For organizations to operate effectively, teams need to talk. Without strong cross-team communication, projects can become redundant, teams might compete for resources (instead of working together), and company-wide goals can be missed because people simply aren’t working together to get there.

As companies grow or organizations move from remote to hybrid work, teams have to work even harder to prevent silos from forming.

Range helps teams make cross-team communication second nature. With Check-ins , individuals can share project updates and progress in just a few clicks to provide better visibility into in-flight work. Tags and Goals make it easy for anyone across the org to see who’s working on what, discover and track work at the project level, and understand how different team-level projects ladder up to larger company goals.

Work spread across multiple tools and apps? Not a problem. Range connects with Asana, GitHub, Google Docs, and more so that sharing updates with other teams takes only a few minutes of everyone’s time.

In this article, we’ll cover how to:

1. Improve in-flight project visibility with Check-ins
2. Follow along with topics and projects with #tags
3. Connect team projects to company goals and objectives
4. Increase communication flow by connecting to Slack

1. Improve project visibility with Check-ins

Silos form when teams don’t know what each other are working on, so the first step to solving for them is clear project documentation and information-sharing. Range Check-ins help you lay the groundwork, making it easy to share, discover, and reference updates from any team across the org today, or later on.

To share a Check-in in Range, go to My Check-in. (You can also share directly from Slack.)

2. Follow along with topics and projects with #tags

Once you have a habit of regular Check-ins in place, #tags make it easy to categorize, discover, and follow along with different workstreams. You can add #tags directly to your Check-in items and can also add them after the fact to group items together later on.

You might use #tags to group individual work items for larger cross-functional projects or company-wide initiatives.

To create a #tag, just add # before a word in your Check-in (ex: Completed tech spec for #ProjectMercury launch).

3. Connect team projects to company goals and objectives

Goals in Range are a way to define the top priorities that people in your organization are working towards and track how work ladders up to them. You might call them OKRs, quarterly goals, or something else, but any type of objective can be represented in Range.

Goals help teams see how everything is connected. You can link objectives to KPIs and metrics, create a hierarchy to connect personal and team-level goals to those company OKRs, and define clear ownership for each. You can even import work from apps like JIRA, GitHub, and Asana to see progress on goals across tools and teams.

When you set your goals and objectives in Range (as opposed to a shared doc or spreadsheet) it’s much easier to develop a regular cadence of communication around them, as:

• Range reminds goal owners to share status updates each week, and updates are distributed to the relevant team members via email, Slack, and Range’s Home feed
• Once you create a goal, team members can use #tags to add it to their Check-in items so their work is associated with it
• Regular check-in meetings that are run using Range can automatically pull up the current status of each goal as part of an agenda topic with just a couple clicks

To set a goal, go to Goals (https://range.co/_/goals) and click on the +.

From there, you can add a deadline, team, and owner to indicate who will be responsible for keeping the work moving and reporting on status.

4. Increase communication flow by connecting to Slack

If your team uses Slack, connecting Range to Slack lets you share and follow along with relevant updates in the place you’re already communicating with each other.

First, make sure you’ve got the Range app for Slack set up. Then, go to your team channel in Slack to subscribe to the teams and #tags you want to follow in Range. For instance, if your team is working on #ProjectMercury with several other teams across your org, you can subscribe to receive all updates on #ProjectMercury in your team’s Slack channel — even if they’re from someone outside your channel. It’s an easy way to stay on top of updates that matter, but might not be associated with your immediate team.

Type: /range subscribe #[tag] to subscribe to a tag or /range subscriptions and select a team.

Try it out

Communication is one of the most important factors in team effectiveness, and one of the most challenging ones to get right — especially on growing, remote, or hybrid teams when it’s not as easy to connect and ask questions.

Range Check-ins help foster better cross-team communication, so you can tear down silos and work more effectively together. They ensure everything is documented, help everyone understand how work is connected, and provide a clear line of sight into what’s happening across the org.

The following best practices can help you get the most out of Check-ins and build them into your team’s routine:

• Set a schedule to stay on top of it: Creating a customized Check-in helps teams know exactly when to share and, over time, creates a habit of checking in. Many teams choose to share Check-ins daily or every other day.
• Use prompts to make sharing easy: Check-in prompts provide guidance so it’s easier for folks to know exactly what to share in their Check-in. You can also tailor the information you collect from your team using custom prompts, so you’ll have exactly what you need to keep everyone informed.
• Set up teams to keep track of work across the org: Teams in Range help you keep track of who’s working on what. You can see progress towards OKRs, review everyone’s updates in one place, and track team trends over time.
• Connect with integrations to save time: Range connects to the tools and apps your team uses most to make sharing status updates even easier. When you use Range integrations, you can pull tasks from Asana, Jira, GitHub, Google Docs and more, directly into your Check-in, without having to jump around between tabs.