Giving in to the urge to create cross-functional teams is easy. More ideas from more people should result in more innovative products and services, right?

But creating teams that span various functions is hard. Joining too many teams can yield distraction and burnout. Piling cross-functional work atop everyday jobs can increase stress, while a failure to reward employees for the extra work can demotivate them and drive them out the door.

SAP’s previous reporting detailed numerous valuable ways to develop cross-functional teamwork as a core company strength rather than an afterthought. Breaking down barriers among functions remains a hot topic because so many pressing competitive strategies, from dynamic planning to delivering better customer experiences, demand collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries.

For example, a May 2024 Gartner survey showed that 84% of marketers report high levels of “collaboration drag” from cross-functional work, including “too many meetings, too much feedback from colleagues, and unclear decision-making authority.” The research also showed that when collaboration drag is high, “businesses are 37% less likely to exceed their revenue and profit targets.”

Your path to cross-functional success may vary based on your corporate culture, your budget, and your ability to roll out new work processes. Here are six common strategies to help improve silo-busting performance.

1. Adjust business and HR processes to reflect cross-functional work.

Cross-functional teams typically don’t exist on the corporate organizational chart or in performance management processes, says Caitlynn Sendra, a PhD in organizational psychology and a product innovation scientist with SAP's human capital management product strategy group. As a result, she says, “organizations often lack information about who is working on what, who is at capacity, who can do more, and when a team has reached its goal.” This makes it harder to effectively manage and reward their work.

The ad hoc status of cross-functional teams also sets the stage for battles over staff and funding. “Some leaders in some parts of the business say, ‘I feel like I don’t have control over this team; I don’t feel my organization will benefit from this team’s work, so I’m not going to fund it,’” she says. Without a longer-term understanding of the importance of their work, teams tend to be “under resourced and pushed to do too much with too little.”

Rather than simply adding these teams to a conventional organizational chart, she suggests creating a dynamic one that reflects employees’ cross-functional work. Such a chart does not describe fixed reporting structures but rather how people are working together on a project at any point in time.

“If you can show a manager who is working on what and the value they are providing, it could help educate those leaders on the value of those teams and how to better support them with more headcount or more funding,” says Sendra. “If you can see the scope and scale of their work and why it matters to the business, management suddenly becomes less concerned about ‘This team [is] not reporting directly to me’ but rather ‘Everyone in this business is working dynamically all the time.’”

“If we don’t shift our thought processes and HR processes to reflect that perspective, we’re missing out on a huge amount of value,” she says.

2. Track the teams’ work against clear goals tied to business results.

Established teams in a single department typically have well-defined business goals and managers tasked with monitoring their performance. That often isn’t true for cross-functional teams created to solve urgent problems or experiment with new technologies. That can set the stage for confusion and leave employees feeling unrewarded for their hard work.

SAP’s research shows that cross-functional teams deliver the best results when they are highly structured, with clearly defined roles, goals, and accountabilities. However, the vast majority (78%) of the more than 1,400 survey respondents said the teams they worked on were only a little or somewhat structured. A dynamic organizational chart can help provide that structure by tracking, in real time, who is working on which teams and encourage leaders to share funding and staff.

3. Properly staff your teams.

All too often, organizations add membership on a cross-functional “tiger team” to an employee’s existing workload. “As organizations have tried to cut budgets, cross-functional work has been used … to extract more work from employees” without increasing headcount or budget, says Sendra. That often leads to burnout and excessive turnover.

SAP research shows that teams are often staffed based on internal relationships—"who knows who"—rather than on an accurate appraisal of who would be best suited for the work, with no process in place for assessing each employee’s time and the value of the added work.

Instead she recommends building cross-functional work into employees’ job descriptions so that “everyone’s expectation is that 25% or 30% or 40% [of an employee’s time] is reserved for cross-functional work or projects.”

SAP fellowship programs offer an example, allowing employees to spend as much as 50% of their time for up to six months on a special project. As a result, Sendra says, “Managers are not thrown by the fact that one of their reports is going to get a fellowship. They realize that it’s better to lose 50% of someone’s time for six months rather than losing 100% of their time forever because they left for a competitor that will offer them a more stimulating work environment.”

Adding cross-functional work to an employee’s existing load means, of course, that they will have less time for their current responsibilities. Deciding what work an employee will have to give up to take on a cross-functional project is currently left to an informal discussion with their direct manager. This can lead to the manager incorrectly dividing the employee’s time or just adding the cross-functional work to their current workload and hoping they can cope. By tracking cross-functional work and its value with a dynamic organizational chart, managers can have more explicit discussions about how to use employees’ time and avoid the urge to just pile more work on them.

4. Don’t forget project management.

A major complaint about cross-functional work—the amount of time spent on committees and in meetings—is due to a lack of project management, says Sendra. As team members juggle their regular and cross-functional work, no one volunteers to manage the project because “they figure ‘that’s not my job and not my skill set,’” says Sendra. But without strong project management, she says, “There’s nothing to keep the momentum going, no progress check-ins, no clearly defined goals …[and] teams just dissolve under the sheer weight of that ambiguity.”

5. Train your teams in soft skills and track their progress.

Working with unfamiliar co-workers on an urgent project takes a lot of negotiation, compromise, and flexibility. Beyond their technical expertise, team members need good people skills to succeed.

One common roadblock is employees who, feeling pressure or a desire to help, take on more than they can handle. The authors of a 2024 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article written by Gartner researchers describe a manager who led a multiyear “Say no and mean it” campaign to encourage members of a marketing team to respectfully push back against requests from business partners if the required work wouldn’t deliver enough value. By detailing the steps required to fulfill each request, that marketing team could work with the business partner to assess whether the request was worth the effort and cost involved.

The leader also “coached her team to recognize their own people-pleaser tendencies and set appropriate boundaries” and trained them on how to properly push back on demands when needed. As a result, they “successfully renegotiated their role on cross-functional programs, and they are now seen as business partners in pivotal commercial decisions.”

6. Take concrete steps to build trust.

Managers have an important role in helping different departments trust each other’s motives. In the HBR article, Gartner researchers described a telecommunications company whose CEO and executive leaders track trust ratings in crucial relationships at both the C-level and on lower-level leadership teams. The ratings help “reveal sources of tension that could otherwise go unnoticed … and prompt teams to talk about issues impeding collaboration success,” the authors say.

“Boundary spanners” or “network brokers” who take it on themselves to coordinate the work of multiple teams need special help to cope with high levels of stress, the authors of another 2024 HBR article writes. These may be project managers for a team but can also be other team members who “… go beyond their formal roles to bridge gaps between disconnected people and units in an organization, facilitating the flow of ideas, information, and resources.” That requires them to reconcile “conflicting information and perspectives from various sources [as well as] divergent expectations or group norms [along with] limited control over their collaborators’ work,” the article says.

The authors recommend recognizing their work in job descriptions and when evaluating their workloads and performance as well as giving them proper collaboration tools and training in areas such as communication, negotiation, cultural sensitivity, and project management.

Process makes perfect

Sendra also suggests that companies consider creating a Center of Excellence (CoE) to support cross-functional work, much as they do for other important areas such as analytics or AI. Many of the strategies discussed, such as providing project management resources or training in new skills, are common CoE functions when an organization seeks to train its workforce in new skills.

Companies that get cross-functional work right are “leaning into the process element,” says Sendra, “using technology to help their managers track the work of cross-functional teams and understand the value they are delivering.”

“Those companies are rare,” she says, but they benefit from a more diverse and more engaged workforce that has the time and tools it needs to deliver superior results.