Best practices for collaboration across groups

Important

This article is for the legacy Workplace Analytics app and does not reflect functionality available on the updated Viva Insights platform. Access current documentation for Viva Insights advanced insights here: advanced insights documentation.

Connecting employees across units creates agile innovation by helping the company use benefits of scale, cross-pollinate ideas, and integrate different perspectives.

Employees that collaborate across silos are more aware of other perspectives and are better able to share ideas to foster innovation and inclusion.

Why it matters

The How to Make Sure Agile Teams Can Work Together article explain how important cross-group collaboration is in getting work done:

• "Work occurs through collaboration in networks of relationships that often do not mirror formal reporting structures or standard work processes."
• "Intuitively, we know that the collaborative intensity of work has skyrocketed, and that collaborations are central to agility."
• "Yet most organizations don’t manage internal collaboration productively, and assume that technology or formal org charts can yield agility.”

Best practices

• Improve internal connectivity. Create inclusive and trusting environments to make agile collaboration easier. Employees who maintain large, stable, and diversified internal networks are often better positioned to use their connections for quickly responding to customer needs and driving customer satisfaction.
• Create cross-functional Teams channels that focus on customer needs.
• Use Suggested tasks to mark key internal contacts as important to never miss emails from them and to respond more efficiently.
• Motivate team members to reach across silos. Break down silos and expand networks with cross-functional goals to help improve communications with isolated teams by assigning interdepartmental liaisons to communicate across teams.
• Map the interdependencies between different teams where central players contribute, to understand and plan for potential risks. Have a back-up plan to cover such emergencies.
• Pair newcomers and network influencers through staffing or mentoring. This simple practice triples newcomer connectivity compared to employees who don't get this experience.
• Create inclusive and trusting environments to ease agile collaboration. A culture of fear exists when employees don't feel safe to come forward with ideas or those on the fringe feel less confident about contributing.
• Set up "communities of practice" or business development initiatives to help share expertise or resources.
• Set specific goals and reward agile collaboration. Peer feedback helps to identify people who the formal performance reviews might otherwise overlook.

Change strategies

Co-create lists of go-to contacts and distribute them to highly networked individuals

Survey the group to collect a list of contacts. This list could be a good place for your team to start when they establish new connections. This can empower you and your team with the right contacts in order to solve any problems that might arise. Ways to do this:

• Send out a company-wide email where people can volunteer to be a connector within their team.
• Combine all of these connectors into a list and share it.
• Communicate with all that you now have a list of go-to contacts.

Create goals across teams or departments

You can coordinate and assign liaison roles to communicate across teams and with other departments and avoid isolation and ensure information flow. Ways to do this:

• Identify a cross-team goal, such as improving customer satisfaction.
• Identify the groups that should be involved, such as Support, Services, and Engineering.
• Align on an initial project, such as a platform to quickly find and respond to customer incidents.
• Create a platform to share ideas, such as a Teams channel and a monthly check-in meeting.

Create cross-team communities

Create a space for people with similar interests to share ideas, knowledge, and resources.

Enable personal network insights

Empower individuals to take advantage suggestions on how to improve their connections by using Suggested tasks.