You may be familiar with this story…
Let’s say you work for an RTO.
Not enough sales being made to meet KPIs? The Sales team argue ‘Hey, we made the sales, but Admin hasn’t logged them in the system properly’. The Admin team counter- argue, ‘Yes we did, but the trainers haven’t delivered the right paperwork, so we can’t process it and invoice for the dollars’.
Trainers in turn claim either ‘The sales people sold the wrong courses’ or ‘Admin are making it too hard for us, insisting we complete all this paperwork, when they know we spend all our working hours preparing or delivering the training that actually brings in the dollars. We just don’t have time to do all their paperwork!.
To complicate this culture of blame and counter blame, the members of the different departments barely communicate to each other (save for the monthly drinks when they begrudgingly share a room for the price of a free beer).
This scenario is a prime example of silos in action. And *may be a true story from my HR experiences..
Silos can, and do, crop up (pardon the pun) in any and all organisations, no matter how big or small.
In business the silo mentality is characterised by individuals or divisions that withhold information from others in the organisation for various reasons, which might include power struggles, fear, organisational inefficiency, or simply because they don’t take the effort to update shared information. [Sales Force]
Silo mentality is often to blame when some or all your teams start operating as individual units, more concerned with competing against each other, and /or blaming each other when things go wrong than in working towards organisational goals.
Silos thereby destroy trust and impede necessary communication.
For your people to be engaged in what your business is trying to achieve, they all need to be on the same page and working together to bring the vision to life.
Why is breaking down silos important?
- Improving culture
Silos equate to a culture of blame and distrust.
Inevitably this results in, at the very least, pervasive unpleasantness. At the opposite end of the spectrum, this type of culture will lead to widespread examples of inappropriate behaviours and possibly / probably, some form of group bullying.
And what does this lead to? WHS and legal headaches, lost productivity and dollars, and ultimately, loss of staff.
So break down the silos and save dollars – and headaches.
- Improving collaboration and innovation
If teams aren’t talking to each other because of a siloed mentality, then how on earth will they successfully collaborate on projects, let alone feel psychologically safe enough to have the robust discussions necessary in order for innovation to happen?
Break down silos and reap the benefits of a diversity of skills, knowledge and experience from the different arms of your business, coming together to drive innovation.
Keen to know more about the importance of innovation to high performance culture, and how to improve it in your organisation? Read our earlier blog in the A – Z of Workplace Culture series, ‘I is for Innovation’.
Or are you curious to understand more about psychological safety, and how to build it in your business. Then read ‘P is for Psychological Safety’ here.
- Driving productivity
Let’s return for a minute to the example I shared at the start of this blog, with the siloed RTO.
Flip those facts around, and imagine that Admin has simplified the paperwork that Trainers need to complete, including establishing pro-forma documents that already have much of the necessary information automatically filled in.
The result?
The time that trainers need to spend completing the paperwork has been halved – which means the Trainers can better utilise that time for designing new programs AND they will be much more likely to actually complete the paperwork.
In turn, Admin saves time from having to endlessly chase up the Trainers for their completed paperwork (or from having to complete the paperwork for the Trainers).
Boom. Productivity increases – whilst stress levels for both teams decreases. Win win.
OK, OK, yes, I admit it, we’ve got silos here. So, what can we do about it?
A) Collaborate – and Communicate.
Silos often happen because the leader of each silo (team / department) feels they are in competition with other departments, or does not understand how each department contributes to the overall success of the organisation.
This means every organisation needs to have an organisational wide mission and purpose, that devolves into organisational goals.
The organisational goals are then utilised to craft departmental goals. In other words, every unit’s goals are in direct alignment with the broader organisational goals, rather than in conflict with another divison’s goals.
Regular meetings between leaders of separate units provide an opportunity for sharing information including how each department is progressing towards achieving their individual goals; for sharing challenges and for workshopping solutions.
Progress towards both Organisational and Unit goals should be shared: and for bonus culture points, when milestones are achieved these should be celebrated.
Collaboration shouldn’t just happen between leaders and managers.
Wherever possible, bring employees together from different units to work on projects together; and make sure you invest in, and make good use of collaboration tools such as Slack (for real time collaboration), Asana or Monday.
B) Walk a day in my shoes. Subtitled interdepartmental exhibits.
This was one of the tools employed at our *fictional RTO, and I have seen it successfully introduced elsewhere since.
Each team took turns hosting members from the other departments for half a day so that staff can see firsthand exactly what it was their counterparts actually do on a daily basis. Activities can range from co-attending client meetings, spending half a shift on the floor, holding a demonstration of what work the unit does (followed by a FAQ or Town Hall type discussion), as well as more informal ‘hanging out and getting to know each other’ activities.
As participants discover more about their colleagues’ work, the challenges they face, and the colleagues as individuals, then it becomes a lot harder to blame ‘those sales guys’ for everything that goes wrong.
Especially after you’ve spent half a day out on the road with them sharing the unique experience of cold calling.
C) ‘Random Lunch with Dave’
Credit where it is due; I came across this idea on a blog post many years ago, and it has remained one of my absolute favourites. The idea is that the CEO invites one member from each department out to a monthly lunch. At lunch….
There is no agenda for each lunch, but the goal of the initiative is to help everyone get to know one another, to keep communication walls from building up, gain insight on culture and product ideas, and most importantly to help the CEO (sic) identify choke points within the organisation, which have the power to disengage and switch people off.
Attendees are a true mix of staff from different departments and functions, newbies/ vets and everything in between, and always an odd number are invited to make it difficult to pair up.
D) New staff member profiles
As we work our way through this period in history oft times dubbed The Great Resignation, many organisations are dealing with the flip side of resignations – onboarding of team members.
There are many ways to successfully onboard a new employee; but one way to both onboard that employee AND help avoid silos from building is to integrate the newcomer not just to their team, but the wider organisation.
And if we know something about said new starter, we are more likely to approach them (physically and online) and start up a conversation with them. Whether they work in our department or not.
In turn, the new starter will feel they are part of a team bigger than their immediate business unit, and be more likely to continue interactions with co-workers from other areas.
So, interview the new starter, find out something unique about them, and then share their story via your newsletter/intranet/ or your internal company version of Facebook. Better yet, record the interview so people can quickly and easily watch it in their own time.
Or maybe, if they are willing, have them record a TikTok. Noting that I write this in January 2023 when TikToks are The Thing at the moment. This may not be the case when you read this – so in other words, whatever is The Thing of your day, then incorporate that if you can – and if the new starter is willing.
Silos are the bane of many organisations, and are the nemesis of high performance culture.
Keen to understand if / how or why you have silos in your business – and what you can do to break them down?
Good news: you’ve come to the right place. Let's chat for a free discussion about how Workology Co can help you do any / all of the above.