Cross-functionality - what is it? – XP Injection. Cross-functional collaboration Cross-functional teams are especially important in manufacturing

Why a cross-functional team (rescuing the company and giving it new growth) needs to be formed not according to psychotypes, compatibility and temperaments, but according to the ability to set tasks "not for your subordinates"; how to unite this motley and sometimes conflicting team and what should the HR do so that the members of such a team do not run away with the words "Yes, never again!" - toldHead of Human Resources (Supply Chain& Regions) at FM Logistic Julia Meshcheryakova.

- Julia, what do you see as the cross-functional role of the HR service? Why is it necessary to develop cross-functional connections and communications in the company?

Cross-functional teams include representatives of various services (operational unit, merchants, financiers, quality department, personnel management service, etc.) with cross-responsibility. They are created with the aim of launching a new product, starting work with a new client, improving service, overcoming the crisis a separate direction or the company as a whole and other project tasks.

In an operational project, the HR is responsible for the involvement and interest of its players in the project (provides for the presence of motivation - material and non-material), for the nature of communications (constructive, with a focus on finding solutions, not problems) and for organizational decisions that can be made during the project (for example, changing the regional structure). In the project concerning the functions of the personnel management service, HR is a key figure. For example, changing the motivation system, introducing new assessment methods or a personnel reserve system. In order to "sell" an HR project to operations, one must involve the operations at the preparatory stage.

Also for an HR specialist, as a personnel development specialist, participation in projects identifies or develops potential employees and is, to some extent, a launching pad for growth. The project should be developing for the employee, and not an experience, after which you want to say "Yes, yes, yes, never again."

- How to start developing cross-functional connections and communications in the company? And how to support?

You need to start not with the development of cross-functional connections and communications in the company, but with the correct setting of goals for the team, determining the timing and image of the desired result.

Implementing a culture of healthy and constructive communications is an ongoing effort not tied to a single project. HR needs to analyze the state of communication in the company as a whole. Are you regularly informed about projects and news, or will ordinary employees be amazed at the launch of a new service? What forms of communication are accepted in the company, what are the rules for using e-mail and holding meetings? How are decisions made and how do they escalate below? What relationship patterns are encouraged? What happens if an error is found: looking for someone to blame or a solution? In an atmosphere of healthy working relationships and a culture of communications, nothing specifically needs to be done to develop cross-functional relationships; communications will not become a blocking factor.

- How should cross-functional teams be assembled?

According to the tasks that this team faces. No illusions: you will never assemble a team according to psychotypes, compatibility and temperaments. A team of those who have serious experience in the matter and can give results is recruited. Petya Ivanov has been carrying out regional launches for 10 years, which means that he will head the cross-functional team. The task of an HR is to develop communications to such a level that the team does not fall apart at the start of the project due to irreconcilable differences that will arise.

But I would definitely did not recommend people who are not capable of teamwork to the project team, and those who have managerial skills in their infancy - because you have to assign tasks to non-direct subordinates.

Read also: Feedback culture: from an HR bow to a powerful tool

- How to avoid cross-functional conflicts and how to resolve them?

In a situation of intersecting interests (for example, a merchant in logistics needs to sell, and an operator needs to carry out transportation, and this is not always possible at established rates) - no way, let's focus on "decide".

First, lay straws and make life easier for yourself with the maximum amount intersectingKPIeven with differences of interest. The goal of the whole team should be the same, ideally tied to a quarterly, semi-annual or annual bonus. The task of HR is to offer an optimal system of motivation. At the same time, it is impossible to formulate the goal as an immeasurable and vague "participation in projects", it is better to specify: "a regional launch at such and such a time."

Secondly, any non-constructive interactions should not just be stopped, but equated with a behavior model that unequivocally worsens the result. Negotiations in the spirit of "it's not me, it's Vasya" should be equated with destructive and not approved. The search for errors, getting bogged down in the analysis of the flight must be replaced by a calm search for solutions. This style should be implemented and cultivated by the manager and HR manager and applied to all processes in the company, but in projects where deadlines are tight, it becomes especially relevant.

