Discover strategies to identify organizational silos and how breaking down silos in business can help you to improve your team's productivity.
Despite the emergence of some amazing software products for team collaboration, to improve team communication, hybrid working and employee productivity, all designed to align employees and employers in more ways than ever before, the threat of organizational and information silos for team efficiency and business growth is increasing.
Some recent research shows that on average 40 percent of company employees report that they feel siloed because "different departments have their own agendas" (commonly known as The Silo Mentality).
While these kind of business silos cause issues with employee communication and team collaboration — both of which are critical success factors for delivering the best customer experiences and ensuring you have the right product/market-fit — the increasing problem is becoming more linked to the impact on revenue growth.
After all, just because you have the best online collaboration tools in place, it doesn’t automatically guarantee your team collaboration effectiveness. If you don’t combine a culture of information transparency with team collaboration software tools and best practices; the negative impact of organizational silos will quickly become apparent.
Organizational silos, often referred to as information silos or business silos, are a systemic division within a company where departments or teams work in isolation with minimal or no interaction and communication with each other. These silos can form due to a variety of reasons including geographical distance, technological gaps, or cultural differences. The term "business silos" refers to a business structure where departments operate as individual entities, focusing on their own tasks and goals, often at the expense of the company's overall objectives. Similarly, "information silo" specifically refer to a situation where information is not shared between departments, leading to a lack of transparency and collaboration. These silos can hinder productivity, innovation, and overall business growth.
Let's analyse Slack usage for a moment. A great example of an information silo problem can be traced to the choice between using Slack's private channels versus its public channels. The problem can be amplified with direct messages and how your employees create and share content stored in your Google Drive.
If you create an important piece of content, store it in your Google Drive and share that content with handpicked individuals through Slack private messages, you have effectively created an information silo. This easily leads to isolated knowledge and be part of the overarching silo mentality.
If you setup a specific Slack public channel for you entire organization, for example #important-company-content, and share your new piece of content in this channel, it means every employee can find it easily, new hires in the future can find it easily, and you stop the potential of organization silos being created.
Read more: "Free Slack Guide and Slack Best Practices"
This is a very simple example, however the impact equation becomes more complex when you begin to:
The actual figures relating to the impact of organizational silos and information silos are terrifying, research suggests the impact is now in the region of “$340bn in 2019, expected to rise to $520bn in 2022”. Research specific to the UK suggests a similar trend “£400bn per year in lost productivity for UK organizations”.
Flowtrace helps organisations to identify and breakdown organizational silos by providing clear data on how your teams collaborate together.
The impact of organizational silos not only effect your revenue growth, they reduce employee productivity, employee efficiency and employee engagement.
Despite the fact that employees are more technologically interconnected than ever before, the silo effect continues to be a problem for teams of all types. According to Clear Company:
Let’s explore how your organization can improve cross-team collaboration, break down organizational silos and improve employee efficiency through the right team collaboration tools, communication processes and best practices.
Remote employees, hybrid working, managerial differences, lack of collaborative tools, too many collaborative tools, no best practice guides for employees and misalignment on strategic company goals are all reasons which enable information silos to propagate.
However, be mindful, too much segmentation can also significantly impact productivity, profitability, employee efficiency and cross-functional collaboration.
Organizational silos cause problems for every employee whether you are already aware of the issue or not, but getting rid of silos altogether may result in additional unwanted chaos relating to your culture, if employees feel their communication is being to controlled.
This is one main the main reasons we started Flowtrace, not to try and completely remove information silos for startups, but to help our clients continually improve, using in-depth analytics to identify and break down the organizational silos that have the most positive impact on growth.
Focusing on effective and creative collaboration among employees with a variety of skill sets is great way to improve long-term communication between employees, reduce the negative impacts of information silos and create a transparent information culture.
Create opportunities for employees to work closely together on large-scale projects that matter to your company. We always advize our clients to create small teams and align on projects with a common goal.
According to HR.com, “identifying and catering to different skill sets is a way to prevent “one size fits all” approaches to management. By identifying the strengths of each team member, it’s easier to find areas where two or more people can work together to mitigate each other’s shortcomings”.
This will not only lead to better business outcomes, it will also help create a sense that everyone is involved in improving business performance and building something impactful together.
The net effect of these types of shared experiences forge incredible team collaboration bonds and drives innovation through your company.
We cannot stress enough the importance of ‘Engaged Employees’, your employee engagement strategy and employee experience will have a big impact on business efficiencies and growth.
In simple terms, if your employees cannot easily find important information, then they are not fully engaged.
Breaking down organizational silos can also help you gain advantage in competitive landscape. Here’s the proof:
Flowtrace is on an exciting journey to break down the information silos and unleash the potential of inter-team collaboration. We welcome you to be part of the journey, and together we can improve startup business performance, break down organizational silos, reduce the risks of startup failure, improve employee engagement, empower more startup collaboration cultures and accelerate faster growth. Take a closer look at our pricing plans or try out our platform by creating a free account.
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