A task force built around one question: do cross-functional teams collaborate well?
A company-wide pulse put cross-functional collaboration satisfaction at only 11%, down from 50% the prior July. I initiated and led a task force to improve it: baseline survey, theme analysis, scored idea pipeline, five-phase rollout, and a cross-pillar coordination rhythm. A repeat survey with a 10 percentage point improvement target came in at 2x that.
The situation
A 100-person independent B2B agency was running through the aftermath of acquiring another specialty shop. The April 2024 company-wide pulse asked a single question: “Cross-functional teams collaborate well.” Only 11% of respondents agreed. The same question on the July 2023 survey had scored 50%. A 39% drop in 9 months was a clear sign that the agency had a collaboration issue.
The Executive Leadership Team split the response across three task forces, called pillars: “Work” was one of them, and it landed with me. The performance goal I signed up for, documented in the system that ran my review: a 10-percentage-point improvement on the same question at a repeat survey, scheduled for the Fall, six months after taking the 11% baseline score.
What I built
- A baseline survey that got a 61% response rate. Sent to all employees in April, close to 90% of respondents added optional comments in addition to rating cross-functional collaboration from their perspective.
- A theme analysis of the optional comments. I identified seven themes, ranking them by share of comments touching each. The top five became the agenda for the Work Pillar’s first quarter as a task force tackling this issue.1
- A scored ideas pipeline in Jira. Ideas submitted from across the agency were run through a scoring matrix and prioritized going into the second half of the year. The pipeline shaped the Work Pillar’s work into a sequenced roadmap scored against agreed criteria.
- A five-phase rollout: Crawl, walk, run, drive, fly. Each initiative in the pipeline was tagged to the phase it belonged in.
- A cross-pillar coordination rhythm. In addition to my Work Pillar, we also stood up two additional task forces centered around the company’s top-line growth as well as one focused on its people. I facilitated regular syncs between all pillars, so that their efforts weren’t duplicating work or colliding on the same teams. Mid-year and end-of-year ELT updates formalized the reporting.
The outcome
At the onset of my work tackling this problem I had publicly stated my intent to integrate, simplify and modernize the agency’s collaboration habits: “How we get work done should feel simple and effortless, so that everyone’s mental energy can go towards the What: making our clients happy and proud.”
Our cross-functional Work Pillar task force clearly struck a nerve, and we were able to improve the agency’s perceived collaboration quality by a factor of almost 3x, raising it from a 11% agreement to 32% in just 6 months.
And this wasn’t just a one-time fix: I left behind a repeat-survey schedule on a quarterly cadence, and a documented system for how to capture, score, and execute operational improvements. That scored pipeline had a maturity-arc plan attached to it. ELT now had a standing cadence to check in on the three pillars in coordination, and I hear collaboration has been steadily improving ever since.
- The survey themes, ranked by share of comments touching each: Defined Processes and Roles (50%), Reduction of Silos (38%), Communication and Transparency (34%), Trust and Understanding (30%), Integration and Inclusion (25%), Use of Tools (9%), Responsiveness and Engagement (7%). The ranking told us where to spend the first weeks.