Third, project leaders must be prepared to use their management skills (even if they are not leaders) and negotiation skills to the fullest. It is better to have such skills, because the very first assignment can end with a clarification that the project manager to the operator or marketer is not the boss. Clearly define and separate the work of the main job and the project. The first one will not go anywhere, and at the height of the project, when the replacement of the player will be painful for the result, it may turn out that the financial controlling service has begun the budget process and it is impossible to distract controllers.

- What do organizations get as a result if they learn how to work in cross-functional teams?

Successful implementation of projects, whether it is entering new markets, upgrading the service system or implementing ISO standards. Project teams can be drivers of change management, pilots for innovation, and talent pools. Players gain experience in project interaction and the opportunity to try themselves in a new role as part of a team without rotating to another permanent job.

I know examples when, thanks to successful participation in a project, an employee with potential was promoted to a higher position: the project finally convinced prof. suitability one notch higher. I do not strongly believe that a person grows in training. If you want to develop - give a project or include it in a project team, on the timeline you will see the expression of all the necessary competencies. The project is a risky, but more effective measure for the analysis of managerial potential, and participation in project work should be "sold" by an HR like a carrot for further growth opportunities.

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“Not products, but the processes of their creation bring companies long-term success” - with this formula, the ideologists of the process approach, Michael Hammer and James Champy, defined management philosophy many years ago: to manage an organization means to manage its processes. That is, the organization is considered primarily not as a set of various departments responsible for their part of the work, but as a set of business processes through which its activities are implemented. From here follows the criterion: the company is as effective and good, including in the eyes of customers, how efficient and good its business processes are.

Business process definition

A process is a specific, repetitive sequence of interrelated tasks performed by humans and/or machines to achieve a specific goal. A process is initiated by a specific event and terminated by a specific outcome or by calling another process.

A business process is an end-to-end and cross-functional process that gives a valuable result from the customer's point of view.

End-to-end Process is a process considered from beginning to end, i.e. to achieve a valuable result for the customer.

A cross-functional process is a process that is not limited by functional boundaries, i.e. across functional boundaries.

The very idea of the process approach is to describe, analyze, automate and control the organization's activities at a horizontal level, through the formalization of "end-to-end" or cross-functional business processes that pass through various functional divisions of the company. Synchronization of the interaction of various functional units in a "cross-functional" business process makes it possible to optimize it according to certain parameters. As a rule, this is achieved by simplifying existing procedures, harmonizing the formats of transmitted information, reducing waiting times, automating and reducing the number of participants in the business process. All this helps to reduce the execution time of a business process by several times, and most importantly, it often reduces its cost, which makes the company more competitive.

Definition of the process approach

Business Process Management (BPM) is a systematic approach to isolating, designing, executing, documenting, measuring, monitoring and controlling automated and non-automated business processes, aimed at consistently and accurately achieving results consistent with the organization's strategic goals.

BPM enables an organization to align business processes with business strategy, resulting in improved bottom line performance by improving performance at the individual, enterprise, and interface levels.

In theory, everything is very simple, but in practice there are many nuances. First of all, this is the lack of competition in many Russian markets, which leads to the unwillingness of management to improve their activities, and therefore to introduce business process management in their companies. Secondly, the appointment of leaders on the basis of the principle - "better weak, but your own and with confidence" leads to the fact that most managers are not interested in the transparency of their activities and work on the principle of distributing tasks and subsequent "kicks" for their non-fulfillment. Thirdly, constant changes among top managers, and subsequent "raids" on the company of the next "management teams" with new principles, approaches and methods of management, lead to a decrease in the maturity of the management system in the company in a very short time, and the transition to the simplest method of management - on behalf.

One way or another, but this managerial entropy can be fought only through the constant description, analysis, improvement, regulation, automation and control of key business processes. If a company produces something for a competitive market, then it needs not only to rebuild internal business processes, but also to launch a regular procedure for improving them. You can’t stop in competitive markets, you need to run with all your might, otherwise competitors will catch up and overtake you, so the process approach is not only a description and standardization of business processes, but continuous improvement and the search for new ways to provide high-quality results in the shortest possible time and at the best cost.

