MGMT 7.3 Communicating In Your Organization

Again this is the perfect week for this discussion and blog! In financial aid we get a ton of questions and some of the time they do not deal directly with financial aid. Questions such as what is the tuition rate? or Will these credits transfer in? or when will my refund hit my bank account?  None of these are directly related to financial aid and the student is always frustrated when we can’t answer those questions for them. Each department has their niche and it would not be wise for other departments to speak to the expertise of said department. However, Power explained in his article that being able to communicated across an organization helps employees understand the process from start to finish. They get a better idea of the who, when, why and what of that process.

Our office is teaming up with the online advisors to do some cross training as a group in the next couple of weeks. This is something that I have wanted to do for a long time but we never were able to do so in the past, primarily because of the time factor. Not enough time and too much to do. A few of the online advisors have sat down with us to review what our processes are and I feel that it has given them a better appreciation of what we do here. It is really easy to make assumptions and blame each other when things don’t go the way we want them do or there is a miscommunication between the departments and the student.

This is the first step in working across boundaries and I want to go to the next level and involve the other departments as well. We all work on the same floor (except the advisors) so we should have an understanding how each department functions and what makes them tick. By doing this we can improve our communications as well as look at processes from a new angle which can be a good thing. Power suggests that by working together we can solve some underlying issues that we may not be seeing because we are not working together as a team.

The plan is to speak with each department and set up some cross training or possibly workshops to bring everyone together for a better perspective. So many times there are issues but they are looked at by upper management, who have not been in the mix for a long time so they miss out on the key problems. By putting the people who deal with these issues everyday together, we can help solve or suggest better ways of doing things. This would be an ongoing project not something we try once and stop once we think we figured it out.