In every company, there will be instances where different departments work together on company processes and projects.

Examples of common cross-departmental collaborations:

• Sales and Marketing working together on customer outreach campaigns
• HR and IT working together on revamping the company's career website portal
• Finance and Legal working together on drafting the company's payment terms

Hence, it is important that the various departments in your company are collaborating with one another effectively to drive optimum business efficiency and performance for your company culture.

How can you improve your collaborations with other departments?

When collaborating with other departments, here are 3 key principles you can apply with the 3 S's:

• Support
• Strength
• SOP (Standard Operating Procedure)

1. Support

While it is good practice to be focused on achieving your respective departments' targets, it is vital that you also take the initiative to support other departments by getting to know how they operate, their workflows and helping them with their respective targets too when possible.

Relating to this, more often than not, other departments are also looking for ways to support yours. Do invest effort in ensuring your department's requests and workflow are clearly communicated and understood by them as well.

In addition to enhancing the mutual understanding and working relationships with other departments, this also helps streamline the execution of roles and tasks in your cross-departmental collaborations.

2. Strength

In your cross-departmental collaborations, you need to recognise and appreciate each departments' strengths and how they collectively add strategic value to one another and more importantly, collectively towards the company's common goal.

Which means taking intentional steps to break away from individual department-focused silos, adopting a big picture mindset of the company's common goal and how each department plays an important part together.

This is also an opportunity to consider new ideas for your own department, learning from other departments in your collaborations with them and ideating fresh creative solutions together.

3. SOP (Standard Operating Procedure)

In cross-departmental collaborations, it is essential to be mindful and respectful of other departments' SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) as well, as they may have additional processes and protocols to be adhered to.

A common example would be when requesting information from other departments, which may be deemed private and confidential and thus, not appropriate to be shared across to the requesting department without proper justification and necessary approvals.

In approaching this and to avoid potential misunderstandings, similar to point No. 1 above on "Support", it is thus vital to make the effort in understanding the other departments' perspective here in working out a collective amicable resolution, which may require a 'give and take' between departments too.

Concluding remarks

By applying the 3 S's principles above, you are a step closer towards improving how your departments collaborate with each other, working as an aligned and cohesive unit for your company culture.

It will take time and effort, but the bigger overall success that comes from instilling this in your company culture will definitely be worth it.

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