First, cross-department collaboration is the pain point of enterprise management
According to the results of the survey, the time spent on internal communication between ordinary employees and middle managers accounts for about 40-50% of their working time, and the proportion is even higher for higher-level executives. In some cases, communication within the department is perfectly fine, but communication across departments is constantly problematic;
When a job is assigned, one department leads the cooperation of another department, but due to improper cooperation, the delivery is delayed;
Cross-departmental work often involves multiple departments doing the same job over and over again.
Work problems, each department shirk responsibility to each other, no one to bear responsibility;
These are the cooperation problems we often encounter in our work. With the development and expansion of the enterprise, there are more and more departments and more and more members, and the work is gradually refined. It is more and more difficult to do inter-department work, and the communication and cooperation effect is low, which affects the whole work efficiency of the company.
2. Difficulties in cross-departmental collaboration
1. Different departments have different responsibilities and cannot understand each other
The work content and responsibilities vary from department to department, and sometimes people only see what they want and don’t see the difficulties of others.
Such as our sales team will often and some customers for the product development team feedback opinion, but the r&d team has its own task arrangement, so can’t solve the problem of their reaction in time, a long period of time, sales team and r&d team is in a state of complain about each other, influence the team harmony, is not conducive to teamwork.
2. Different tasks and objectives of the department lead to different perspectives
The work of each department has its own goals. Even for the same task, different departments want to achieve different results, which will lead to different focuses. If they do not know the work of each other, it is easy to fall into emotional opposition.
For example, many product managers may think that a certain function needs to be added to the front end of the product, and it is not complicated to change it a little. However, the function added to the front end may involve many changes to the back end. If the product manager and the R&D team do not communicate well, it is easy to cause disputes.
3. Personal KPI > overall goal of the company
To put it bluntly, everyone works for their own good (personal growth or material rewards), and if they do a good job, they will be rewarded accordingly, so if there is no profit to be made, few people will be willing to help others to do more than their own job.
For example, the operation department now needs a product video tutorial and wants the design department to help design the beginning and end of the video, but this is not the task of the design department. Even if they help to do a good job, the operation department will be commended and rewarded in the end.
In fact, this situation is very normal, everyone has so much work energy, help you to do things without benefits, no one is willing to do it. The essence of this situation is that goals are inconsistent, with everyone working on their own personal goals and ignoring the overall goals of the company.
Three, how to do a good job of cross-department cooperation
No matter the size of an enterprise, it is necessary to set up independent internal departments. Only through reasonable division of labor can each department unit effectively operate and achieve corporate goals and organizational performance. Therefore, cross-department communication can follow the following principles:
1. Reach a consensus on goals among all staff members
Products, sales, marketing, human, etc. Each department has its own tasks and responsibilities, inconsistent if the target is easy to cause their respective, only from the work of the department and each department interests, but ignored the overall goal of organization, this will only strengthen the competition and weakened the cooperation between departments, easy to cause inter-departmental communication barriers, not smoothly achieve organizational goals.
So the first thing that cross-departmental collaboration requires is goals. The goal should be set and reached consensus in advance, and the goal should be made public. OKR should be made public to the whole company, and the goal should be transparent, so that each department and everyone can see the company’s goal at any time and know whether their work deviates from the company’s goal.
(Chart of CORNERSTONE’s goals)
2. Assign responsibilities to people, clarify the post responsibilities of cross-department personnel, and link up the working process
An enterprise is composed of departments with distinct responsibilities. The completion of enterprise goals requires not only active work within the department, but also cooperation beyond the boundaries of the department to complete the work of the enterprise.
Employees in each department have their own clear job responsibilities. In the face of the ambiguous areas existing in the responsibilities of employees in different departments, it is necessary to make clear rights and responsibilities and reasonable division of labor. If it is necessary to work together, it is also necessary to clarify the common cooperation content, and clarify the cross-department cooperation positions and personnel, sort out a complete cross-department cooperation workflow, and confirm that each work is responsible for by personnel; Continuously optimize and improve the cross-department workflow in the actual cross-department collaboration, and solidify the work standard.
(Pictured on CORNERSTONE’s mission page)
3. Clear demands before communication to ensure smooth communication
In fact, the essence of cross-department collaboration is communication. If communication is not in place, it is easy to cause mistakes in work. It is recommended to clarify your demands before communicating with colleagues, and then conduct reasonable communication to ensure smooth communication and achieve the desired effect as far as possible. Important information is best communicated face to face, which can solve problems more effectively and avoid miscommunication and task failure.
4, unified communication platform, convenient information retention
Nowadays, many enterprises communicate with each other through wechat or email. Switching back and forth is not convenient and easy to cause the problem of communication failure. A unified communication platform can not only avoid the trouble of switching and improve communication efficiency, but also avoid the loss of important information and documents in the chat. CORNERSTONE discussions allow team members to communicate with each other, share information, and solve problems they may encounter at work. Important documents can also be transferred to a WIKI or file at any time.
(Pictured on CORNERSTONE’s discussion page)
Efficient operation of the team to create value
An efficient team must have clear goals, specific roles, smooth communication, clear procedures and a high degree of trust among team members, which requires a certain amount of time to operate and train. In order to maintain enterprise competitive advantage, keep the enterprise efficiency, improve the ability of enterprise innovation performance, companies often need to take measures, through the problem oriented and demand oriented, strengthen inter-departmental communication and cooperation between people, promote the inter-departmental coordination ability, reduce the department conflict, reasonable and effective use of organizational resources, promote the vitality, the efficiency and performance of the organization.
Conclusion:
At present, the departmental barriers between organizations at all levels within enterprises are still a pain point for many enterprises. It is inevitable to encounter cross-departmental cooperation problems in work. Poor cooperation will lead to a series of problems and seriously affect work efficiency. In general, the most important aspect of cross-departmental collaboration is goal alignment. By setting common goals, both parties can reach consensus. In addition, it is also necessary to consider issues from the standpoint of the other party, so as to ensure the smooth cooperation between the two sides and form an efficient cross-department cooperation mode. CORNERSTONE’s industry-wide one-stop project collaboration platform, links to the official website, no thanks! (www.cornerstone365.cn)
