On the journey to becoming an established business, it’s important that all teams within your company have their own clear and distinct goals. However, as many companies discover, these teams sometimes start operating in isolation, without an eye to the bigger picture and how their work impacts the company as a whole. This article will provide some tips on how to ensure that all departments in your company collaborate effectively.
Effective collaboration is obviously an important component when it comes to keeping your business running smoothly, but once your business grows beyond a single location and as you start adding departments, this collaboration inevitably becomes more challenging. Departments often develop a ‘silo mentality’ which occurs when a department only sees their role in the process and fails to recognize the impact they have on the overall growth of the company. The silo mentality can crop up anywhere, especially when your company grows beyond a single location.
While the addition of new departments, employees, and locations are all indicators of success, expanding your company’s footprint presents new and unique challenges. Creating success in subsequent locations means replicating and upholding the standards of your first location while giving latitude in other locations to adapt and change to their local environment. You’ll want to create a framework that allows your carefully chosen people do what they do best. Consider these cornerstones as you roll out more locations.
The Right tools for the Right People
Having multiple locations can create logistical challenges. A small operations team looking after multiple locations may struggle to track down supplies, reach the right people, or respond to the unique needs of their in-store personnel.
Give your team the right tools and systems needed to properly do their jobs. Good tools and systems are effective immediately, and your team will have little time to invest in learning complicated legacy systems, so picking the proper systems from the beginning will help you and your employees avoid frustration and bottlenecks. Click here to request a demo and learn more about how Intelocate can help you and your people operate more efficiently.
Clear, Coherent Communication
It’s inevitable that In any growing organization, communication becomes more difficult. In multi-location businesses, communication must be a two-way street, with the head office being able to quickly delegate tasks and inform employees of new initiatives, and with the store-level employees being heard by head office when they have an issue that needs to be addressed. Effective communication will be a collaborative effort, with insight from people at all levels within your company.
Opening new locations will bring about new opportunities. In order to capitalize on those opportunities, you must prepare for the challenges they will bring. Take the time to set your key cornerstones in place and get ready to grow.
