Perhaps individual employees at your company work well within their specific teams - but when they have collaborated across departments, communication seems to break down. Interdepartmental communication can be tricky to master, and even capable leaders can hit roadblocks when trying to manage projects with cross-functional teams.

Here’s why interdepartmental communication is essential to your company’s long-term success, how to drive cooperation through your company’s culture, and how your teams can coordinate for major projects and presentations.

Find Your Company’s “Why”

First, it’s important to recognize why interdepartmental communication is an essential ingredient for your company’s long-term success. Overall, strong communication between teams allows you to complete projects on accelerated timelines, minimize project errors, and send deliverables to your clients in a timely, straightforward manner. Plus, your employees will feel more engaged with each other. When everyone is on the same page about project expectations and standards, it’s easier to fulfill these objectives.

Foster a Cooperative Culture

Before implementing any process or workflow changes to promote better communication and collaboration across departments, you’ll need to consider how you can help your employees feel more comfortable sharing ideas. In order to create an environment that supports a culture of open communication, you’ll want to maintain an optimistic approach toward leadership.

When people contribute their own ideas and perspectives at meetings, be encouraging rather than discouraging, even if you disagree with their points of view. While you’ll need to be demanding at times, you should avoid being demeaning. Finally, it’s crucial to uphold the idea that success is always possible - when your team genuinely believes that you can always overcome obstacles, they’ll feel inspired to look harder.

Identify Failure Points and Roadblocks

Before you can improve interdepartmental communication, you need to pinpoint the specific issues that are holding your teams back from collaborating openly. Indeed states that common communication failures can include delivering surpluses of unnecessary information, neglecting communication with remote workers, or failing to respond to urgent messages. Teams can also end up stuck in “silos” without access to agreed-upon communication channels that everyone involved in a project can access.

Implement Process Improvements

Once you’ve honed in on the specific areas where you need to improve communications, you can start implementing improvements. For example, if teams have been sending delayed responses to time-sensitive emails, you can set up notifications to prompt their responses within a specific timeframe. You can also establish a centralized repository with necessary project resources so that people can access the resources they need without being overwhelmed.

Coordinating on Presentations

Presentations and reports for senior leadership are crucial collaborative projects that often require input from numerous teams. If you want to assemble better presentations, Training Industry recommends communicating with key stakeholders or executive leaders to get an idea of what they already know about the topic. That way, you won’t waste time collecting unnecessary details, and you can get straight to the topic at hand. Furthermore, you can focus your collaborative efforts on uncovering the connections between data points rather than simply reporting disconnected metrics.

Interdepartmental communication can make or break your business. If different departments at your company are unable to cooperate effectively, your business might falter. By following these tips, you’ll be ready to emphasize open communication as a core aspect of your company’s culture, identify current obstacles to smooth communication in your business, and come up with better strategies for coordinating presentations and reports.

Chelsea Lamb Businesspop.net | chelsea@businesspop.net