Collaboration between departments is one of the most frequently seen obstacles for organizations that are growing. Sales is waiting for Operations, HR is working with Finance onboarding, Marketing is waiting for Product on campaign timing, and so forth. When multiple departments are working off different tools, it delays the alignment and gets frustrating. You get email overload, duplicate work, and everyone is in the dark on priority. To fix this, organizations are increasingly using project management tools that bring communication, scheduling, documents, and approvals all into one platform.
Lark provides this unification, allowing HR, Sales, Operations, Finance, and the other departments to work together as one. Rather than chasing updates across silos, the team can work in a shared space where communications ties directly back to execution.
Lark Messenger: Cross-team communication without silos
Often the first point of friction between departments, communication can be the biggest barrier in interdepartmental projects. Teams send long chains of emails to one another or work on disparate chat apps, and misalignment occurs. HR sends an announcement to Finance, and Finance never sees it. Sales asks a question, and Product answers a week too late.
Lark Messenger can help bridge those silos by creating dedicated channels for each project or initiative and allowing all departments to participate. Teams can tag relevant team members and stakeholders to bring them into the conversation, pin important announcements or conversations to make it visible, and share files without toggling between apps. Messaging is a searchable history that captures each person’s commitment, and we link the action items back to the chat for accountability. Messenger eliminates the silos of decision-making across departments to keep all departments informed.
Lark Calendar: Coordinating schedules across functions
While communication may be clear, scheduling tends to impede collaboration. Work between departments can stop altogether when calendars can’t be aligned. For example, Compliance from HR might need to reach out to Legal regarding compliance, but if there is a scheduling conflict, it can set the whole process back.
Lark Calendar makes the entire process seemlessly easy by providing visibility into schedules to know who is available and when-including each departments own time zone conversion. The recurring event feature makes even a continous institution wide connection easy to maintain on a regular basis. Smart reminders will make sure no prep gets forgotten and links to Docs, or Base records, for context pre meeting. Through smart structuring of time, Calendar makes inter-department collaboration predictable and manageable.
Lark Docs: Shared playbooks for interdepartmental work
Confusion often arises when departments are using different versions of a document, or even may follow different versions of a policy or procedure. HR, Finance, and Operations may each have their procedures, and when these departments start working together, not only may it lead to confusion but also to errors. Lark Docs solves this problem by giving all departments one place to create, edit, and share interdepartmental playbooks. Each team can co-edit live with client and leave comments in context of clarifying roles and responsibilities. Version history tracks changes and ensures that whoever is working on the playbook sees the latest updates. Docs can also link directly to Calendar events or Messenger conversations, so that no context is lost. Whether it is a onboarding policy or cross-team campaign plan, Docs provides a transparency between departments.
Lark Approval: Streamlining multi-department decisions with automated workflows
Approval is a well-known bottleneck in organizational collaborative projects. For instance, Sales might require Finance’s approval to discount a contract, HR might require IT’s approval for access to software, and Marketing might require Legal’s review on a message. Without any structure, these approvals become prolonged processes, causing friction between departments.
By defining how requests are made and assessed, Lark Approval adds clarity and efficiency to the process. Employees fill out structured forms to articulate their requests clearly, while managers benefit from the overview window that summarizes pending items by department. Transparent logs show who signed off and when, reducing ambiguity. To accelerate collaboration further, Approval supports an automated workflow that routes approvals directly to the right stakeholders. By removing bottlenecks, Approval keeps multi-department projects moving without unnecessary delays.
Lark Meetings: Turning cross-team discussions into outcomes
While departments frequently come together to align o
n strategy, once they leave that meeting, there are often no clear ownership of meeting follow-up. This often leads to the same question of strategy being talked about again at the next meeting with few actionable items.
Lark Meetings facilitates inter-department conversation towards action. Teams can co-edit collaborative meeting notes directly in while meetings are happening, recordings videos, in-meeting chat for quick follow-up items, and sharing your screen for complex data points. You can have task created while in a meeting and related directly to a quick message or email. Meetings can therefore be action checkpoints rather than passing the role of the meeting to another meeting.
Lark Base: Providing a structured hub for shared records
One of the biggest challenges for collaboration between departments is working off one source of record. Sales have a tool to keep track of leads, HR has a different tool to track onboarding, and Operations is using another one completely separate to track their projects and tasks. This leads to misalignments and redundancy.
Lark Base solves this by serving as a shared hub where all departments can build and manage customizable databases. HR can log employee records, Sales can track opportunities, and Operations can monitor projects—all within the same system. Dashboards provide visibility across functions, while filters and search allow stakeholders to quickly retrieve relevant information. Linked entries connect tasks, approvals, and documents to their respective owners. By consolidating records, Base ensures departments collaborate from a single source of truth.
Conclusion
As businesses expand, collaboration across departments becomes more complex —and often slower. Communication silos, conflicting schedules, document confusion, decision bottlenecks, and misaligned records create friction that hinders growth. A unified system like Lark helps eliminate these barriers by bringing communication, coordination, and execution into one connected workspace.
Messenger breaks down silos; Calendar aligns schedules; Docs creates shared playbooks; Approval accelerates decision-making through automated workflows; Meetings turn conversations into outcomes; and Base adds structure and visibility —all within Lark, a powerful project management software designed for modern, cross-functional teams.
For growing organizations, simplifying collaboration is no longer optional. With Lark, departments work in partnership rather than in parallel —driving progress, alignment, and accountability across every project.