One of the primary challenges of navigating a growing team is getting — and keeping — everyone on the same page. Cross-functional collaboration enables stakeholders across teams to check in with each other and ensure they’re pushing projects forward. We have cross-functional syncs all the time at Loom: sales and support; marketing and brand; engineering and product; and company-wide Brown Bag sessions that give Loommates across the organization the chance to learn more about what individual teams are working on.
But cross-functional meetings aren’t without their complications. It can be tough to find the perfect window of time when everyone whose input you need is actually available. So when you do, you certainly don’t want to use up your valuable synchronous time just to provide context or go back and forth on timelines.
That’s where Loom video messaging comes in. We use Loom before, during, and after cross-functional syncs to make them more seamless and stress-free. Here’s how you can, too.
Set the tone for successful cross-functional collaboration
A few days before a cross-functional sync, it’s a common practice at Loom for meeting organizers to record a loom to explain the agenda and main goals for the meeting so they don’t have to during the meeting itself. They also use it as an opportunity to provide context around their team’s specific needs, and bring up any questions they have for attendees outside of their own team, like asking how a certain feature works, in case there are aspects of the project that they’re less familiar with.
Meeting attendees can review and refer back to this loom to better prep for the sync and ward off the negative effects of context switching. They can also answer or raise questions in the comments section or record loom replies, which can help refine the agenda long before the meeting starts.
Record a cross-functional sync
Last-minute schedule changes happen, but with Loom, you don’t need to reschedule your sync entirely just because one or two attendees aren’t there. Recording your cross-functional sync with Loom allows any key stakeholder who might’ve missed your meeting to watch on their own time (and speed it up to 2x to get through it faster) without having to wade through meeting minutes. It’s also handy to pass on to colleagues who might be joining your project later on and need to get up to speed, or to share with other teams who might need more information about the particular project discussed during the sync.
Provide status updates after a cross-functional sync
Before Loom, one of the first questions on my mind after a cross-functional sync wrapped up was, “When should our next meeting be?” Now, I rely on Loom to record and send asynchronous status updates whenever possible, greatly reducing my need to schedule frequent syncs just to discuss deliverables. In general, this practice has helped me think more critically about what I really need from someone before I go ahead and throw time on their calendar.
Loom has completely transformed the way I collaborate with my colleagues both within and outside of my team, letting us make the very most of our synchronous time together.