Executive strategies for better cross-departmental collaboration

“Communications is not a drive-thru,” Jenny DeVaughn, VP of Communications at ADP, said during Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in ‘Nashville this past August.

Repeating a mantra she’d shared during a Ragan Communications Leadership Council Retreat months earlier, DeVaughn’s now trademark line underscores a point: that communicating a process for effective collaboration is the best way for communicators not to be treated as order takers by other departments—and become collaborators instead.

Rounding out DeVaughn on the panel was Brian Brockman, VP of Communications for US and Canada at Nissan, and Gideon Pridor, CMO at WorkVivo for a robust conversation about what those processes and practices look like.

Here’s what stuck out.

Building a foundation of transparency through cross-departmental data sharing

Reminding the audience that transparency is more than just a buzzword, Devaughn emphasized that employees benefit from understanding how their feedback is used.

She explained that ADP closes the loop by regularly communicating with its 64,000 associates on how data is utilized.

“We heard you, here’s what we’re doing, and more importantly, here’s what we did,” she said.