Working in Silos: Ways to Break the Barriers Between Teams

What is working in silos? Understanding the meaning and impact

Working in silos refers to a situation where teams or departments operate independently with little communication or collaboration with others. This isolation can lead to inefficiencies, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities. By understanding this dynamic, leaders can better identify and resolve the gaps in their organization’s collaboration strategy.

How can an organization reckon with the realities of work silos while simultaneously breaking down walls to create more connected teams?

How to break down workplace silos

1. Recognize that silos aren’t always bad

The first thing to recognize is that working in silos isn’t something to avoid at all costs. After all, it’s only natural for workers to work well with others who think in the same ways.

“Working in silos is more natural than working collaboratively. It’s a tribal mentality,” says Ron Ashkenas, co-author of The Harvard Business Review Leader’s Handbook and The GE Work-Out. “It’s the same thing in organizations. Cutting across silos is an unnatural act.”

As journalist Gillian Tett explains in her 2015 book The Silo Effect, it can also be a matter of necessity. “Professions seem increasingly specialized, partly because technology keeps becoming more complex and sophisticated, and is only understood by a tiny pool of experts,” writes Tett. “Silos help us to tidy up the world, classify and arrange our lives, economies, and institutions. They encourage accountability.”

Silos are often the result of tightly efficient departments, which can be an essential marker in assessing the strength of a company. According to Chris Fussell, co-author of One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams and a former Navy SEAL, the breakdown occurs when the effort of connecting one silo with another becomes too much of a hassle.

“The real problem in most organizations is that those silos are disconnected. . .and information travels too slowly, resulting in a failure to adapt,” explains Fussell in a 2017 Inc.com interview. “The trick is to connect the silos together effectively.”

In other words, your main goal is to ensure that team members in the organization both want to work together and can do so easily.

2. Optimize how you communicate to avoid work silos

According to Slack’s Future of Work study, 24% of workers are dissatisfied with communication at work, including how teams share information across the organization. On top of that, 52% want a workplace where processes are always improving.

Prioritizing transparency and open communication on an organizational level can take time. Start with a carefully chosen project management software and a solidknowledge management system to ensure teams can easily find and share important information

Also, encourage teams to be conscious of how their colleagues communicate. An engineer might choose to communicate by chat or text, for example, while someone in the sales department might prefer a check-in over coffee. Tools for asynchronous communication can help bridge those differences.

3. Set the tone from the top

If collaboration is a core component of the way your organization does business, people have to, you know, like coming to work and talking to each other every day. It all starts with establishing a positive organizational culture by:

• Providing a thorough onboarding process that sets the tone for a workplace culture of psychological safety and inclusion
• Consistently enforcing that culture
• Creating a workplace rooted in collaborative culture helps prevent working in silos, which makes communication difficult later on

The more keeping each other in the loop is enforced as part of the culture, the more likely teams work toward common goals.

4. Use regular checkpoints to break siloed work patterns

No matter your organization’s size, ritualize communication on an ongoing basis. To avoid an overload of meetings, you could plan quick weekly check-ins instead. You could also use a RACI matrix to determine the breakdown of responsibilities, including which different departments or teams need to be in contact with each other, and when. Workers will eventually feel more comfortable with the act of cross-team collaboration when they can anticipate it.

“I talked to a CEO of a very large global corporation recently who does a Monday morning meeting,” says Ashkenas. “Everybody around the world—and they switch the times up so that it’s not inconvenient for everybody all the time—takes 20 minutes to just quickly go around and make sure everybody knows what everybody else is doing, what are the issues they might have to deal with together.”

5. When in doubt, stop, collaborate, and listen

If you’ve tried most of this and your silos are simply not connecting properly—or if a bigger, more urgent problem arises—more drastic measures might need to be taken. The GE Work-Out provides one possible solution. It’s an intervention method in which the leaders from teams working on or impacted by a project come together to:

• Bypass bureaucratic bottlenecks
• Develop creative, collaborative solutions
• Empower people to put those solutions into motion immediately

“It takes practice, and a systematic kind of structure,” says Ashkenas. “Leaders have to continually be pushing people to get out of those silos, but gradually over time, you can begin to overcome some of that natural tendency.” That is how you begin addressing the silo mentality.

6. Stay focused on the big picture

If overcoming working in silos is starting to feel like another thing on your to-do list, that’s because it takes work. But disconnection among teams is a liability that can cripple an organization, affecting productivity, morale, and employee engagement. Investing time to talk to one another as you go will help your company in the long run.

In her book The Silo Effect, Tett recounts how getting New York City’s municipal departments to share info led to the reduction of deadly fires in derelict apartment buildings. In the long term, consistentteam collaboration is the most efficient, productive way to work.

“The cost of not doing it is far greater than the cost of doing it,” says Ashkenas. “If teams go off to do their own thing, and then months pass, and you realize that the plans don’t work, you have to go back and do them all over again. It leads to all sorts of problems with getting to market on time, dissatisfied customers—the risks are tremendous.”

That said, try not to overthink it. Siloed work might be inevitable, but by building networks and utilizing the strategies listed above, you can gradually learn to adapt and bridge gaps within them. Stronginternal communication and regularknowledge sharing can help every team see the bigger picture.