And now the trend of introducing process management is clearly visible among those companies that operate in competitive markets - the financial industry, telecommunications, education, retail and wholesale, and many others that need to be more efficient than competitors in order to "survive". Companies in other industries will move towards process management either when faced with a deteriorating market position, or through instructions “from above” on the need to modernize the existing management system.

Analyzing the activities of some foreign multinational companies, in fact, in all of them, I found well-built standardized business processes, and the corresponding management and motivation system, powers and responsibilities are delegated to lower levels of management, and the management system by instructions is perceived rather as an anachronism.

As a conclusion:

The implementation of a process approach for a company operating in highly competitive markets has virtually no alternatives, however, this management model requires an increase in the level of maturity of the company's leaders and the desire to start a cycle of continuous improvement of the company.

Forming a cross-functional team can be an effective approach for solving extraordinary and complex tasks. Every manager should know what a cross-functional team is, because this knowledge can significantly increase the labor efficiency of almost any enterprise. But it should be understood that this way of organizing work has both advantages and disadvantages.

Cross-functional team - what is it

Under cross-functional team in modern theory is a team formed from specialists of various profiles who work together on a common task. Such teams, due to the synergetic combination of the skills, knowledge and experience of their members, as well as their personal qualities, can achieve outstanding results, especially when solving non-trivial problems. Therefore, the practice of forming cross-functional teams is most widely used in the field of innovation management.

Since cross-functional teams can be formed at various levels, from a theoretical point of view, any large enterprise where there are various positions for people employed in different areas has a cross-functional team in its state in the form of all its staff. However, in practice, a team in this case means a relatively small team formed to solve specific problems. At the same time, this team is most often taken out of the scope of its departments in the specialty.

In many ways, the idea of forming cross-functional teams contradicts the main idea of modern personnel management - the principles of the division of labor. So, several staff members can fully serve the entire enterprise, and for this it is not necessary to delegate one such specialist to each separate structural unit. However, the main task of cross-functional teams is primarily:

Providing the most effective solution to a non-standard problem. For example, commands like these can be used to complete overtime orders or solve tasks that are outside the scope of routine work with typical requirements.
Development and implementation of innovations. The brainstorming method, as well as the method for finding solutions and implementing them, is best used when a cross-functional team is involved, which will provide the most versatile and at the same time professional consideration of issues without possible subsequent conflicts.
R operation of a small business. For small businesses in certain areas of activity, a cross-functional team is the only effective solution. In general, many recommendations on the formation of such teams can be useful to almost any leader.

Cross-functional teams can be formed to solve almost any problem, not just innovation. For example, even the relocation of one structural unit will require at a certain stage the formation of such a team - from loaders, furniture assemblers, carriers, planners, installers, and so on.

As can be understood from the above example, a cross-functional team can be formed both on a temporary basis and be a permanent structural unit in an enterprise. At the same time, the formation of a cross-functional team can be carried out both on the basis of the established staff units and specific employees corresponding to them, and imply the employment of new employees.

In addition, some of the team members, or even the entire team, can be recruited using the . And almost always, the responsibility for the formation of such teams rests either with the head of a particular project, or with personnel specialists or.

Advantages and disadvantages of a cross-functional team

Like any way of organizing work in an enterprise, the use of a cross-functional team is not an ideal option for solving absolutely all tasks, but a method that has its own advantages and disadvantages. Accordingly, this approach is not universal, but in many aspects of activity it has a number of advantages. The advantages of cross-functional teams as teams or as a method of organizing work include:

However, cross-functional teams also have certain disadvantages that should be considered when deciding whether to use such a staffing tool. The main disadvantages of this approach include:

