Cross program collaboration

As we have seen, collaboration underpins employee engagement, morale, and satisfaction. It also helps with employee retention. A sense of connection and community alongside open communications leads to a happier workforce. And cross-team collaboration means there are more opportunities to build connections with more colleagues. Furthermore, the big picture thinking that collaboration encourages ensures there is a greater sense of connection with the company culture.

Employees that can closely align themselves with the company culture tend to stay longer in their jobs. Doing the same work and performing the same tasks every day can get a bit dull.

No matter how great your workplace environment is, if team members are bored at work, they may start looking elsewhere. Cross-team collaboration is the perfect way to mix things up! Put your employees in a new environment with different people to reawaken their creative juices, and get them re-energized. Collaboration can help to get staff excited and enthused about work once more. Many innovative companies encourage staff to spend at least one day a month in a different department. One of the early pioneers of cross-team collaboration, Northwest Mutual Life, famously set up collaborative teams to consider how computers would change the business world.

It demonstrated how collaboration was ultimately behind working through complex or demanding projects that require problem-solving and creative thinking.

The flywheel model puts customers at the heart of your business. Company goals, business processes, and operations are then aligned with and built upon that customer center. Cross-team collaboration supports the flywheel by eliminating potential sources of friction between teams. Information is more readily shared, and communications are more fluid in a collaborative environment. The impact on the customer experience, in turn, is significant. Customers are more likely to act as your brand ambassadors and advocate for the business in their networks and online.

Keen to know more? Check it out here to inform, inspire, or challenge your thinking. Negative, grumpy, and complaining. Everyone has a story to tell about working with a difficult colleague. The tough task of handling workers with poor attitudes falls to managers and HR professionals. Often that task is made all the trickier because these staffers are The emergence of Omicron, volatile economies, sustainability, and climate change, plus the Big Resignation, are just some challenges.

However, through it all, intranets have been at the forefront in supporting organizations If certain departments are already cross training internally or have mentioned it multiple times, start with them because they already want to see the program succeed.

Once you have worked out the kinks in your training strategy, you can roll out your method across the company. Interestingly, your employees are already practicing some form of cross training on their own time. Darren Shimkus , general manager and vice president at Udemy for Business, shares some interesting statistics at Entrepreneur about millennials in the workplace:. Almost half of employees are willing to spend their own time and money improving their skills. You can learn what they want to know and what they have trained for on their own.

Nick Gidwani , chief revenue officer of the talent development platform Pathgather, agrees. While you might not be able to give your employees exactly what they want, taking their career goals into consideration can help you find tasks and skills that will motivate them to grow and work more effectively. Creating a peer learning environment allows team members to share knowledge with their co-workers.

By building cross training into the workday and pairing team members together, your employees can form peer-learning systems and turn to their co-workers whenever they have questions. Other benefits of mentoring on the job is that employees might not learn as well in a classroom setting with multiple students, doing better with one-on-one training.

Plus it can be harder for managers to gauge the effectiveness of classroom lessons. This reinforces their skills by having them teach it to others, while creating a positive incentive for learning the material. In short, how the hard work was worth it. Mentors who themselves had to learn the material might come up with better ways to teach the methods and skills.

In that sense, a mentor program can actually improve your training processes and materials. One thing to avoid as you cross train your team is limiting specialization. If everyone is good at a lot of little things, few people will be great at a few things.

While Barr highlights the potential loss of specialization, she counters it by suggesting that the training focuses on skills that help employees do their jobs better instead of expanding their overall skill base to processes not relevant to them.

Before you start a training plan, make sure your team knows what time commitments and limits are expected for learning. Extending the training process also allows time for new information to be absorbed.

Consider setting up a weekly hour of training to review basic concepts. You can test employees on what they learned previously to reinforce the message and then move ahead with new ideas. Over a few months, the message can stick without taking too much time from the overall work week. Justin Reynolds at the employee engagement platform TINYpulse writes that it can take up to eight months to onboard a new employee. Conversely, services that enable children to remain in school or early care help to moderate some of the disruption of a family housing crisis, including limiting child care needs for families in shelter.

When homeless and educational services providers work together, each can better concentrate on core functions and strengths and build more responsive and robust solutions. Coordination of efforts creates benefits for children, youth, and families, and for the systems that serve them.

Active cross-systems collaborations establish a foundation from which both homeless services programs and educational services providers can most effectively address housing, education, and other needs of these vulnerable households.

Casey Foundation National Center for Children in Poverty , and the What Works Collaborative Urban Institute , as well as other academic and governmental research partnerships, suggests that housing stability and educational success are closely linked and mutually reinforcing.

Findings of the recently published Family Options Study also establish a strong link between housing stability and child and family well-being.

Providers of shelter, housing, and related support services for children and youth experiencing homelessness can support the academic success of children and youth by strengthening their linkages to school systems and community-based education programs. Similarly, educational services provided by Local Education Agencies LEAs , homeless education liaisons, teachers, social workers, and early childhood education providers can help connect at-risk households to housing and services, and strengthen developmental outcomes for children and youth, thereby contributing to housing stability and prevention of family homelessness.

Conversely, high degrees of school mobility have been linked to decreased levels of academic achievement. Provision of high quality educational services and supports to homeless children and youth helps decrease the stress of parents associated with child care needs as they deal with finding or maintaining housing and other challenges of homelessness. Access to stable educational settings for children and youth including Early Head Start, Head Start, and K programs undergirds parental success in maintaining employment and economic stability, and thus supports subsequent housing stability.

For more information on the relationship between education and housing stability, see School Stability and School Performance: Literature Review by the National Center for Homeless Education. Team members researched topics and reported back to the group, which created space to share skills, questions, and to explore how web analytics topics might apply in the contexts of our different program areas.

We compiled a shared document of resources and key concepts with guides, training resources, and other reference sources. The skillshares and discussions have covered topics that include:. In this context of multiple new mission-critical RAC web properties, the group offered a space to explore ideas about how we measure our work and impact while gaining the skills to implement event tracking and reporting mechanisms to enable that analysis.

Because the Web Analytics Owners team is a group of individuals from across different function areas of the organization with distinctly different day-to-day work, this specific group of people has never had occasion to convene before this. The group is intentionally non-hierarchical in structure with rotating facilitation and a predetermined but collaboratively created agenda for each meeting. We have structure and accountability, but a loose and conversational approach that leaves us space to explore, often sharing resources in a team chat between meetings.