Onboarding represents a pivotal moment in your employee’s professional lives. Your new fleet of staff will pick up on subtle cultural cues when in the office for the first time and will benefit greatly from a robust training program.
Taking a strategic approach to onboarding is particularly important if you want to create a workplace with excellent communication and cross-departmental collaboration. By foregrounding cross-departmental work during the onboarding phase, you ensure that new hires know how to reach out to other employees — even if they work in an entirely different department.
Prioritizing cross-departmental collaboration during onboarding also gives your new hires a holistic understanding of your business. People can learn plenty from those who work in different fields, and you’ll find that your new hires are able to think critically about their own roles when they have a holistic understanding of the firm’s operations.
Board for Onboarding
Interdepartmental cross-collaboration can be effectively encouraged during the onboarding process by integrating activities and programs that connect new hires with teams beyond their immediate department. For instance, scheduling interdepartmental meet-and-greet sessions or collaborative workshops allows new employees to gain insight into the roles, objectives, and challenges of other teams. This fosters a broader understanding of the organization’s operations and lays the foundation for future cooperation. Additionally, assigning cross-functional mentors or organizing job-shadowing opportunities can help new hires build relationships across departments.
Incorporating real-world collaborative projects into onboarding is another impactful approach. Assigning new employees to cross-departmental teams to work on low-stakes yet meaningful projects ensures they experience the benefits of interdepartmental collaboration firsthand. These projects can demonstrate the value of diverse perspectives, streamline the sharing of knowledge, and build a sense of camaraderie across teams. By embedding cross-collaboration into the onboarding process, organizations establish an environment where teamwork is prioritized, empowering employees to contribute more effectively to the company’s goals.
Enhancing Cross-Departmental Collaboration
Taking a collaborative approach to onboarding can bolster your efforts to create an agile workplace. Put simply, people are far more likely to find creative solutions to challenges when they have a holistic understanding of their role within the wider company. By embracing onboarding tasks, you will benefit from cross-functional collaboration and experience:
- Greater cohesion between remote and in-person employees;
- Improved awareness of upcoming deadlines affecting other team members;
- Enhanced appreciation for the contribution of fellow employees;
- Increased ability to think creatively when addressing emerging challenges.
Cross-departmental collaboration is critical today, as macroeconomic headwinds like global conflict, climate change, and shifting supply chains present unpredictable challenges. Finding solutions to these challenges is all but impossible if you work in a siloed, static company. Instead, break down communication barriers and reap the rewards of collaboration by adequately onboarding new hires.
Morale-Boosting Onboarding Strategies
The onboarding process is an exciting, if stressful, time for new hires. They finally get to settle into their new role and are constantly meeting new people. As a leader, it’s your job to turn this excited energy into morale-boosting onboarding that benefits the whole team. You facilitate cross-departmental collaboration and improve the effectiveness of your employee onboarding strategies using approaches like:
- Starting earlier: Get the ball rolling as soon as your new employee signs on the dotted line. Give them limited access to your communication channels and build a little hype around their arrival so your existing team is excited to see them when they join.
- Mentorships: Assigning a trusted mentor to a new employee ensures they can learn the ropes with assistance. A good mentor should make your new hire feel at home and will help your new employees build relationships across departments.
- Personalize: Meaningful personalization, like a letter from the CEO or an individualized training plan, can boost morale and help your new hire feel like part of the team. Taking the time to introduce new hires to people you think they’ll get along with across different departments will aid efforts to create a more collaborative culture, too.
- Team-building: Incorporating team-building activities can boost the morale of your entire team and give your new hires a chance to show off their skills. A short team-building exercise can break the ice and get people from different departments talking.
- Gathering feedback: Regularly checking in with a new hire is crucial if you want to bolster their wellbeing and ensure they’re able to work with people from across the company. As an experienced leader, you can use this time to spot gaps in the onboarding process, too.
Taking an intentional, people-focused approach to onboarding is crucial if you want to make the most of your time with new hires. Get started as soon as possible and make every effort to ensure your new employee meets the whole team. Doing so can break down barriers and help people feel part of the group.
Bolstering Company Culture
Every company has a unique culture that impacts the way people work. As a leader, it’s your job to ensure every new hire feels connected to your core values and settles into their everyday tasks. Creating a culture of cross-departmental collaboration during the onboarding process can lead to unexpected boons for your business, like:
- Sparking a period of growth for existing employees who you ask to conduct mentorship;
- Discover leaders in unexpected places;
- Enhance recruitment and retention efforts, as 34% of employees leave their jobs due to culture, while 45% say they look for “great culture” when job-seeking;
- Encourage innovation by facilitating more conversation between employees in a diverse range of roles.
The cultural benefits of cross-departmental are too impactful to overlook. Simple initiatives like hosting a team-building day can lead to unexpected but highly profitable rewards. For those who seek a company that runs well, a plan to enrich company culture pays dividends.
Conclusion
Cross-departmental collaboration is increasingly essential for modern businesses. Facilitating effective communication between your teams begins with a collaborative approach to onboarding. Start with simple measures, like assigning each new hire a mentor and hosting team-building days for your new team members. This improves your company culture and ensures new hires know how to contact peers in other departments. By embracing cross-departmental onboarding, every part of the company can benefit.
Guest writer.