Strategies to Improve Communication and Collaboration Between Departments

If you’re like most managers, your job involves communicating with people from many departments and backgrounds. Interdepartmental communication can be the difference between success and failure. Below are some top strategies to help improve interdepartmental communication and employee collaboration at your company.

The Importance of Team Collaboration

No business can succeed without teamwork. From customer service representatives to sales teams to accountants and marketers, all staff members are part of one big unit working toward a common goal: success. The more effective the communication and collaboration, the better your company will do in customer satisfaction and revenue growth.

How Communication Fails

Team members don’t always understand their own roles or how they fit into a given project. Once you know where teams typically fail in communicating, you can design processes to counteract these problems. For example, your company might use software that requires each team member to complete different actions before moving on. It's crucial everyone knows what tasks are required of them and what tasks need to be completed by others before moving forward with their part of a project. Another common failure point is when team members feel unheard.

The most important thing you can do to improve interdepartmental communication is to encourage employees to give honest feedback about how well departments perform. Realize that most employees are reluctant to be critical so if people are shy about speaking up, it’s up to you as a manager to initiate discussion.

Create a Shared Understanding

Before your team can figure out how to solve a problem, members need to understand what that problem is in the first place. If everyone has different ideas about what needs fixing or why it needs fixing, then no amount of communication can bring them together. Ensure everyone on your team is on the same page before moving forward with any other steps in the collaboration process.

One strategy to improve interdepartmental communication is to schedule brainstorming sessions that focus on department-specific topics. These meetings can be held monthly or as needed. The goal is to generate new ideas, discover opportunities, create plans of action, and ultimately solve problems in a collaborative setting.

Use the Right Tools

Project management software, such as Asana or Trello, can help improve team collaboration. These tools help share information between departments and communicate on deadlines and requirements. Projects often span multiple departments from customer service to accounting, so being able to share updates in one place is a huge help.

When preparing reports for presentations, you can easily maintain everything in one file. If you have numerous documents, illustrations, or charts that you'd like to include, use this tool to add pages to a PDF. You can also reorder, delete, and rotate pages with this tool.

Being Successful

To be a successful manager or leader, you need to find ways to improve interdepartmental communication. If your organization doesn’t have an existing program, these strategies can help.

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