Unsuitable for routine and everyday tasks. In this situation, the division of labor into departments, relevant industries and areas of work will be much more efficient, as it will ensure regularity, clear control and stable professional involvement.
High requirements for team building. The person who ensures the selection of the cross-functional team itself must be an effective personnel manager and leader, since the quality of the work of such a unit depends on the selection of participants much higher than in the case of highly specialized teams.
Transition period and risks of psychological incompatibility. Any cross-functional team must go through a certain period of getting used to each other, which will temporarily reduce the functionality of each of them. In addition, bringing in specialists from departments that are negatively disposed towards each other can nullify the work of the entire group. Therefore, it is necessary to take into account the risks of conflict situations and conduct selection taking into account the psychological compatibility of all participants.
Difficulty in finding staff. Not every enterprise has enough staff to form a full-fledged cross-functional team. The selection of new specialists can also complicate the task of forming this team.
Sensitivity to force majeure situations. In the event of unforeseen circumstances, the loss by such a team of one of its members, even temporarily, can almost completely suspend the entire process of solving the problem if he was the only specialist of a certain profile in the team. For example, in the case of sick leave or maternity leave of one accountant from the accounting department, the company will hardly feel this change. At the same time, the loss of an accountant from the financial monitoring software development team can become critical.

How to Build a Cross-Functional Team - Procedure

The general procedure for forming a cross-functional team is quite simple. However, it is necessary to approach the stages of its creation with the greatest responsibility, since in many respects the activity of such a team directly depends on the quality of the selection of its members. In general, in any such team, four stages of development can be distinguished:

Interest. At the initial stage, each of the team members is extremely interested in completing the task, however, the lack of an accurate understanding of the principles of the team’s functioning and established social ties within it significantly slows down the work process.
Conflict. At the second stage of the formation of a cross-functional team, its individual members may begin to fight for leadership, and due to the involvement of diversified specialists, other conflicts may arise related to a misunderstanding between employees in the field of activity of each other.
Calm. At the third stage, the team gains a clear understanding of the importance of working on a common goal, conflicts stop, and the roles in it are quite effectively distributed. However, in general, by this stage, a general decrease in motivation and ossification of the team in one form is possible.
Flexibility. Not all cross-functional teams reach the last stage, but it is on it that all the advantages of this approach to labor organization are most fully revealed. In this case, the cross-functional team begins to act, adapting to the situation. Leadership in this case is transferred to the most competent employees in certain issues without conflicts, and the employees themselves often significantly expand their qualifications and can even begin to replace each other in many issues.

Every leader should know that any team one way or another goes through the above stages in the process of formation. Therefore, the emergence of conflict situations should not be considered an unforeseen circumstance - however, the leader must be prepared in advance for the impact that mitigates the negative factors affecting the team at each stage of its development.

By understanding the processes by which cross-functional teams develop, one can easily understand the principles by which they are formed. The general procedure will look like this:

Roles in a cross-functional team

When forming a cross-functional team, one should evaluate not only the professional skills and knowledge of each of its members, but also personal qualities. So, in any such team, the following roles of employees should take place:

Coordinator. It can be both a formal leader and an equal member of the team, whose main task and desire is to ensure internal communications between its members.
Experimenter. Workers of this type most often offer to support non-trivial solutions and are a source of both innovation and possible conflicts with management, focusing mainly on the immediate practical implementation of tasks.
Expert. This person is first and foremost a specialist in his professional field, and he conducts an evaluation of ideas and solutions supported by factual knowledge.
Ambassador. This person should be responsible for the external relations of the team with the outside world and management, he should lobby for the interests of the team, advertise it and talk about the results of its activities.
Judge. Such a person in the team ensures the resolution of disputes, avoids bias and strives to find better solutions, but does not resolve conflicts on its own, and may even escalate them due to the desire to achieve the best solution without concessions.
Innovator. Specialists with this personal characteristic are primarily engaged in solving creative issues and searching for new options for action, but not in the practical, but in the theoretical sphere.
Handyman. These professionals most often seek to broaden their knowledge and expand their horizons, which often allows them to fill possible gaps in the team and replace other employees.
Executor. Such a specialist has little interest in discussing and searching for solutions, but is focused on their practical implementation in accordance with the tasks set.
Intermediary. Employees with this personality type are primarily interested in the development of the team as a whole and ensure the settlement of internal conflicts that arise, but are not too motivated to achieve results if they are to the detriment of the psychological microclimate.
Critic. Such employees most often provide control over other employees, question their ideas and find possible problems and inconsistencies, preventing them from being actually implemented into the solution.

