How can communication between departments in your organization be improved to avoid conflict?
For any organization, human resource plays a vital role for achieving its mission. Communication has its significant role when it comes to managing human resources, which is an important organizational asset. Effective communication assists employees to understand the mission and formulate strategies (Eunson, 2007). Usually in many organizations, different departments have diverse targets, which help gauge their comparative performance. This internal competition, which is usually set for achieving growth sometimes, backfires. One of the major reasons behind this occurrence is the notion that departments in an effort to show their performance develop conflicts, as well. Communication is the only medium that can solve internal conflicts and help organization achieve its objective.
Not all the organizations have a standard list of prescribed solutions for improving its interdepartmental communication. The first step towards solving the conflict in the organization is to accept it as a problem and let people from these departments know about it. The second step is to build a baseline that can be developed by focus group. After it, a list of problems should be shortlisted through research, which is usually done by surveying different departments. The baseline helps evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention. After the identification of problems, the leadership should identify the causes for each problem. Finding a solution based on problems is a flawed method because problem itself is a product of different underlying causes. The most important solution that can assist organization to avoid conflicts is the notion of drafting targets that are interdependent. The organization should also support interaction by encouraging different departments to have informal meet-ups. Many organizations run special projects that allow employees to work on new initiatives. Therefore, having different teams from different departments to work on new initiative can also help address the causes.
What strategies could be used to ensure this conflict does not happen again? What would a leader do to prevent it?
If an organization is facing a problem that has been recently solved by new leader then it may be beneficial for short-term, but it is not a sustainable solution. If the organization want to avoid a conflict for the years to come then it is mandatory to make it as part of a process. Making something as part of a process is done by the development of standard operating procedures (SOPs) (Dreu & Gelfand, 2008). These standard operating procedures help the organization to identify similar sort of problems, which can be solved by a pre-defined solution. This pre-defined solution assists the organization to avoid wasting time and money on solutions that has already been identified by the organization. These standard operating procedures should be framed in such a way that it can be updated as per new challenges faced by the organization.
A leader plays a critical role in enforcing the standard operating procedures. This can be done by effective communication of policies in the organization. If some procedures are framed then it is the responsibility of a leader that it is being implemented blindly. It means, if there are separate rules for leaders and separate rules for junior level employees then instead of helping restrict conflicts, it will encourage more conflicts. Development of standard operating procedures is not straightforward as it may look. There is a whole process of consultation from lower, middle, and higher management. It should be drafted in such a way that it is accepted by a majority of the employees. Taking employees in the consultation phase will add credibility to the entire process; hence, there will be a high level of cooperation amongst all.
References
Dreu, C. K., & Gelfand, M. J. (2008). The psychology of conflict and conflict management in organizations. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Eunson, B. (2007). Conflict management. Milton, Qld.: Wiley.
