Communication Matters Between Your Company’s Departments

If you are a business manager or owner, you may have noticed that interdepartmental communication isn’t always easy. However, the way that your groups interact and coordinate with each other can make or break your business. Today’s article aims to help you improve communication within your organization.

Why Communication Matters

There are many reasons that interdepartmental communication is crucial to your business. First, and perhaps most importantly, it improves efficiency. When everyone is on the same page and working toward a common goal, there are fewer instances of “effort duplication,” which happens when different people work on the same thing, even when they don’t need to. Further, interdepartmental communication on business matters also leads to better relationships and can foster a happier and healthier working environment.

Your Education May Help

If you’re struggling to gather the proverbial troops, it could be that you need to spruce up your business acumen. In this case, you might consider going back to school to earn a business degree. Whether you’re working toward a degree in marketing, management, or communication, your education can equip you with the hard and soft skills you need to help everyone communicate better.

Pain Points

According to the knowledge management platform Bloomfire, there are many different workplace communication problems that you might run into. These include things like a lack of in-person interaction, information hoarding, and even a lack of feedback. When you’re ready to improve the communication efforts of your employees, you have to improve their environment. Start by identifying these pain points so that you can work with your staff to find a solution to each so that you can improve workplace collaboration by overcoming communication barriers.

For instance, if you have multiple teams working on a project, a pain point for your employees might be difficulty accessing every document needed to do their job well. A solution to this could be prioritizing PDF documents over paper ones and making them available on a company sharepoint, like your intranet or even Slack. By using Adobe Acrobat’s PDF editing and creation tools, your team can make whatever changes they need to important project files before sending them on to the next team members who need to work on them. Plus, PDFs can be stored and sent securely with password protection, ensuring confidential company information stays that way. This eliminates the barrier of having to track down files that may be with another team member or department, or even located in a different building.

That Common Goal

We’ve already mentioned ensuring that everybody is on the same page and working toward a common goal. But how do you choose which goals to work toward? Start small. One example is having your teams come together to offer a project update to company leadership. In this case, you might begin by hosting a meeting with all of your team leaders to let them know your plan. Sales training and leadership company Sandler recommends following up with your meeting attendees in writing. A quick email with the bullet points of what was discussed will help them remember their task.

A poor working environment, low morale, ineffective project development, and wasted time are just a few of the issues you might encounter in a business without excellent communication. However, there are ways to overcome this woeful workplace. Start by arming yourself with the education you need to be a more effective leader and communicator. Then, identify pain points and create a plan of action to overcome them. It takes time, work, and patience, but you can improve your working environment simply by opening yourself up to improving communication within all departments.