Each of the above roles should be present in the team in approximately equal numbers. However, one person can easily fill several roles, including to varying degrees. It is best to determine the role of an employee in a team in advance by testing personal qualities - a team formed on the basis of the results of such a test will be the most effective.

For IT professionals and business leaders who are looking for a one-stop technology to meet the needs of every user involved in cross-functional collaboration, the idea of "one app to solve all needs" ignores the reality that effective collaboration in our world is a multi-faceted job. How could it be otherwise? Instead, the secret to success lies in the social elements involved in cross-functional work and finding ways to strengthen communication by leveraging existing systems.

With the amount of technology created to improve team communication, cross-functional collaboration should be easier than ever. With it, we can immediately contact colleagues from any office, department or branch. We can share documents around the world using Google Disk. We can assign tasks and collaborate on projects in Asana. However, introducing new software to your team is not always enough. You probably have other barriers to overcome that are more personal in nature.

For example, at InVision, collaboration tools play a key role in coordinating work between product and marketing teams. However, they also emphasize the importance of ongoing communication, clear assignment of responsibilities, and common knowledge about upcoming product launches.

General definition

Simply put, cross-functional collaboration is when people from different teams or functions (marketing, sales, engineering, HR) within a company come together to work towards a common goal, project, or task.

This can be anything from day-to-day tasks like customer support and social media marketing to one-off projects like sales or developing a new customer conversion feature.

Advantages

Cross-functional collaboration can open up opportunities for companies to operate as efficiently as possible. So why are we fighting? And why do we struggle to do so, even when we all agree that we want it?

How to achieve effective communication

Lack of understanding of what your colleagues are doing creates a barrier to collaboration between teams. To solve this problem, regularly discuss the summary of your team's upcoming work with your entire company, or create a place where others can easily read this information.

Development of Diversity

It's easy to grab one person from each department and grow a team, but if you really want to maximize your team's effectiveness, you must create a group that is diverse in multiple ways, not just in their area of work. Such a group is called a cross-functional team.

Resistance to push for recalculation of meetings

When working with large, diverse, disparate teams, it can sometimes take several weeks to schedule each meeting for a meeting. Regular meetings also turn from the moment your team gets to work on their usual tasks, which is frustrating for its members. For these reasons, it is important to limit the number of CFC meetings to a minimum amount of time. Make sure you use new technologies such as communication and collaboration tools. KaiNexus, for example, uses tools such as Google Docs, GoToMeeting and, in fact, KaiNexus. Continuous Improvement software is a great way to get teams to collaborate between meetings. This makes your other meetings more productive, and helps you find and analyze problem areas of cross-functional collaboration.

When you absolutely need to meet, there should be a strict agenda, a single notebook, and a well-defined method for documenting follow-up tasks. Often, employees set a timer on their mobile phone to limit the amount of time they spend discussing a single topic. A surefire way to make sure a meeting ends on time is to remove the chairs from the boardroom!

Achieve genuine interaction between people!

Turning on your cross-functional teams to see what impact they have builds momentum and keeps teams resilient. People want to know that their efforts matter. By showing them their results, they will be more interested in continuing to participate. On a larger scale, developing a standard way to measure the impact of each cross-functional group can help you truly understand and understand the dynamics of continuous improvement throughout your organization. Proper measurement improves the visibility and transparency of the continuous improvement of cross-functional interactions between employees in your company.

Engaging Leaders

In most organizations, there are people who are natural leaders no matter what position they hold in the company. They are ideal people for solving cross-functional collaboration problems, and therefore they need to be involved in the team in the first place.

Encourage senior executives to make your company's goals public, so everyone, not just management, needs to know the company's priorities. If you are an individual contributor, make sure you know how your projects achieve the broader goals (you can use the clarity of the pyramid to help display this) and communicate why your personal initiative is supporting global collaboration.

