assess performance with the following project progress metrics:

• Completed tasks and duration of completed tasks with task tracker templates
• Remaining tasks in a project with burndown charts
• Resource capacity utilization with resource management software
• Billable and non-billable time with time tracking software

Misunderstandings

When collaborating with other departments, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that they might not use the same technical jargon and terminology you’re used to. As a result, you could end up with needless, easily avoidable misunderstandings that could impede progress.

For example, if your software developers create a user test to assess a particular feature, fill it full of jargon, and send it through to the marketing department for feedback, it’s likely to cause confusion and slow down progress as clarification is required. 

Cross-functional collaboration helps cut down on this issue by providing every contributor with the same point of reference, setting the foundation for clear, direct communication. With the help of a project management platform, teams gain:

• Comprehensive, unified visibility
• Standardized language for key deliverables
• A single source of truth for feedback and communication

Having a centralized location to house task details and discussions allows teams to collaborate more effectively across department lines, cutting down on delays and miscommunication.

Best practices for implementing effective cross-functional collaboration

Knowing about cross-functional collaboration and how it can benefit your company is one thing, but successfully implementing it is another. In this section, we’ll outline best practices for creating a work culture built on a foundation of collaboration, including:

• Clarify roles
• Host regular concept reviews
• Avoid micromanagement

Clarify roles

From the outset, you need your team leaders to step up and paint a picture for their respective teams, clarifying each member’s role, the shared goal, and how they’ll work to achieve it. In these meetings, leaders should encourage open discussion and input from all members to create a back-and-forth dialogue. That way, each member will feel a vested stake in the project’s success and find it easier to engage with the workload.

This planning process can become an effective team-building exercise, creating new connections between team members. It also allows each member to define their own contribution to the project, giving them autonomy and a sense of ownership.

Host regular concept reviews

Concept reviews present an opportunity to invite stakeholder feedback and refine the collaboration process as you go. The input from stakeholders can influence the direction of the project and help you outline parameters such as the budget, timeline, and other important details.

Concept reviews can also encourage criticism before the project is too far down the pipeline. It’s much easier to change the project before you’ve made serious progress than when it’s close to completion.

Avoid micromanagement

When ownership is blurry and progress is difficult to track, team leaders are more tempted to micromanage. Cross-functional collaboration helps bridge that gap by giving every department the same roadmap. This visibility allows managers to confidently trust the team without concerns that important tasks or feedback are falling through the cracks.

With Wrike, teams can cut down on the need for micromanagement by gaining:

• Real-time visibility into tasks, deadlines, and feedback
• Clearly defined ownership so everyone knows who is responsible for what
• Automatic status updates that keep everyone in the loop
• AI-powered automation that signals risk early

Wrike allows individuals from various teams to come together and work on tasks and projects with ease. Actionable to-do lists, 360° visibility, and instant file sharing give your teams all the tools they need to succeed. Plus, you have your checks and balances in place with access to detailed productivity reports in the form of tasks and projects completed. That way, you can assess progress and see how each team is performing. These capabilities allow managers and supervisors to more easily and accurately stay informed on project progress.

Sign up for a free two-week trial today and see how Wrike can help create a cross-functional collaboration framework for your organization.

Real-world examples of cross-functional collaboration

Cross-functional collaboration can unlock benefits across a wide range of real-world use cases, spanning multiple industries. Let’s take a look at examples of how real brands leveraged Wrike to break down departmental silos and improve collaboration and innovation across teams:

UNSW increases communication and streamlines workflows

The Challenge: At the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, the Division of External Relations was juggling incoming requests from roughly 6,000 staff across multiple systems. This created fragmented communication and a lack of ownership, which led the team to seek out a robust system that would allow for better cross-team collaboration in a more centralized communication hub.

The Solution: By implementing Wrike’s request forms, custom workflows, and dynamic dashboards, the team was able to centralize every brief, automatically route tasks, and increase in-tool communication by nearly 250% in the first three months.

Marketing Architects improve efficiency with custom approval processes

The Challenge: Tasked with producing 25 high-quality TV advertising spots a month, the Marketing Architects team was spreading project management across eight disconnected tools with limited functionality. This led to limited visibility and management across projects, siloed feedback, and slower client approvals.

The Solution: With Wrike, the team was able to reduce their eight tools to just one. By leveraging the platform’s customizable workflows, guest proofing and annotation, and automated approvals, the team was able to cut turnaround time from days to hours, leading to a 40% increase in efficiency.

Walmart Canada gains full portfolio visibility for the Transportation department

The Challenge: Stuck with Excel sheets and notebooks, the team at Walmart Canada had no portfolio-level insight and struggled to efficiently complete projects as a result.

The Solution: The team leveraged Wrike’s customer request forms, blueprints, automated approvals, portfolio dashboards, and versioned document storage to establish one visible pipeline. In doing so, they were able to cut down on calls, emails, and fragmented project review meetings, enabling leaders to more easily understand each project’s financial impact.

What are the different types of teams needed in cross-functional projects?

A cross-functional team is one that brings together people from different departments to achieve a common goal. But that leaves the question: How do you know what types of teams you need to bring into a cross-functional project?

It primarily depends on your company and the type of project you’re working on.

For example, if you want to revamp your employee onboarding process, you’d involve human resources, department managers, and maybe a few recent hires who just went through the process themselves. But if you were redesigning the company’s website, you’d involve the marketing team and the legal team.

That’s why the first step in building a cross-functional team is to think about your project itself, including the end goals and KPIs for success.

When you have a solid grasp on your finish line, you can work backward to build a team that will help you get there. As you identify who you’ll need, make sure to also think through questions like:

• What expertise do you need to execute this project? 
• What experience levels do you need involved? 
• What is the capacity or availability of other teams? Consider the resources you need and make adjustments.

With that in mind, building a cross-functional team should be a … well, cross-functional process. You’ll need to work closely with department leaders to understand their teams’ workloads, timelines, and expectations.

It can be helpful to use a system like the DACI decision-making framework so everybody has a clear understanding of how people fit in. DACI stands for: 

• Driver: The person or people leading the project
• Approver: The person or people who have to sign off on the project and related decisions
• Contributor: The people who bring expertise and input to execute the project
• Informed: The people who are impacted by the project and need to be kept in the loop, even if they aren’t actively working on it

While there isn’t a default checklist of exactly who needs to be included on a cross-functional project, the above questions and framework will help you ensure you pull in people with the right experience and skills — and provide them with clarity about the project’s goals and scope.

Enable cross-functional collaboration with Wrike

Cross-functional collaboration requires thoughtful communication and coordination — and that’s tough to pull off with jumbled spreadsheets and endless email threads.

You need collaboration software that’s designed to support cross-functional teams as they get projects across the finish line. Wrike streamlines even the most complex projects and team structures with:

• Centralized communication and access to resources
• Clear task assignments and deadlines
• Increased transparency and visibility into what everybody is working on
• Timelines, reports, and Gantt charts to get a bird’s-eye view of your team’s work
• Templates to maintain consistency across all of your projects

When you’re bringing together people from all different departments on a cross-functional team, Wrike will serve as your single source of truth that everybody can use to communicate, work together, and ultimately deliver a winning project. Kickstart cross-functional collaboration in your team today with a free 2-week trial of Wrike, or reach out to our team to learn more.