By George Wentworth
One of the biggest challenges for companies is the lack of direct and proper communications between departments, such as HR and finance. This hinders the ability of a business to function optimally. In order to optimize your company’s inter-department communications, you must have your operations team speak multiple languages and work as a universal translator of sorts, in order to increase efficiency between multiple team collaboration and ensure higher compliance across the company.
First we should understand what optimization is, and how to calculate its cost and value related to operations and to the company overall. Optimization means maximizing the desirable and minimizing the undesirable, and that is achieved by utilizing the most cost effective and performance enhancing solution available, without compromising quality.
In order to understand its value, we must analyze the operational expenditure, or opex for short, which is the money a company spends on the day-to-day running of the business, which includes everything from payroll to stationary. The value of the company is directly related to the opex expenditure, since the decrease in the opex, while maintaining the same level of efficiency and quality, directly influences the overall value of the company.
How does inter-company communications affect cost? One way to look at cost is through time and efficiency. Increasing department efficiency while reducing the amount of time required by each employee to complete a task can be accomplished through a better communications system within the company.
Even though that it might sound counter-intuitive initially, having a middle man between departments can work exceptionally well to achieve this goal. And no department is better position to tackle this than operations, as by default it is an internal department created in order to oversee the daily running of the business and possesses an unique bird’s eye view of the entire enterprise.
The operations department can achieve this by having direct oversight over other departments, such as HR, Sales and Finance, as such becoming the bridge between teams with different goals and agendas, especially when those teams must work together. In order to ‘bridge’ the communications between these varied teams, operations must be able to speak to each team member using their own unique language, in order to convey information in the most intelligible way possible, and to assure full compliance at all times.
The information will often times originate from one team and will be delegated to another, and it is the operations goal to ‘interpret’ these messages and thus optimize inter-department communications. Part of this translation process is as simple as adjusting expectations and mitigating conflicts, but generally the majority of the time the true task lies in explaining process in a straightforward manner. This can be accomplished first by understanding each department goals and priorities, and relating the task at hand to how it aligns with its primacy.
By working across multiple departments, and with every team member within a system, an Internal Operations Department can become the pivot point for all other departments, and the central information hub the leading executives can rely on when checking the company’s vitals.