Monday, February 27, 2017

Are Your Company Departments At War With Each Other?

Company is a mechanism - even if separate parts work well, it doesn’t guarantee the organization as a whole functions efficiently. Today we will discuss one of the most common issues that can be potentially holding your business back. As soon as any company has more than 2 employees, cross-department or cross-functional conflicts are inevitable. The bigger the company, the more strained cross-department relations hamper its growth.

In this article we prepared the most common causes of interdepartmental conflicts and strategies to prevent them.

Break system barriers 
19eeac8d8783ef6231b41bde69401309.jpg
As if human communication is not complicated enough, business operating systems might create barriers that don’t let the team collaborate efficiently. Competing goals, vague roles or broken business processes are typical examples of possible system barriers.

A business process refers to a wide range of structured activities that are implemented to accomplish an organizational goal. As business processes can be manual or automated, involve several people or even departments, challenges are pretty predictable. For example, your designer didn’t make the graphics on time and the whole team failed to meet deadlines, your development team didn’t release necessary updates and your sales dropped or you lost a big contract as a result of a silly logistic mistake. Sounds familiar, right? According to the article in Entrepreneur.com such bottlenecks in your business processes cause low morale of your team (59,5%), missed deadlines (53,7%), angry customers (42,6%), and lost revenue (36,3%).

Solution 

Broken business processes usually stem from inefficient labor or scarce resources. But it’s not so easy to see where exactly your business process slows down and the root causes of these issues. A proper Business Process Management (BPM) software can help you make your business processes transparent, you will be able to see the bottlenecks and eliminate them.

Fight tunnel vision 

7b0b57779a23a800207d45ce6d3ec976.jpg
When you work in a startup with 2-3 colleagues, you are well-aware of their roles and functions in the company. But the more people you work with, the vaguer is your understanding of what your colleagues are actually responsible for. Too many departments, too many people… Employees fail to see the big picture, management becomes more and more formal. All in all, it creates a silo mentality – each department knows only their own role in the company, but they are reluctant to share information with other departments or not really willing to listen to their suggestions on how to improve. As a result, the whole company suffers from poor communication, employees have no idea what their colleagues in other departments do and how much time one or another task might take.

Solution

Cross-department boundaries are difficult to breach. Besides general strategies to keep your team motivated and engaged, there are new HR practices, such as cross-training, job-shadowing and job rotation. Cross-training provides employees with possibilities to learn new skills outside their usual duties. Alongside improved morale, increased employee flexibility and productivity, cross-training enables your team see the aspects of work their colleagues do. Job-shadowing is not only a career-exploration activity, it is a popular on-the-job learning technique. Your employees see the challenges their colleagues have to deal with every day. Job rotation is a method used in some companies to keep their employees motivated, make them learn new skills and see the bigger picture. All in all, these techniques help employees breach cross-department boundaries and improve the collaboration in the company.

Improve interpersonal relationships

032f99bad2991eb753d32e1edc7a1e0b.jpg
No matter how good your business processes are, you can forget about efficient collaboration if your employees don’t like each other. You might say that it is difficult to control interpersonal relationships in a team. However, you can do a lot to facilitate the communications and make your employees “more likeable”.

Solution

Apart from system barriers, there are physical barriers which don’t allow your team to collaborate. Make sure that your working space has some break rooms where people can communicate without fear of disturbing their colleagues. Surprisingly, break rooms increase productivity and creativity, not speaking about improved health and wellbeing of your employees. Team members have a chance to get to know each other outside their professional duties and it greatly improves their tolerance and readiness to collaborate with each other. It’s also very useful to hold regular teambuilding events and encourage your staff to spend some time together out of work hours. Finally, yet importantly, consider your company culture every time you hire a new person. Diversity is great, but your new hires should share your company values and be on the same wavelength with the rest of the team.

Building strong relationships across departments takes time and effort. But once you manage to achieve it, your efforts will be rewarded by enhanced collaboration, greater efficiency and smoother business processes.

Bitrix24 is a free Business Process Management (BPM) software with a set of standard business processes (leave requests, business trips, expenses, purchases, general requests, internal helpdesk). Use promo code TIP10 when registering your free Bitrix24 account to get extra 10GB. 
You may also like:

Thursday, February 16, 2017

How Gantt Chart Software Can Make Your Business More Efficient

Friday, July 08, 2016

New Free Website Forms In Bitrix24 CRM

Long-awaited lead capture forms for your Bitrix24 CRM are finally there. Everyone knows what a web form is, but sometimes working with forms may require additional efforts: 

- need of a website where the form will be placed; 
- web form creation may be complicated for a sales agent when additional programming skills are demanded; 
- difficulties with filled form results processing; 
- results transfer to the CRM; 
- form results analytics where e.g. Google Analytics connection can be really handy. 

The purpose of any web form is to get a new lead or contact, or add more information to the existing client records in your CRM. 

We have tried to minimize your efforts with a new smart web forms in Bitrix24. Discover the advantages of Bitrix24 CRM web forms: 

1. Easy web form designer

7faa028d01c137d806f510f002ac4c91.png
2. Public page for your web forms with your Bitrix24 domain name (your company name) on it: 

63d0b2bd93a19e61dd63d177e638808d.png
Custom background image, different tabs background & text colors, 3 types of form theme, etc. 

fb353b1ccc9e6440bc5a044d8edf1bd6.png
3. Integration with Bitrix24 CRM

ed3bda7faeb25293b40a303dcf87adbd.png
4. Queue of several responsible persons for web forms results distribution (coming soon

5. Web forms results can be connected to Google Analytics (you will be able to add your Google Analytic ID inside the form designer) 

6. Five pre-designed forms (coming soon

7. Three scenarios for web forms

- simple forms; 
- forms with field rules; 
- forms with online payment option (e.g. client will be forwarded to Paypal payment page after form is completed): 

d4a29b2fb95783074af3f30c0e9947f7.png
Products from the catalog can be selected and added to the form, so that a client will be able to choose: 

1944f702509fe03e9798d32954e15591.png
After the form is completed, the client will see the final invoice with online payment options and be redirected to the chosen provider (e.g. Paypal) payment page: 

bd03827fac3797848088f6677e37b0af.png

8. Embedded forms – copy & paste the code into your web page: 

898a0a1e16838a585c5674aed964d44d.png
Use Bitrix24 CRM forms to boost productivity. All form data will be saved to the CRM system; managers will only have to process the collected information inside the CRM system. 
Use forms in the chat, on your site's pages or send a link to a public page so that your clients can complete the form whenever they choose.