Cross-department cooperation involves the pooling together of departments or individual employees to work on a single project. The concept encourages seamless sharing of data, insights, and innovative ideas between disparate departments for the growth of an organization.

Members in cross-department teams present whatever challenges their units face and together brainstorm for solutions. Through sharing customer feedback, marketing and sales teams can suggest ways to enhance product quality to the production department. Cooperation creates a dynamic synergy that benefits employee engagement and experience.

Creating a collaborative culture

In a siloed department model, the right hand has no idea what the left does. Individual departments work in isolation as management directs and keeps oversight. This model does not create the Operational Excellence needed to drive success in an organization. A business must bring down these department walls to foster a collaborative culture for innovation and growth.

A new approach to business management and employee training can help re-orientate your workplace culture. Engage an external consultant to train workers and restructure your administrative setup. OpEx Learning offers fantastic operational excellence training courses that can help this endeavor. Through their open access method, students receive written content and enjoy interactive engagement in assessments or discussion forums.

Benefits of shared insights and innovative ideas

Fresh perspectives spur creativity and multiple skills perfect the product. Manufacturing organizations require new products and continuous improvement to sustain or grow their market share. Bringing the research, production, marketing, and sales teams together can excite fresh ideas that lead to new products and improvements.

Brainstorming together on common goals is a great way to find solutions and generate ideas faster. Total employee engagement escalates responsibility, accountability, optimum performance, and operational excellence. In this collaborative environment, management can introduce transformative concepts such as Lean Six Sigma to raise performance standards.

Homegrown leadership skills

A collaborative working culture allows individual employees to demonstrate their skills. In this process, the company can discover hitherto unknown talent and special leadership skills in their employees. Developing and nurturing these reduces the need for costly external consultancy. You also generate a pool of internal expertise the company can use to fill management positions through promotions.

Selecting leaders from the general workforce to head temporary teams raises esteem and generates motivation. It creates employee loyalty and commitment to improving the fortunes of the company. The organization gains operational excellence from performance teams’ enhanced communication, better conflict resolution, and faster decisions.

Team performance for enhanced productivity

Once employees overcome the initial awkwardness at the start of cross-department cooperation and begin working as a team, overall performance improves tremendously. Everyone communicates openly and resolves conflicts amicably, creating a unity of purpose and a sense of process ownership. Individuals work for the team’s success as they learn new ideas to apply in home departments.

Collaborative team performance minimizes the DPMO ratio and increases productivity. The value stream flows efficiently when all employees participate and contribute to conflict resolution as teams strive to assist each other. Team performance is the epitome of operational excellence.

Mutual support and accountability

Working together forces departments to support each other for their success. Interdependence and mutual support help spur productivity and growth, which is the goal of any organization. Collaboration also fosters interpersonal relations and reduces workplace frictions creating a conducive environment for business.

Employees in cross-department teams learn more about other units to understand the bigger picture and the scope of their contribution. Everyone then seeks to align individual and department efforts towards the organization’s success. Understanding the importance of all players in the process, teams hold each other accountable for upholding responsibilities.

 

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