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If you’re a manager, you might be worried that important information is getting lost in translation between the departments you oversee. Or perhaps you’re concerned that different departments are siloed, making it difficult for people to stay in the loop about cross-functional projects. To streamline interdepartmental communication and collaboration for company-wide success, try implementing some of these suggestions shared by List My Businesses.
Why Interdepartmental Collaboration Matters
No department exists in a vacuum – at some point, you’ll need to collaborate with other teams. Collaboration shouldn’t be viewed as a necessary evil in business. Effective collaboration is a boon for your company! Chron states that open, ongoing, clear communication between
separate departments builds long-term trust across teams, improves client satisfaction, boosts operational efficiency so that you can avoid revenue losses, and eliminates potential conflicts.
Common Communication Failures
If you want to drive better company-wide collaboration and communication, you need to develop your strategy by addressing your most prominent coordination issues first. Take a step back and assess where problems are cropping up. Which departments are struggling the most? Which clunky processes are impeding communication? When do you notice employees hesitating to collaborate?
Familiarizing yourself with common communication issues in corporate environments can help you evaluate where problems exist at your own company. Bloomfire recommends keeping an eye out for employees or departments who unintentionally “hoard” key information, leaders who misinterpret information, and managers who provide little to no feedback.
Collaborating Across Departments
To address communication issues between departments, you may want to get guidance on how to approach business process management (BPM) and apply these principles. You can use this approach to better analyze how people, workflows, and systems interact within your business. This will help you make laborious workflows and processes more efficient and easier for all teams to navigate. To get started, you’ll create a BPM framework that is unique to your business. You can assign a trusted employee to monitor its effectiveness and take action to improve the framework if necessary.
Project management tools and other programs that aid collaboration can also be great investments. For instance, by working on projects in Google Docs, teams can easily add in-document annotations, and with Trello, teams can benefit from extensive task-management features and real-time coordination. Team Building also recommends experimenting with Salesforce for customer relationship management projects.
Furthermore, you may want to require managers and other upper-level employees to provide regular feedback, with a particular focus on communication and collaboration skills. This will help your employees improve in these areas.
Coordinating With Leadership
Sometimes, your business suffers from top-down or bottom-up communication challenges. Lower-level employees, management, and executives don’t always communicate in a timely or organized fashion. To remedy this problem, departments can come together to create comprehensive reports for company leaders. If you need to include lots of graphics, charts, and documents in the same presentation, you may want to assemble everything in one file by combining several PDFs.
You can insert pages to a PDF online for free with a helpful editing tool. You’ll start by uploading the original document you want to add to, and then uploading the pages you need to add. Then, you can reorder, delete, or rotate pages as necessary.
It can be hard to facilitate smooth communication between departments at your company. But taking steps to support collaboration can help every team work more efficiently, avoid errors, and provide better customer service. By incorporating business process management and using project management tools, you’ll be able to address communication snags and pave the way for better collaboration in the future!