Developing a Tool for Cross-Functional Collaboration: the Trajectory of an Annual Clock

Abstract

This empirical study examines how practitioners from the organizational functions of humanresources, occupational safety and occupational health services within a Finnish industrialorganization view the challenges that production supervisors face in their daily work. The articlepresents a formative intervention, which focuses on supervisors’ changing work and how theseorganizational support functions could collaboratively serve supervisors better, especially in theirtask of promoting well-being at work. The article approaches this collective learning effort fromthe framework of the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), by examining how crossfunctionalcollaboration evolves and the transitions through which it develops in an interventionprocess. The development of collaboration is analysed through a process of collective concept andtool formation by following a cross-meeting trajectory of specific annual clock episodes. Anannual clock, a co-ordinating tool used in organizations to assist the yearly planning andmanagement of specific operations, emerged in the intervention as the practitioners’ attempt tosynchronize overlapping and inconsistent well-being related practices assigned to supervisors.The article presents a framework that can be applied in this kind of combined empirical analysisof tool development and the evolving collaboration. The analysis shows how the idea of the annualclock grew through multifaceted conceptualizations, in which it first had the status of a conceptualobject, then a collaborative tool, and eventually a script for becoming a novel cross-functionalpractice. Simultaneously, the mode of interaction expanded from a function-based co-ordination totask-oriented co-operation, and finally to communication.