Getting NetSmart - Tips for getting to know your colleagues

People spend a lot of time and effort on external networking. They belong to various user organizations and discussion groups. They go to conferences and trade shows. But they often neglect the biggest networking opportunity they have: the chance to get to know employees within their own company.

Here are some tips for getting to know them better:

1. Invite your colleagues to your staff meetings. Knowing what your fellow employees do is as important as knowing your own job. It also helps boost corporate morale. So, have representatives from other departments do a brief presentation at your staff meeting each week. Allow time for question-and-answer sessions so that your team can really comprehend the guest's tasks. In the end, this will help your team buy and integrate more relevant applications and network gear

Sandra Gittlen 2. Attend other departments' meetings. There's nothing more educational than finding out what other teams in your company struggle with. By attending a staff meeting, you'll hear what frustrates members of that department, and, most likely, you'll find out those frustrations are related to technology. Then, you can return to your team and build solutions for those problems, in the end boosting the bottom line for your company.

3. Implement cross-functional team meetings. Most companies have cross-functional meetings in the form of executive committees. Very few have lower-level meetings among various department representatives. However, these meetings are often the most useful. For instance, Network World recently put together a "synergy" committee, and already we've made significant changes to how we do business just by having input from across a range of departments. Sometimes, just getting a viewpoint that is different from yours can make you see an easier way to do something. In the end, this saves time and money and also creates an amazing sounding board for companywide ideas.

4. Take someone to lunch. This sounds like a "junket," but you can learn a lot about what someone does at the company in a one-hour timeframe. Encourage your team to do the same. In fact, you can have your team members do debriefings about what they've learned during your staff meetings.

5. After-work social hours. Again, this sounds like I'm encouraging more partying than business activities. But if your department is having a get-together after work, invite some colleagues from different departments. Ask them about their work and what challenges they have. Most people like to talk about how they do their job and what they wish they could do better, especially if they know the listener could probably help them.

All these ideas are ways to train your team members in the most important area of all: your company. Without the knowledge of what your company does and how it operates, it's next to impossible to create optimal networks.

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