In many businesses, communication between departments is an ongoing challenge. Many employees do a great job of communicating with their team members but struggle heavily when it comes to communication outside their department.
Improving communication, however, may be easier than you think. Using the right communication tools, including an all-in-one communication software, can make it easier to maintain communication across departments.
Keep communication options in one place.
Many businesses get bogged down by too many communication options. When they need to share information with their internal team, they share it one way. When they need to reach a department outside their own, on the other hand, they may have to use a completely different platform. There’s email, texting, and, of course, the internal communication system to consider–and often, while one internal team is using one system or platform, the business as a whole uses another option entirely.
By using an all-in-one communication system, on the other hand, your business can make it much easier to communicate from one team to the next. Instead of struggling to determine which platform you need to use at any given moment, you can make it simple for employees to maintain access to one another–all on the same platform they already use to connect with their existing team members.
Have clear, company-level goals and communicate them regularly to employees.
To keep all departments within the company on the same page, you need company-level goals that everyone is working toward–and every employee needs to know what they are. Those goals–and the progress toward them–should be included in regular newsletters and internal communications so that employees can maintain a clear picture of exactly what they’re working to accomplish. When those goals are clear, it can help facilitate communication between departments and maintain a higher level of cohesion between them.
Hold company-wide meetings or meetings between departments that need to collaborate.
Your sales team may have the solutions the marketing team needs–and vice versa. The IT team may not care about the marketing team’s goals and how they’re working to meet them, but they may have the solutions on hand that will allow them to mitigate many of the challenges faced by the IT team every day. Unfortunately, in some cases, those teams may have comparatively few interactions within your company environment–and in a worst-case scenario, they may have none at all. By holding company-wide meetings, or regularly bringing together departments that need to collaborate, you can help integrate those departments and streamline communications.
Keep all the information about a project in one location.
In some businesses, information about a project quickly gets segmented. The development team may have one piece of the puzzle, while the sales team has a completely different perspective. Unfortunately, this can make it very difficult for the development team to reconcile problems noticed by the sales team, or for the sales team to answer questions about things the development team has not made clear. By keeping all the documentation and information about a project in one location, on the other hand, you can allow members of any team to easily review that information and get a better idea of the latest changes in the project.
Foster a psychologically safe environment.
Often, the communication between teams fails because of a disconnect between one team’s culture and another. One internal team may use jargon that the other team doesn’t understand. Another may have a completely different communication method or atmosphere that is alien to the other team, which can make it more difficult to facilitate communication between them.
While it can be difficult to change the culture of either team–and you may not want to!–you can facilitate communication between them to create a psychologically safe environment where they can interact comfortably. Foster an environment where all team members feel free to ask questions or to take minor risks as they work toward achieving their goals. Help team members keep in mind that a lack of understanding as it relates to their specialty does not necessarily mean that the other party does not have the same high level of intelligence–and that working together to achieve a higher level of understanding can benefit both the individual teams and the business as a whole.
Effective communication across your business starts with having the right tools in hand. Pronto makes communication easy. Our effective tool allows for messaging, meetings, and document storage, effectively keeping all the necessary information at your employees’ fingertips so that they can improve their interdepartmental communications with ease.
