How can you facilitate cross-functional teams when members are remote?

Establishing clear communication challenges and allowing people to speak up is a great way. Be aware of only senior people raising their voices. Depending on their role they might not have all the relevant problems in their head.

Engage the team in a workshop to collectively define the goals of the project. You should not define roles and responsibilities - the team should do that. That way, you have commitment and ownership.

Clear definition of purpose, goals and roles of each team member and clear communication on tasks is important when working with cross functional teams to avoid duplication and conflict among teams. Setting goals should be done by the team to promote ownership and accountability.

Facilitating cross-functional remote teams requires clear communication channels, collaborative tools, & a focus on shared goals. Implement regular video conferences for face-to-face interactions, establish virtual collaboration spaces like Slack or Teams for real-time communication & use project management tools such as Trello or Asana to track progress. Encourage transparency & openness to foster trust among team members. Assign clear roles & responsibilities, ensuring everyone understands their contributions. Schedule regular check-ins to address any challenges & celebrate successes. Promote a culture of flexibility & understanding to accommodate different time zones & working styles, fostering a sense of unity despite physical distance.

- Clear goals, - clear communication channels (how do we interact when something is urgent, how when something is nice to know or can wait etc.) - take time at least at the beginning of the team working together to allow everyone get to know each other - ideally, you'll manage to get together "in real life" every once in a while, because this really helps to create more trust and confidence in each other

I think it can be really confusing to introduce too many tools or platforms. One good one with enough capabilities should be enough. Then everything can be done in one place that becomes the virtual representation of the session and a space where the collaboration can continue after the session and land as part of the daily work.

Personally, I do not find hybrid meetings effective. I either try to go fully in-person OR fully remote. There are a lot of fantastic tools now-a-days that can created extremely engaging remote sessions, however if some are in room… ALL should be in room.

Keep it simple. The more tools you use, the more can go wrong. The goal is communication. Plan consistent sessions for communication and have the team involved the entire time. That builds trust and enables them to define what is needed.

Trust and psychological safety (Amy Edmondson and Timothy R Clark) are interrelated. Trust is built when there are repeated, consistent, positive experiences of psychological safety. Believing that you can speak up without fear of reputational damage in all 4 of Timothy Clarke’s dimensions of psychological safety significantly facilitates trust. Application of these requires building self awareness and self management of leaders, leadership teams, and team members.

When team is remote it is crucial to choose proper tools for communicate and collaborate. The best is to first understand within the team preferences how they want to collaborate and communicate and then together choose which tools needs to be used for which topics. In case lack of knowledge in team there should be facilitator to provide ideas and details what and how can be used. Agreed and decided tools and platforms for specific needs, the way they will be used and guidelines for specifics should be noted down for future to mitigate misunderstandings. The best would be to prepare kind of Definition of Collaboration document shared with team members and new team members in future.

Treat people as humans. In this way, they will trust you as a leader and open up to share their work/personal challenges. Knowing their challenges in life will allow me to empathize and have smoother collaboration between team members.

A couple of comments: 1. Most clients I have worked with end up with goals as a part of the facilitation process. It is helpful to set process goals for the facilitation as ways of working. 2. Organizations are usually not very adept at picking facilitation tools. For example, they often default to a virtual meeting platform (Zoom, Meet, or Teams) as "all they need." Facilitators should use other tools but they have to be bundled together and easily usable by participants. For us, Howspace has been the role-model toolkit meeting this need. 3. Efforts to build trust and rapport can help shorten the forming, storming, norming, performing cycle but the phases will still appear.

Imagine u have fun online with others beside goals and channels. A gif as check up every morning that shows what is happen in ur life, is a good way to set up a nice community feeling. Plus is a lovely battle of who finds the most empowering gif of the day ??

Building trust is quite difficult whilst ruining trust is easy. First of all, to build trust, we need to include openness, respect and a positive attitude in the team. It is important to show that on the basis of every mistake it is better to look for improvements for the future, instead of punishing the team member who made the mistake. Being open to new ideas will allow us to use collective intelligence, which can increase team integration. In integrated team people more frequently trust each other. The good actions from facilitator is to use every team building activities - check-in, assure intentions understanding, time token for speak etc.

Actually I disagree with ‘you should provide them with a clear and compelling vision’. This implies that only ‘you’ have the way forward. In cross functional and hybrid teams it is critical to create alignment between individuals and teams. In a VUCA world, the ability to work together across physical spaces and technologies requires new interpersonal skills and a capability of flexing / pivoting with clear line of sight towards a direction of travel.

Cross-functional teams need to be empowered to self-organize. Autonomy and flexibility need to be at the highest possible level, especially if team members work remotely and globally. Leaders need to provide support in the form of removing possible roadblocks or providing a coach or facilitator who could help the team define their working agreement. Team members need to outline how they want to work together, what is important for them and how they're going to periodically review the terms of their agreement. Once they start working together, they can learn how to trust one another and create a space for them to experiment and learn.

I've always found it helpful to facilitate a peer-consultation process where people can experience the value of bringing together cross-functional perspectives on a challenge that someone brings. You give the 'owner' a few mins to explain their challenge (no interruptions) ending with a 'How can I...? question, then the group asks questions (not leading ones!) to more fully understand the context, then the owner just listens in to the group interpreting the challenge from different angles, next the group offers some options to rethink the challenge or some experiments to try out and finally the owner says what they take away from the structured conversation. Both helpers and owners benefit from these 30-40 mins of collective intelligence.

As entregas e a performance podem ser um alerta se o fator remoto, tem impactado de alguma maneira no acesso a informa??o, a vis?o Holística das situa??es e ao propósito em contribuir e chegar aos resultados.

Consider adding neuroscience insights to this article - particularly the research of David Rock from the Neuroleadership Institute. In specific the threat and reward of the SCARF model - very powerful insights for cross functional and hybrid teams.

AI's responses effectively tackle the initial part of question but fall short on addressing the nuances of remote team dynamics. The core issue persists: aligning individuals across various business segments with distinct goals and interests to act collectively. In-person interactions naturally accelerate rapport and trust—a pattern I've consistently observed for over 2 decades. Therefore, the critical task for a facilitator at the outset is to establish this trust foundation, as all subsequent efforts depend on it. How you do this depends on the seniority, functional, combination of cultures and many other factors. It’s not “out of the box” and requires thoughtful preparation every time to meet the needs of the audience.

To facilitate cross-functional (CF) teams when members are remote, consider the following strategies 1. Clear Communication of Goals 2. Virtual Team building with a mix of CF team members 3. CF Collaboration Tools - Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. 4. Regular Video Conferencing 5. Cross-Training Initiatives – Peer-to-Peer Learning 6. Task-based Collaboration 7. Unified Communication Guidelines 8. Documented Workflows 9. Flexible Scheduling 10. Recognition and Appreciation 11. Feedback Mechanisms 12. Team Activities – Competition, Assignment, etc. 13. Continuous Learning Opportunities 14. Encourage Initiative and Innovation

Facilitate remote team is mainly to build the true team from remote team members. First phase is to build knowledge about each other, what they are experts of, how they work, how prefer communicate, what are even their hobbies. The second phase is to limit problems in interactions, slow downs etc. The third phase when team knows each other team members and interact properly and efficient, is to address any conflicts and misunderstandings with possitive attitude. And always is finding way to make people happy to work in team together.