Why is it harder to engage employee commitment across organisational boundaries?

One of the stickiest problems in organisations today is ‘How to influence communication and service provision across departmental boundaries so that employees in all departments are engaged with the organisation and each other to achieve high performance and results’.

In many cases, we see pockets of very effective, results focused engagement within departments and business units and, at the same time, very poor relationships across boundaries with other departments or units.

The end result is frequently a reduced overall business effectiveness and customer satisfaction as well as feelings of demoralisation amongst employees: A case of ‘what's the point? Nothing will change’. This raises the question ‘If employees report that they are engaged with the company and their teams and managers, why do relationships across boundaries continue to suffer?’

For example, I recently observed an employee engagement score above 85% in a client company; an enviable result in anyone's view. Nevertheless, employees in successive surveys continued to report that whilst they loved working for the company and wished to stay, they had low trust in relationships across some company boundaries. They reported a lack of respect from colleagues in some other departments, and believed the company could be more successful if departments worked better together.

These employees were flagging the common issue that communications with their colleagues in other department are not responsive enough, and interdepartmental support did not appear when needed or requested. In other words, they felt let down and this caused trust in their colleagues to diminish.

The serious impact of this widespread problem is wasted time and an increase in management cost to projects, as well as longer timelines in achieving results. The overall end-to-end customer or project delivery time is increased with a resulting impact on innovation success measures. Not to mention the impact of personal rejection on the individuals concerned.

So how can we begin to tackle the causes of this problem?

One of the reasons for such testy relationships is a lack of strategic focus on the need for good cross functional relationships, coupled with believable measures of success. To quote the management guru Steven Covey, in influencing outcomes, we need to start with the end in mind and plan for success from the outset.

So what indicators help us to recognise when cross functional relationships are working well?

Each organisation will have its own unique requirements, but they are likely to include:

• All teams involved in a customer or research project share joint objectives for success
• Time, cost and quality agreements are in place between all teams involved.
• Personal objectives reflect corporate intent for collaboration
• Formal and informal channels of communication are open across teams at appropriate levels for all
• Teamworking agreements are in place
• An issue escalation and management process is in place to ensure rapid problem-solving

The important decision for the organisation is ‘What cross functional relationships do we need to support our customer and strategic goals, and what indicators will we observe?’ Measures of success then become apparent.

For example, in an organisation where indicators chosen for engagement include ‘supportive and collaborative cross functional relationships’, the effect will be to focus the leadership on the nature of relationships with other departments the quality of the cross-functional working experience.

If objectives for corporate success are shared as a cabinet responsibility, then leaders begin to change their approach and influence team behaviour towards colleagues in other parts of the organisation. The silo mentality is changed and end-to-end projects and activities begin to work more effectively.

It does seem to illustrate the old management adage that ‘What gets measured gets managed.’ Sadly, we can be sure that the reverse is almost certainly true: If it isn&’t measured, it probably won’t be managed, and it probably won’t get done.

How could improved cross functional or cross departmental relationships benefit your organisation?

By focusing on improving this issue alone, organisations could gain further agility and speed. The results could also be a more relationship based management culture, and more engaged, achievement focused employees, acting with corporate intelligence.