3 strategies for better interdepartmental communication

To prosper, companies must ensure that their various departments work well together. That's because effective interdepartmental communication is "the lifeblood of a successful organization."

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Most of us have experienced effective and ineffective interdepartmental communications and understand how much better we as individuals and our teams perform when we communicate effectively. Interdepartmental communication can play a vital role in removing barriers and putting processes in place to help teams achieve departmental goals while achieving overall organizational strategies.

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Here, you'll find three strategies to improve interdepartmental communication:

1- A company with no limits

Managers often put too much effort working through interdepartmental processes and can't seem to bring people together for cross-functional work. The work process should bring teams together at set intervals to specifically address cross-departmental needs. This way teams will have the information they need to truly work together in pursuit of common goals.

2- Proactive, good old-fashioned relationship building

One of the barriers to effective interdepartmental communications is strained relationships in organizations, which often lead to a lack of trust. Without strong relationships, people are less willing to communicate with each other.

One way to improve interdepartmental communications is to improve relationships one person at a time. If a manager needs to work regularly with a manager in another department, managers must make a consistent and proactive effort to build a strong relationship.

There are many ways to do this. For example, meeting regularly for coffee or lunch, offering help for projects not necessarily related to initiatives that both teams need to work on, or even offering excess resources during slow times are great tools. Performance improvement consultants, FranklinCovey, would call these fiduciary deposits. One can build trust, and therefore communication channels, by being the first to offer help, praise, or friendship without expecting anything in return.

3- Clear communication of the implementation process

We can say that there are two other main barriers to effective interdepartmental communication: physical separation and system separation. It is difficult to communicate with other departments in different locations or time zones, or using different software systems that are not accessible to other departments.

To improve interdepartmental communication, organizations must have systems in place that allow people to communicate and work in harmony. Emails are a tool, but if teams are doing real work on systems they don't have access to, there's still a barrier to communicating.

Using systems such as enterprise software networks, collaborative intranets, and cloud-based software that allow people to work on projects asynchronously in a centralized repository eliminates the need to work on separate documents and juggle multiple versions.

Interdepartmental communication is primarily about people and relationships, but in a world of complex, dispersed matrix organizations, having systems and tools in place to enable communications is critical.

Organizational performance may depend on it. How are you trying to improve interdepartmental communication in your company?