Merit promotion

All of these strategies and more can be undermined if employees throughout the organization are not recognized and rewarded for their collective efforts. This is a matter of competent cross-functional management.

It is not difficult to find financial incentives based solely on the goals of one department. This creates conflict over the employee's salary and provides predictable poor results. In order to improve cross-functional communications, leaders must set goals and incentives that require it, and reward people for improving the overall system, not just one part of it.

Difficulties associated with distrust

Cross-functional collaboration involves teams from across the organization tasked with working on a single project or finding a solution to a specific problem. In theory, this sounds perfect. Different approaches to skills are given to approach the project from several angles. Sounds like a thorough, efficient method, right? But not everything is so simple! After all, some people don't even know how to spell "cross-functional collaboration." This method is a kind of innovation in management, and therefore has its drawbacks that have yet to be overcome.

When employees and managers view an organization as a group of divisive, divided groups, the result is "tribalism" or the emergence of competing "blocks" within the company. When there is a lack of trust between such "blocks", any cooperation fails.

Leaders can help bridge the conflict of interest of these divided groups and create a culture of trust by aligning common goals and incentives across the organization as a whole, instead of encouraging the selfishness of individual employees and departments. If mistrust is a barrier to collaboration in your organization, try starting with a few small tasks for teams to work together to get quick results. Seeing results can help develop trust.

Cross-functional management and communication between employees

Here we need to deviate a little from the classics. Traditional approaches to problem solving often don't work in cross-functional settings. Recent McKinsey research shows that companies that try to reengineer their cross-functional processes with traditional solutions such as lean and business process reengineering are failing.

Successful approaches to cross-functional problems are based on unpacking the various elements required for this kind of work. Process management is not at the heart of this type of work, the only key to success is communication.

Cross functional communication

From millennials to baby boomers, today's workers have different expectations about access to information, and this already difficult situation has become even more complicated when they all fell into the cross-functional groups that are gaining momentum in modern companies.

Instead of reinventing the way your cross-functional teams communicate, look for opportunities that allow teams to continue working in their current modes and find ways to connect them to the common work so that everyone can work in their preferred mode, communicate through their preferred communication channels, and have the right to receive the right information at the right time.

Connecting tools that align with how people naturally communicate and learn gives everyone the opportunity to contribute and increases the likelihood of success for every member of your team.

Problems of cross-functional interaction

Natalie Poorsky, director of development at Creative Kingdoms, has taken this precise approach to bridging the work of her software developers and content creation by incorporating workflows from Smartsheet and JIRA.

Creative Kingdoms, a subsidiary of Great Wolf Resorts, is working with organizations such as developing image software that can integrate the experience of numerous professionals into clients' lives. Traditionally, the various teams involved in creating content for games have managed their work using different tools. Siled work did not allow teams to communicate with each other at the right time to fulfill customer orders in the most efficient way.

Natalie was at the forefront of this effort and described the issue as "a really unique situation in project management because we use the Agile development method in JIRA methodology and Waterfall with our content maker team." Group work was incredibly difficult, time consuming and made a lot of mistakes.

Instead of abandoning Smartsheet and JIRA and looking for a new solution, Natalie worked to find a way to connect the two systems rather than asking her teams to find new ways to work. By connecting Smartsheet and JIRA, content still flows like a Waterfall, product development is managed in JIRA, and different teams can see the entire work life cycle, not just individual parts of it. Team members are now confident that they are always looking at the latest information about the project while continuing to communicate in their preferred style with the entire group.

Through improved cross-functional collaboration and communications, Natalie expects 10% resource savings next year. To replicate its success, all you have to do is pay attention to the phenomenon of cross-functional collaboration and try out this unique workflow strategy.

Tell me how to write words with the prefix cross -? For example, cross (?) functional. Are the options allowed together, through a hyphen? Which one is preferable?


	Question #298255

Hello! Prompt transfer of the word "cross fit". Cross fit or cross fit?