Some years back I was in a meeting with a public-sector client, discussing how social intranet technologies could help improve collaboration between their different departments.
To put it mildly, the discussion wasn’t going well. In a nutshell, I was told that a social intranet would be a waste of money because employees in the various departments were experts in their own area.
These experts were possessive of their specialist knowledge and ideas, and wouldn’t want to share them with the rest of the organization for fear of becoming obsolete. Essentially, they were afraid that giving away tacit knowledge – breaking down their silos – would essentially render them disposable.
Fortunately, in many modern businesses there has been a new wave of thinking in the past few years that takes a more hardline approach to this kind of attitude.
If employees are not willing to take advantage of the latest technologies available to them and share their expertise for the benefit of the wider organization, then they’re toast. This isn’t a matter of choice. Employers hold the purse strings and expect everyone to work together using the tools at their disposal to share knowhow and drive the business forward.
Today’s employees are seeking greater control over their working lives, and employers are increasingly recognizing that flexibility and freedom are critical to boosting employee engagement.
The possibility to work when, where, and how they like is a priority for talented professionals. Providing the necessary tools to facilitate this is all well and good, but completely redundant if you have a siloed workforce that is blind and deaf to the benefits of collaboration.
Departmental silos can present a wide range of problems for enterprises, including:
The bigger the enterprise is, the greater the challenge with silos becomes. It’s even possible that enterprises working around the globe have silos inside teams but they’re unintended and due to geographical distance rather than unwillingness to share knowledge and expertise.
Author and journalist Gillian Tett has written extensively about the need for a more collaborative approach in today’s economy. She argues that silos are as much about mentality as they are about organizational structure. In her book, “The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers”, she covers some steps as to how organizations can fight the silo effect:
Breaking down departmental barriers isn’t easy, but it can be done. In the end of the day, it all comes down to the company culture and behavior that is encouraged across company. Take a minute to think about your organization:
It can be time consuming to break free from silos but it will reward you in the end. The first thing to do is to break free from the silo mentality.
Silo mentality is a mindset present when certain departments or sectors do not wish to share information with others in the same company. This type of mentality will reduce efficiency in the overall operation, reduce morale, and may contribute to the demise of a productive company culture.
– Business Dictionary
If your organization doesn’t have a unified vision, this is where your work begins. This is the most important and the very first thing to do because a unified vision guides goals of each team towards the same direction. Each team have their own interests to drive them but with a shared vision the managers commit to row the boats towards the same finish line. This way every employee on every hierarchy level is responsible for reaching the company’s targets.
When managers have agreed on a unified vision it also sets a scene for an open and honest discussion. Each manager recognizes different kinds of barriers that might prevent their team from reaching their goals. When barriers are spotted and correct steps are taken there is a much better chance for a company to succeed.
With common goals, employees are more willing to help each other than in a situation where their objectives would be different and helping out a colleague would mean wasting time to something that wouldn’t help in reaching one’s own targets. It also becomes more evident that networking and communicating openly with different teams can help everyone towards the shared goal.
A unified vision and shared goals can also boost employee engagement because it’s easier for employees to realize that they can have an actual effect to the company success with their own actions.
There’s a lot a company can do to teach its employees to work together, communicate better and share information. Employees absorb the way other employees work. If you want to encourage an open and more collaborative company culture, here are some actions to take:
Working to break free from the silo mentality is like any other goal a company has and should be measured as such. Seeing results and being able to change course based on hard figures is the way to go. Each employee is accountable for their actions towards the common goal so measuring the individual performance is also vital.
It’s not an easy task to get rid of silos but avoiding to solve these weak spots can be very harmful for a company. If you can motivate people to stop protecting their valuable knowledge and start sharing it, it’s far easier to rally people around your common goals and get everyone pulling in the same direction.
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