What are the greatest hurdles you face when collaborating with people across your company?
HR consulting firm Robert Half International surveyed finance and accounting professionals about their challenges when collaborating with people in other departments. Not surprisingly, the responses (in the graphic below) include coping with different personalities, work stress, conflicting deadlines, and communication breakdowns — answers which are pretty much the same across the board.
The problem is you want to develop a more collaborative atmosphere in your organization. You want the smart, highly capable people you've hired to interact with one another, despite being on different teams. To spark ideas off one another, and create new value.
But how do you motivate your people to peer over their trenches and interact with others, despite personality clashes, conflicting priorities, and miscommunication?
Source: Robert Half
Take a look at how two of our customers who, when faced with the challenge of cultivating cross-departmental collaboration, absolutely crushed it.
City of Reno: Different Departments, One Tool
The City of Reno, located in the state of Nevada, has been traditionally known as a gambling town or the "divorce capital of the world," but its image started to change recently when it began attracting high profile technology companies such as Tesla, Apple, and Switch. As such, the city is rapidly evolving into a center for tech, a progressive hub with a long-term emphasis on entrepreneurship.
The problem that the city faced was coordinating all the different departments involved in its various projects. Each department used its own choice of software for specific needs, making it enormously difficult to see things through to completion.
Once they implemented Wrike, however, that changed.
Ryan High, Strategic Initiatives Manager and the one responsible for planning cross-departmental initiatives, says: "We find that Wrike is the one software that can, globally, manage all the different tasks, initiatives, projects and programs that we have here in the city of Reno."
Now, the team at Reno uses Wrike to share documents, collaborating on these documents across the entire organization. Because the tool makes workloads and project status transparent, updates and reports on initiatives are simply pulled from Wrike. Even better, every task can be tied to a strategic goal thanks to custom fields. This way, if a job is not helping the team achieve a larger business objective, it's simply deprioritized.
Watch the video below for more details on how they use Wrike to collaborate across departments:
Ben & Florentine: Sharing Folders, Sharing Power
Ben & Florentine's brick-and-mortar restaurant is also the parent company for its franchisees around the US. As President of the parent company, Lorne Cassoff had a tough time sharing information with his restaurants. At the same time, he couldn't see how each of them was performing.
When the company implemented Wrike, one immediate advantage was the ability to share folders across different teams and restaurants, making collaboration a lot easier. Franchise restaurants could share notes and best practices with one another. They could view attachments, give feedback on anything from menus to decor to schedules, and communicate on work without resorting to email.
These days when teams at Ben & Florentine hold a meeting, they open Wrike so everyone has access to the same information and visibility into the action items that result from each meeting.
Smashing Silos, Securing Success
We all know about the silo mentality at work: "You work within your area of expertise and I'll work within mine." It's a mentality brought about by old school thinking and bureaucracy, where people would much rather stick to traditional boundaries around work than create an atmosphere of collaboration.
What both the City of Reno and Ben & Florentine have done is to break down those silos by using a work tool and the mindset that collaboration is a priority. The end result is a healthy culture of teamwork that gets things done efficiently.
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Learn more about the two customers in this post by checking out the full customer case studies:
Interested in learning how Wrike can help your team smash silos and secure success? Start your free 2-week trial today.
