Coffee Break Webinar: Cross-Departmental Collaboration
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Cross-Departmental Collaboration
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Coffee Break Webinar: Cross-Departmental Collaboration
- 1. COFFEE BREAK WEBINAR: How to Increase Cross-Departmental Collaboration
- 2. DATIS HR Cloud is a HR & Payroll software company. Our fully unified solution is based around Position Control and was built to meet the unique, complex needs of the nonprofit sector. With over 20 years of experience with Health and Human Services and Nonprofit organizations, our software has empowered hundreds of organizations around the country to control their costs, maximize their budgets, and better achieve their mission.
- 3. • Address communication challenges across departments • Better align departmental goals and strategies • Fresh perspectives often lead to innovative ideas • Improve company culture and engagement among employees CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL COLLABORATION
- 4. WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT AGREE OR DISAGREE: Your Organization Currently Struggles Communicating Between Departments:
- 5. OBSTACLES TO COLLABORATION QUESTION: What Is the Greatest Obstacle to Cross-Departmental Collaboration Within Your Organization:
- 6. SILOED INFORMATION • Hinders the ability to effectively react to changes in market conditions • Occurs when: • Information cannot be shared freely among departments or groups • Employees don’t have the tools to communicate and collaborate with other departments • Departments use disparate systems
- 7. “Silos - and the turf wars they enable - devastate organizations. They waste resources, kill productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of goals.” - Patrick Lencioni, Author of Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars
- 8. LACK OF CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS • Teams that that are made up of people from different functional areas within a company (i.e. Finance and HR) • Forming these teams is difficult when departments operate on different platforms • Departments with conflicting goals and priorities have trouble teaming up • In many cases, employees have to be forced to form cross-functional teams
- 9. TOO MANY INTERNAL SYSTEMS QUESTION: How Many Systems Does Your Organization Currently Use to Maintain Workforce Management Processes?
- 10. TOO MANY INTERNAL SYSTEMS • Majority of organizations operate on multiple internal systems • These systems often speak different ‘languages’ • Leads to hours of manual data entry • Discourages employees from leaving their comfort zone and collaborating with ’outsiders’
- 11. WHAT YOU CAN DO
- 12. REMOVE COMMUNICATION BARRIERS • Communication barriers cause information silos • Types of barriers: • Physical • Status • Noise • Empower employees to freely communicate throughout the organization
- 13. FORM CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS • Create an atmosphere that encourages collaboration and promotes the value of teamwork • Make it easy for employees in different departments to communicate and share files electronically • DATIS mixes support and development to close the customer feedback loop and shorten ticket times • Determine initiatives, identify complimentary skills, set metrics for success
- 14. REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF INTERNAL SYSTEMS • Less systems = Less barriers to share information • Unified systems speak a universal language • All employees on an equal playing field • Reduces the amount of logins and passwords needed per employee
Editor's Notes
- Today’s webinar is centered around cross-departmental collaboration. When employees are empowered to work with colleagues outside of their department on strategic initiatives, it is a key driver to organizational success. Usually, initiatives and issues affect multiple departments, so it makes sense for employees to be able to work together across departments on strategies and solutions. For example, reducing recruiting costs is a challenge that both HR and Finance should be working on hand in hand. In order to foster innovation, organizations really need to pair employees with different skill sets and backgrounds together. This cross-departmental collaboration not only keeps everyone aligned on departmental goals and strategies, it also helps to improve the overall culture and boost employee engagement as a natural result as well.
- We realized the importance of this topic after reviewing the results of our 2018 State of Workforce Management survey report, which included responses from over 400 Health and Human Services. We found that 66% of executives reported that their organizations struggle to communicate between departments. With almost 2/3 of workforces unable to efficiently collaborate across departments, we wanted to bring to light some of the biggest barriers to cross departmental collaboration, and discuss how executives in the Health and Human Services industry can begin to overcome them.
- In the same 2018 State of Workforce Management survey referenced above, we also asked respondents to identify their obstacles to cross-departmental collaboration. As you can see, the top three obstacles identified were (1) siloed information, (2) a lack of cross functional teams, and (3) too many systems in place. We’ll explore these top three obstacles on the next few slides.
