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Bruce Fletcher knows the choices we make throughout our lives play a big role in how happy we are over the course of our lifetime. He created Lifetime of Happy to help folks understand how their choices contribute to the level of joy they experience on a daily basis and to help them make choices that will help them live a lifetime of happy.
Companies that want to prosper long-term must cultivate effective collaboration among their various departments. And you can’t have teamwork without effective communication.
Your teams and individuals will always struggle to work together productively unless your organization prioritizes communication and constantly seeks to improve it. Below are some of the benefits and challenges of interdepartmental communication and strategies for achieving better collaboration.
Why Is Communication Between Departments Important?
Improving interdepartmental communication can benefit your organization in many ways. Often, the benefits appear in a domino effect. Essentially, it positively impacts employees, brand perception, and overall company health.
For instance, fostering communication between departments can motivate your employees and reduce workplace stress, minimizing health issues and the associated costs. It also leads to higher job satisfaction and lower turnover.
Effective interdepartmental communication can drastically improve your company’s external communication. Communicating more effectively with customers will make those customers happier, and happy employees will be more likely to share brand messages on social media, leading to more leads and conversions. And, of course, more trust and loyalty are soon to follow.
Moreover, fostering communication between departments will boost your team’s performance and productivity, and you’ll have fewer time-consuming misunderstandings. Ultimately, you’ll see higher total profits.
Primary Challenges of Interdepartmental Communication
A lack of interdepartmental communication can stem from many different things. Often, departments in different geographic locations struggle to maintain consistent communication, whether that means they’re in different buildings, cities, or states. Employees who work different shifts are also prone to face challenges.
Corporate politics and overworked employees are other common culprits. And sometimes, departments simply don’t understand the other departments’ communication needs.
At the end of the day, however, it’s typically because the company doesn’t prioritize communication as it should. Identifying the root cause of your interdepartmental communication problems and being willing to address them are the first steps to improving.
Boosting Communication Between Departments
Your organization can employ many different strategies to enhance communication between your departments. Start by exploring business process management (BPM).
Implementing BPM will optimize your processes and workflows through automation. It will limit the laborious, mundane tasks your team members have to juggle, leaving them more time to focus on what they’re passionate about. This will, in turn, boost workplace engagement
and morale and lead to better communication and collaboration. Look to online resources to see an example of business process management and how it could work for your team.
It’s also important to incorporate the appropriate collaboration tools among your team. For instance, project management software like Trello fosters real-time collaboration and provides many task management features to help everyone stay on the same page. And Google Docs is an excellent word processing app that comes with in-document annotations and many other collaborative functions.
If your organization is like many others, you must present regular reports to leadership, employees, or investors. One of the most helpful tools for this task is a PDF editing tool, which you can use to compile multiple charts, graphics, and documents into a single presentation. You can also delete, rotate, and re-order your PDFs as needed.
Besides implementing BPM and finding the right collaboration tools, consider these strategies for enhancing interdepartmental communication and collaboration:
- Don’t allow team members to work in silos.
- Establish company-wide, high-level objectives to keep disparate teams unified.
- Prioritize regular interaction among team members.
- Create cross-functional teams for greater synergy.
- Only adopt tools your team members can learn quickly.
Summing Up
No company can flourish in the long run without impactful communication between departments. Effective collaboration will soon follow as you improve your interdepartmental communication.
Keep in mind the benefits and challenges, and explore BPM and collaboration tools that can boost your team’s success. You’ll see major growth and higher profits in no time!
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