Most organizations survey their employees at least once per year to better understand the general morale, satisfaction, and engagement of their employee populations. Many organizations work with consultants to understand the data. Their consultants warn them not to focus solely on the lowest scoring questions from the survey when they turn to action planning. Inevitably, however, the negativity bias (the preference to focus on low scores) of the leadership teams take over, and action plans get built to address the same issues year after year after year. One of those issues that was sure to be addressed on your organization’s employee survey action plan this year was likely cross-functional collaboration.
Whatever you want to call it—cross-functional communication, department silos, collaboration—this issue plagues employee survey results in organizations in every part of the world. What does it mean when your organization scores low in cross functional collaboration? It means that you are the same as almost everybody else. Much has been done in organizations familiar with the employee survey process to eliminate inter-department silos. Many plans have been made, and many things have been tried to bolster this to varying levels of success. In fact, many organizations have made tremendous progress in improving cross-functional collaboration. Scores improve, but the issue continues to present itself in the lowest scoring items year after year. What do you do?
How Do You Compare to Others?
One of the biggest pitfalls in looking at employee survey results in isolation is that you are unable to determine whether the results you are getting are typical or whether they are high or low compared to peers. For example, if a question about cross-functional collaboration shows up in your lowest 5 scoring items on your survey, but that question has a favorability score of 70%, you may not realize that cross-functional collaboration may be one of your greatest strengths instead of one of your greatest weaknesses. If you are a healthcare organization, you may not realize that the average favorable score in your industry for cross-functional collaboration is 57%. If you score 70%, you are significantly better than the average healthcare organization, and you likely fall in the top 10% of healthcare organizations in that metric. At 70% favorable, that could easily still score among the lowest-scoring items on your survey, but do we still consider that a weakness? I would suggest that at some point, you have done all you can do organizationally to clean up cross-functional collaboration issues, and when you reach that point, it’s time to move onto other issues. It is difficult to know when you have reached that point without viable comparisons.
Where to Start?
Because so many organizations have seen cross-functional collaboration as an area necessary to improve, we have seen organizations try many things. Without getting too specific, we list some practical steps that can be taken below. Remember that to improve employee perception of collaboration does not require that you get everyone in the company talking to everyone else. Before you begin to address the issues, you might ask yourself where the major points of failure exist. A simple example is if your sales and marketing teams are not working well together, and their efforts and incentives are not aligned, this may lead to extreme frustration between departments, and you can gain a lot of benefit from focusing your efforts on aligning these two groups. Once you have identified the major pockets of frustration, here are some of the common methods to improve collaboration between groups:
- Open communication channels: Regular meetings, collaborative planning, and setting defined communication channels between groups can help ensure that team members from both departments are on the same page.
- Foster empathy and mutual understanding between groups: Cross-training and job shadowing can often help members of one department more fully understand the challenges of another department and build deeper understanding between groups.
- Provide opportunities for team-building activities: Strengthening relationships and improving trust among colleagues in different departments can enhance collaboration.
- Leverage technology: Understanding common workflows and facilitating information sharing between groups using software solutions can significantly enhance collaborative efforts.
There are many other simple ways to address collaboration issues in your organization. As you are planning to address issues now, it can also be helpful to do a review of what you are currently doing to facilitate cross-department communication, and what has been tried in the past. Perhaps you are already doing some positive things, and perhaps an effective practice from the past is worth trying again, but for the most part, this exercise helps identify what practices are not working and what can be improved.
Our experience shows that increase effort and process changes applied to collaboration can have significant impact, and we have seen organizations make significant progress. It is rare, however, to see an organization become completely satisfied with cross-functional collaboration without some larger cultural changes.
A Suggested Cultural Shift
A tendency for most managers—especially new managers—is to overemphasize the happiness and contentment of their own teams. In fact, if you ask managers to simply tell you the members of their teams, most managers will list only the people who report to them. They see their direct reports as their primary team. They do not see their peer managers and their direct managers as being part of their teams. This is a very natural mindset for managers to adopt; we call it a team-first approach to management. “Team-first” sounds virtuous and selfless. It sounds a lot like servant leadership. It is far better than a me-first mentality that we see exhibited by some ambitious managers who do not care who or what they step on to get ahead. People who report to team-first managers typically show great appreciation for their managers in employee surveys and 360-degree feedback.
The tendency of a team-first manager, however, is to subordinate the needs of the larger organization for the needs and wants of their own teams. This can place them at odds with other team-first managers in other departments, who are also fighting for the needs and wants of their team members. Where all managers espouse a team-first mentality, it becomes very difficult to find common ground between departments. Managers naturally protect their teams against other departments, and in so doing, they create silos. Team-first managers need to remember that they are also part of a management team, and the collective needs and desires of a management team are likely to align closely with the vision and goals of the overall organization.
Rising above a team-first mentality requires a cultural shift wherein, you team build at the manager level, and build buy-in with managers regarding organizational objectives. As managers begin to prioritize organizational success above the needs and wants of individual team members, they begin to integrate naturally with other departments, and they begin to align their team goals with the goals of the organization. When this happens, silos break down naturally. We call these managers “org-first managers.” Org-first managers proactively reach across departments and functions to see how their teams can more fully support the goals of the collective.
Transitioning to this mindset is not easy. Some managers hold tightly to their team-first mentality. Being an org-first manager does not mean that you never prioritize the needs and wants of your team members. There are times when prioritizing your team members is the best thing to do for the organization. The key to changing the mindset is to help managers realize employees do not need protection from the rest of the organization. Efforts to protect employees from the organization will typically only stunt their career progress and silo them from other departments.
Conclusion
If you are one of those who collects employee feedback year after year and continues to see the cross-functional collaboration issue come up, you are not alone. Even with improvement, most organizations will still see collaboration show up among the lowest-scoring topics from their employee surveys year after year. Adding context to your results can help you understand where you truly stand compared to your peers. If, after comparisons to benchmark, you continue to see yourself scoring low in collaboration, there are some common sense approaches you can take to improve as we have detailed in this article. If you have already seen significant improvement in this area, and you still want to take collaboration to the next level, consider broader culture change initiatives, that help foster an org-first mentality in managers.
