Driving Organizational Excellence Through Cross-functional Collaboration

Creating a collaborative environment using the right tools helps organizations work faster and smarter. By bringing together and processing data from multiple sources, teams across organizations are more productive, have a better sense of direction, and are more confident in their decision-making. 

Cross-functional collaboration isn’t just about improving business outcomes though, it’s about people too. Effective collaboration fosters better communication, which helps build stronger relationships between employees and teams. 

The resulting increase in morale boosts employee engagement, which has been proven to be important in reducing attrition, absenteeism, and even safety incidents. 

Join us as we unpack some of the challenges faced by HR, Sales, and Finance teams, and learn how cross-functional collaboration and automation can deliver lasting value to your organization. 

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Leveraging seamless data flow in talent strategies 

HR professionals know that it’s a team effort to find and retain the right people with the right skills. Talented individuals are vital for propelling organizations forward and achieving both short and long-term business goals. Consequently, successful headcount planning facilitates the sustained growth of businesses. 

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Getting workforce planning right, first time

There are plenty of challenges to contend with when trying to achieve successful headcount planning:

• Tedious, error-prone manual processes to manage headcount requests and staff costs
• Poor forecasting due to fragmented data and absence of a single source of truth 
• Lack of alignment between hiring managers, HR, Finance, and Talent Acquisition teams
• Lack of reconciliation between open headcount and budget
• Poor communication between stakeholders

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Poor collaboration stifles talent acquisition  

When headcount planning isn’t carried out effectively, organizations miss out on talent and this can lead to a whole host of negative consequences. Hiring delays, or making uniformed hiring decisions restricts business growth and productivity. 

Being understaffed puts additional pressure on the remaining employees, and job-related stress is a key factor in increased rates of turnover. In a study by the Pew Research Centre, 39% of those who quit a job in 2021 cited working too many hours as the reason. In short, poor headcount planning can spell disaster, especially for organizations with ambitions to scale quickly and those in competitive sectors. 

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How HR teams can harness automation: 

Automated business processes, underpinned by cross-functional collaboration, significantly strengthen HR teams’ headcount planning capabilities. This leads to: 

• Clarity: Clear alignment on headcount requirements by which team and by when
• Transparency: Immediate visibility of headcount requests
• Financial planning: Alignment between open headcount and budget
• Speed: Shorter time to hire
• Strategic talent acquisition: Securing the right talent to drive the business forward 

With Pigment, you can leverage powerful automated workflows and data analysis tools to streamline headcount planning. Watch Pigment in action with our live product demo for HR professionals and see how Pigment helps you build better planning into your organization. 

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Driving performance in Sales teams with improved visibility

The lifeblood of any organization is its ability to secure new customers, and this hinges on a sales team that feels engaged and motivated to hit its targets. Delivering an effective sales compensation plan is a key strategy to drive sales teams’ performance and achieve the company’s goals.

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Effective data flow is vital for high performing sales teams

Designing and executing sales compensation plans can be tricky. Ensuring timely rep payouts relies on having visibility of accurate data and a single source of truth. 

Poor collaboration hinders sales efforts on a grander scale too. For example, if getting targets approved quickly by the different internal stakeholders is impossible because of clunky manual processes, then Sales teams are far less likely to hit their quotas. 

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The impact of demotivated sales reps 

The performance of sales teams can be severely hindered by poor compensation management and delayed strategy execution. Late payouts, ineffective approvals processes for targets, and lack of clarity behind their targets and remuneration can quickly demotivate sales reps. Poorly performing sales teams cost time, money, resources, and missed opportunities, with negative consequences for the rest of the business. 

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Leveraging automation to drive performance  

When it comes to sales compensation plans, high-quality data combined with automated workflows can transform disengaged employees into motivated and empowered revenue builders. 

Collaboration between internal stakeholders can be driven by automated approval workflows. And the timely delivery of compensation plans based on accurate data aligns the performance of sales teams to the delivery of business objectives. In short, cross-functional collaboration offers a launch pad for implementing automations that drive business success. 

Check out our product tour for collaborative sales planning to learn how you can use Pigment to aggregate data, understand sales performance, and implement powerful reporting. 

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Collaborative strategies for Finance teams

FP&A teams are becoming increasingly forward-looking and playing a much more strategic role in the organization. Yet having the right tools, processes, and support to facilitate this function is often problematic. 

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Finance teams are restrained by poor data flow 

A lack of visibility into accurate, comprehensive, and real-time data continues to thwart the efforts of FP&A teams. An excess of manual processes, like collating data from different places and refreshing data draws valuable time away from more strategic activities. 

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Errors and delays foil Finance teams’ efforts to embrace the role of business partners 

For many organizations, the lack of a single source of truth can lead to far-reaching, damaging consequences. Similarly, unreliable data impedes FP&A teams’ abilities to effectively plan forward, and chasing people for data takes up valuable time, crushing creativity and productivity in its wake. 

That’s not all. A Salesforce survey found that 86% of executives cite poor collaboration and communication as a major cause of business failure. 

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Unleashing FP&A excellence through collaboration 

Automations have a transformational impact on FP&A teams by offering a direct route to stronger collaboration. Read more about collaborative strategies for unleashing FP&A team excellence in our earlier blog post. 

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Deploying cross-functional collaboration with Pigment

As recently highlighted by Forbes, achieving maximum value from automation projects stems from targeting multiple functions at once, instead of a single process. For this to happen, we need to bring an end to silos. 

Pigment's advanced automation features unlock powerful collaboration that bring people together at the right moment, in real time, in a central location. With Pigment, you can: 

• Automate business processes by building end-to-end workflows
• Connect different data sources together 
• Create and assign tasks to collaborators and stakeholders 
• Stay up to date with alerts and notifications 

Pigment empowers HR, Sales, and Finance teams to build plans and execute decisions based on interconnected business processes. Importantly, it builds a common understanding of critical data, and allows organizations to tap into the collective expertise of people across the business to drive financial excellence and confidence in decision-making.

Ready to drive your business forward? Learn how Pigment can help you unlock collaboration in your organization.