- The most common obstacle to cross-departmental collaboration was reported to be “information silos”. These occur when employees are unable to freely share information from one department to the next. One of the main reasons organizations experience such silos is because their employees aren’t equipped with the tools needed to share the information and analytics necessary to collaborate. Everyone is working separately off of different reports and information. Unfortunately, this is really common. Especially in organizations where departments operate on different platforms. In cases like this, employees have to overcome communication barriers to effectively work with a colleague outside of their department.
- This quote really points out the brutal truth about information silos. Author Patrick Lencioni says that “Silos - and the turf wars they enable - devastate organizations. They waste resources, kill productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of goals”. Identifying and removing these silos should be every executives first step in achieving cross-departmental collaboration.
- The next biggest obstacle Health and Human Services executives identified was “a lack of cross functional teams”. These are teams that are comprised of employees from different functional areas of an organization. For an example, creating a team to tackle a project with members from HR, Finance, and the C-Suite would make up a cross functional team. While it sounds easy in concept, forming these teams is difficult when employees are working on different platforms and have conflicting goals and priorities. When implemented correctly, cross functional teams can align departments to produce innovative work. However, it’s unlikely that employees will abandon their comfort zones to make form these teams themselves.
- Lastly, executives noted that having “too many systems in place” was another obstacle that made it hard for employees to collaborate internally. 44% of Health and Human Service organizations have 3 or more systems in place to handle their workforce management processes. In fact, only 28% of organizations that were represented in the survey reported relying on one unified system.
- We know that “more systems = more stress”. So, when we see that only 28% of organizations are using one system, we know over 70% of organizations in the Health and Human Services industry are being bogged down by trying to patch together multiple platforms. This can probably be also be correlated to the roughly 70% of organizations that report they struggle to collaborate across departments. And it makes sense because these different systems used by different departments all speak separate languages, and fail to integrate effectively. This ultimately ends up discouraging employees from wanting to work with others outside of their department because of the administrative burden associated.
- So now that we’ve gone over the top obstacles to cross-departmental collaboration, let’s get down to the main point of this presentation, how you can increase cross departmental collaboration within your organization.
- The first and most obvious tip is to look at your organization and identify all internal communication barriers. These can range from anything from physical barriers, which arise when employees are physically separated by cubicles and hallways, status barriers, which occur when employees feel uncomfortable or intimidates approaching employees with a higher rank, and noise barriers, where the frequency or clarity of messages disrupts effective communication. By isolating these barriers and removing them one by one, employees are more likely to collaborate outside their department since there are less obstacles.
- As noted before, more than one in four executives believe that a lack of cross functional teams is their biggest obstacle to increasing cross departmental collaboration within their organization. We also mentioned that its unlikely for employees to go out of their way to create these teams themselves. It really has to be the responsibility of managers, executives, and team leaders to create at atmosphere that encourages collaboration. These cross-functional teams are more likely to succeed when employees can easily communicate with one another throughout the day, and don’t have to rely on scheduled meetings to keep up progress on various projects and initiatives. We’ve implemented many cross-departmental teams at DATIS to improve efficiencies and engagement throughout our organization. We’ve most recently partnered our support and development teams to close the customer feedback loop. To do so, we followed a fairly simple process. We first determined the initiatives, or goals, of the teams and set metrics for success. We then paired up employees based on their skills and backgrounds. Cross functional teams continue to help us grow and move forward as a company – just as they can throughout the Human Services Industry
- Last but not least, if you’re one of the organizations that has multiple internal systems and struggle with cross-departmental collaboration, another option is to consider reducing the amount of internal systems your departments rely on. The less systems that organizations have in place, the less barriers there are too cross-departmental collaboration. Empowering employees with a shared system enables them to truly “work as one” to achieve more together and really produce their best work. Implementing a single unified system that caters to the needs of an entire organization also puts all employees on an equal playing field, and makes transferring information, processing workflows, and communicating between departments simple. OPTIONAL: For instance, at DATIS, as Stephanie mentioned at the start, we offer a unified HR and Payroll solution puts all employees, form HR to Payroll on the a single platform. This, for example, makes it simple for HR to send time and attendance information to finance to perform payroll without any manual data entry. Finally, in a unified solution, there are less logins and passwords needed, which means they can collaborate with all of their co-workers without the hassle of logging in and out numerous times.