How do you improve collaboration between departments?

Why requests between departments get lost

The request goes to one person. A sales manager sends a direct message to the lawyer or accountant they know. If that person is on vacation or out sick, the request sits there until they're back, and the rest of their department never hears about it.

It's unclear who to ask. A new hire doesn't know who in Accounting handles invoices and who handles payroll. They ask a colleague, who passes the question on, and the answer shows up a day later.

Without a deadline, every request looks urgent. If a request doesn't say when the answer is needed, the department picks up whatever came in first or whoever pushed hardest.

Nobody knows the status. The request has been sent, but it's unclear whether anyone has picked it up. That's where the "any update?" messages and phone calls come from.

The discussion is scattered. The lawyer checks details with the sales manager in a direct message, then forwards the conversation to someone in Finance and relays their answer back. A week later, no one can find out why the contract has these terms.

These problems go away when each department has one chat for requests and clear rules for working in it.

Rules for collaboration between departments

• Each department has one chat for requests. For example, "[Ask] Legal," "[Ask] Accounting," "[Ask] Design." The whole department sees the request, so if one person is on vacation, someone else picks it up.
• The chat is public. Anyone in the company can find it and leave a request.
• Requests follow a template. What you need, by when, and a link to the document or the contract number. One message, one request.
• Reactions show the status. 👀 means someone's on it, ✅ means done. The person who asked sees the status and doesn't have to write "any update?"
• Follow-up questions and the answer go in the thread under the request. The chat itself only holds requests, and the answer always sits right there.
• Need a third department? Bring them into the same thread. Don't forward the conversation or retell the answer: @mention the person from the other department in the thread, even if they aren't in the chat. That's exactly how cross-chat threads work in Pachca.
• The department agrees on a response time. For example, within the working day. Then the person asking knows when to expect an answer.
• The rules are pinned in the chat. Anyone writing to the department for the first time reads them before leaving a request.

What Pachca offers for cross-functional communication

Public chats. Create a chat for each department and make it public. It shows up in Browse: anyone in the company can read the conversation and leave a request. The "[Ask]" prefix in the name makes the chat easy to find in search.

Pinned rules. The request template, what the reactions mean and the response time go in one pinned message.

Cross-chat threads. You can @mention any employee in the thread under a request, even if they aren't in the chat. They see only the thread and the message it started from. More in the article "What is a thread in a team chat app".

Group tags. An admin creates a tag for a department and adds it to chats: employees with the tag join them automatically. Mentioning @Accounting notifies everyone with the tag who is in the chat.

A project chat. If several departments work on the same task for a long time, create a "[Project] Name" chat with one person from each team.

Forms and tasks. Routine requests are easier to collect with a form through a bot, as in the use cases "How do you handle employee requests without a service desk?" and "How do you set up purchase approvals?" A request that takes several days becomes a task with an owner and a deadline: "How do you assign tasks and keep track of them?"

Where to start

Start with the department that gets the most messages: usually Accounting, Legal or IT. Create a public chat, pin the rules in it, and ask the department to answer direct-message requests for two weeks with "please post this in [Ask]." Once requests have moved to the chat, do the same for the next department.