The success or failure of event day is determined by communication amongst departments at your property.
Look:
Your team's efforts must be streamlined for all the days leading up to an event, or nothing will run as planned.
Stress caused by bad communication is overwhelming too.
There's no question that the long-term effects of poor communication will hit your bottom line hard as well.
Would you agree?
Think about what we're saying.
Then, let's put it in perspective for you.
How many days have you been trying to communicate with your marketing department about sponsorships?
Your next event is tomorrow so what are you going to do?
It gets even worse.
It's now 10:30 PM the night before the event, and you found out the marketing team oversold their sponsorships.
Are you surprised?
Has this happened to you?
Has something even close to this ever happened to you?
Now, here's the most critical question of the day:
- How do you improve communication among all your departments while getting the details you need – on time?
It's an important question.
Poor communication has devastating consequences on your operation.
We won't even get started on how it can ruin your events!
When lousy communication goes for too long without being handled, the snowball effect eventually catches up to the rest of your departments.
But:
Before we improve these issues, what's the root of your communication downfall?
What's causing the actual breakdown?
Let's find out.
The 4 Effects of Disjointed Communication
We've done our homework for you and have put together four thought-out hazards that could be hindering your lines of communication.
Let's consider where your operation measures up.
Then, we'll see four ways to strengthen your communication with a purpose.
Employee Conflicts
When managers or employees are not speaking to each other, it is challenging to communicate effectively.
In addition, personal agendas and conflict prevent the team – and complete operation – from communicating effectively.
A Time Investment for Employees
Members on other teams may not take the time to share important information, especially when they're under pressure to complete tasks and deadlines for their department.
When the pressure to produce is present, communication to other departments won't be a priority.
Communication Protocols Are Not Concrete
The importance of documenting crucial details, processes, and protocols is as essential as tracking things that happen at your property.
Unfortunately, it's ubiquitous that procedures for interdepartmental communication are not outlined or agreed upon between department heads.
It's obvious – they need to be!
Location, Location, Location
Effective communication among departments is challenging when they're located on different floors or other buildings.
Space will create obstacles for communication.
Sharing crucial information may be less important once they figure out how long of a walk it is to your office.
Motivation to communicate might diminish even more over time because they know you're always on the move and unreachable – when they need you.
But knowing you still need the correct information…when you need it, we're going to move on and show you how you can prevent these factors from sabotaging your operation.
4 Ways to Improve Communication Across Departments at Your Property
Are you ready for peace of mind?
We put together four concise and practical steps for improving communication for the days leading up to your next event, daily operations, and for an overall increase in professionalism at your property.
Now, you don't have to wait for your next big event to put them in place.
Instead, we encourage you to start implementing once you finish reading this article.
- Ensure Important Procedural Information Stays the Same
- Promote Goodwill Between Your Department Heads
- Employ Specific Process for Effective Communication
- Increase Operational Efficiency by Implementing Streamlined Solutions
Ensure Important Procedural Information Stays the Same
What doesn't important procedural information change each day, week, and month? Each department needs to create a list of the missing details from other departments and their everyday expectations.
We'll help you get started. But, first, let's rehash the marketing example: You know you'll always need the number of sponsorship activations in advance so you can order enough chairs before the night before the event.
The vital information gets to the need-to-know staff on time. As a result, everyone is happy…, and you have peace of mind knowing all "things" are being communicated.
Promote Goodwill Between Your Department Heads
As you know, we're proponents of role-playing. Team building is excellent, too, especially if you're working with leaders from various departments. Develop quality leaders and the rest of your operation benefits.
Once they're communicating on the same page – the effect will move down the hierarchy to frontline staff.
Team building can significantly improve how well department leaders and their teams work with each other and other departments along the way.
Employ Specific Process for Effective Communication
Each department must include steps outlining when and how information must flow between departments – before, during, and after events – corresponding to your expectations.
No more ambiguous procedures. Everything you require will be in black and white.
Do you know where that leads? You'll have accountability across all departments.
Increase Operational Efficiency by Implementing Streamlined Solutions
This is what supercharges communication, period.
After you've enhanced communication among teammates, bring it together with software that will take your contact and total operation to a whole new level.
Not just any ordinary software you read about on review sites. Invest in fully integrated, flexible software that your peers use – and are willing (and happy) to share their success and applaud the solution provider for listening to their needs.
Take this, for example; Your frontline staff now can communicate a broken cup holder, no more paper products in the restroom, among other things, to the command center through progressive technology.
It gets a lot better too.
The command center operator will be able to push details of the broken cup holder or other joint issues at your property into your incident management software with a click of a button.
Then, they can seamlessly generate a work order within the software for the maintenance team to view, manage and complete the work order directly from the maintenance software, which by the way, talks to your incident management software.
The result is efficiency.
Over to You
Today is the best day to create order throughout your operation.
Rapidly improve communication between all departments and watch efficiency and effectiveness drastically increase.
What will be the result for you and your staff? You guessed it: Peace of mind.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and freshness.
