CFO Office of the Future: Why Collaboration Is Key
The business environment of the 21st century is rapidly changing. With fast-paced digitalization, modern companies are feeling pressure to adapt or be left behind. Although chief financial officers and their teams have always been important to organizational success, the job of the CFO is also transforming. To prepare its company for new challenges, the office of the CFO will need to embrace a forward-thinking, collaborative style.
The CFO of the Future
It’s no longer enough to simply play the role of the accountant. Running a successful office of the CFO now demands more creative thinking while keeping an eye on the bigger picture. Additionally, CFOs need to guide business decisions and prepare their companies for future growth. This means that chief financial officers and their teams can no longer be siloed from the rest of the company.
Why Collaboration Is Key for Chief Financial Officers
So how can the modern CFO keep up? Building strong relationships and fostering a collaborative work environment will be key to success. Here’s how collaboration can help bring your CFO office into the future.
Promoting Productivity and Innovation
Smart collaboration can increase productivity by helping teams accomplish more. A good CFO knows how to create processes that benefit the entire business and make others successful. This requires keeping everyone in the loop on your company’s financials. But your colleagues outside the office of the CFO don’t have time to trudge through data. You’ll need to get the most important information out to the right people to keep your company agile.
The modern CFOs must walk a fine line. A big part of the CFO’s job is to reduce risk. However, risk reduction shouldn’t stifle innovation. Collaboration can help drive innovation by bringing together diverse viewpoints within your company in a low-risk environment.
Driving Strategic Decisions
Operations and finance have to work together to achieve company goals. When the office of the CFO establishes a collaborative environment, the rest of the company benefits. Open communication between the office of the CFO and other executive offices creates access to key financial information and inspires strategic company decisions.
As the chief financial officer, you’ll need to lead the way on this change in culture if you want to see results. Make information sharing a priority and be a resource. Let your colleagues know they can come to you for a financial perspective on important initiatives. Give non-finance executives frequent updates on your priorities and challenges. Discuss your office’s projects and how they affect the company as a whole. This keeps all the executives on the same page about the direction of your company.
Remember that collaboration goes both ways. Be open to suggestions, even if they come from outside the office of the CFO. Your colleagues may have fresh perspectives and unique insights.
A Connected Team Is a Successful Team
Opening up communication between executive offices may help drive strategic decisions. But collaboration between team members is just as important.
Make your office a well-oiled machine—every individual should be working together to contribute to the larger goal. Encourage your team to share ideas, teach one another new skills, and work as a united front. This will help the day-to-day tasks of your office run more smoothly.
Conclusion
Effective collaboration is key to keeping up with the increasingly complex business environment of the 21st century. But it doesn’t happen overnight. Forward-thinking chief financial officers will need to find ways to be more efficient and free up time to spend on predictive analytics and collaborative decision-making.
Want to create a more collaborative environment in your CFO office? The right technology solutions can support your goals. insightsoftware’s Tidemark cloud-based planning solution, has a unique collaboration feature that provides seamless planning and forecasting processes across users, business units and entities to give you a single source of the truth. Introducing real-time, timely collaboration into your business right from within your planning software allows you to capture critical discussions with a point of reference, share data and integrate other departments. You also have the ability of retrieving these communications in the future and in the context of your business processes.