Most employees feel that they just need to understand their own jobs. Which, in some ways, is correct. However, when it comes to handoffs and cross-departmental tasks, that narrow focus can cause a breakdown.
That’s why it’s vital to not only document the everyday tasks taken on by an individual stakeholder, but also to document interconnecting functions. Providing employees with minute, executive-level knowledge is unnecessary. However, sharing a 10,000-foot view with employees ensures that they see why they must complete tasks in a predefined way. You, as the executive, know that consistency keeps your business operating as it should. But an everyday employee might not understand this.
This article shares how you can give your team members the perspective they need to keep providing their best work while also ensuring no balls are dropped along the way.
Give Your Employees a 10,000-Foot View without Overwhelming Them
Every job in your company deserves to be documented.
It is tempting to focus documentation efforts on the highest-stakes roles. However, it’s often the less glamorous jobs in your company that are extremely essential. For example, your CTO may make that big decision to automate the invoicing system, but the people in accounts are going to understand what needs to be invoiced, the system priorities, and the best date to send an invoice for reliable payment.
So, the first step to building a high-level view to improve hand-offs is documenting how each job in your company works and how they work together. This not only lets you assess an area for automation and train new employees in a department, but it also gives you the chance to put the organizational structure on paper. This is where you see all of the parts interconnecting and working together.
Now that you have documented what processes interact, you can map out organizational flowcharts and show how the organization fits together. For example, if you are trying to get your sales team to see how their job is important, you can use documentation to map out how their work affects the rest of the business.
A new customer in a furniture store might go from the salesperson to an accountant in order to see if they qualify for a zero-interest payment plan. Then they will go back to the salesperson with their paperwork, and the sale will close. The salesperson then gives that paperwork to the manager, who arranges delivery between the delivery team and the customer. The delivery manager adds this information to their schedule, and the team delivers the furniture on the appointed day. They notify the manager, who then reaches out to the customer to ensure everything went the way they wanted. They share the happy customer’s information with the marketing team so they can add the customer to a list of people they can offer deals to in the future.
The salesperson might just feel like the customer comes in, they talk to them, sell something, and out they go. When they understand how everything is interconnected, they can do their job more effectively and feel confident offering free installation or other services not shown on the showroom floor.
How to Document Cross-Department Processes and Improve Team Handoffs
A holistic perspective of your business is very different than your business viewed at a granular level. However, you must view your business granularly to show employees how each department works with one another. Here’s an overview of what to do:
1. Ask all employees to document their most commonly used processes and procedures. This might include scripts, “how tos” for key software, and step-by-step breakdowns of their daily touchpoints.
2. Once this information is documented, talk with the employees about where they hand off tasks both in their own department and interdepartmentally. Get them to document how these handoffs are done.
3. Build a summary. Distill the documentation into a simplified, high-level overview that any employee can use to understand the connections across the business.
4. To create a high-level view for a specific role, review the information from that perspective and build a summary or flow chart that shows the departments with which the role interacts. From there, you can highlight any areas where a hand-off will be necessary. This provides employees with an understanding of what they are handing off, and where it will go from there.
Are you ready to start documenting your business and showing team members where and why they should interact? Then it’s time to get started! Download our latest ebook, Stop Carrying Your Business in Your Head, or schedule a free initial consultation with Business Success Consulting Group. We will help you turn what your team knows into something the whole company can use.
