Silos serve as excellent storage for grains and protect them from nature’s wrath, however, they have no place in a workspace. Here, silos denote isolation or teams and departments that function detached. In the presence of such, a business struggles to move forward, suffers from productivity issues, and often goes bust.
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That’s how lethal silos are. Luckily, there is a way to overcome the silo mentality and break the divide, which restricts information exchange and growth. Foster collaboration.
In this article, we will share six time-tested strategies to help you overcome the silo mentality in the workplace and take your business up via collaboration.
Silo mentality is lethal but not incurable. There is a way to break the silos & make sure your business progresses full steam ahead. Below are six tactics to overcome silo mentality before it wreaks havoc in your workplace.
Goals divide. Vision unite. Silos appear frequently in a workplace where teams or departments blindly follow internal objectives and ignore the vision. Quite often, departmental objectives or internal goals clash with others, and that undoes progress and halts growth. Here, the solution is to ditch the goals and follow the vision.
So, promote managers and leads to inspire the team to follow a shared vision and create goals aligned with the business objectives. This way, even isolation doesn’t hurt as it takes you forward the right way.
Remote evolution is on the rise. Today’s workforce rarely works under a single roof and functions physically detached from one another. However, it shouldn’t create a digital disconnect, as then silos form, and consequently collaboration takes a hit. Here a trick to overcome the silo mentality is to use collaboration tools like project management software, shared documents, & data management apps.
Encouraging remote work sounds like an odd hack to up collaboration. However, it works. Truthfully, working from home is not the culprit behind the silo mentality but the cure. Silos are no creation of the modern era and have been the bane of offices and workplaces for many decades.
Thus, working under the same roof doesn’t necessarily promote harmony. Similarly, working remotely doesn’t necessarily break the link. In truth, remote work makes collaboration easy and hassle-free. Thanks to digital looks, today it is even easier to collaborate via apps like Microsoft Teams than it is to have a sit-in in conference rooms.
Put plainly, flexibility makes work fun, promotes collaboration, and helps the team keep their focus on what matters the most.
A shared vision helps the team, divided by goals, see the big picture and function as a unit. Similarly, shared accountability helps them see themselves not as parts but as wholes. Building shared accountability is a surefire way to break the silo mentality in the workplace and foster collaboration between cross-departmental teams.
There are many ways to build shared accountability, like delegating a single task to teams or individuals from different departments, encouraging individuals from cross-functional teams to sit together and devise solutions in a think tank, or making multiple departments responsible for a single project.
All the above works the same way and makes different individuals & teams look out for each other and collaborate for the win—thanks to shared accountability.
Building cross-functional teams is another way to overcome the silo mentality. Like shared accountability, it encourages individuals with unique skills from different departments or teams to collaborate and move forward as one.
Additionally, cross-functional engagement is also achievable via cross-departmental training sessions. So, the next time you want to up collaboration, try involving sales or customer service teams in the marketing training events or sessions and see different heads unite in the name of collaboration.
Silo mentality brews in the office, but that doesn’t mean you can’t break them outside it. A way to foster collaboration in the workplace and build better bonds between teams is to let them mingle outside the work. Give different departments opportunities to bond via fun monthly, quarterly, or yearly retreats. Host events to help the teams companywide know each other so they learn to perform as a unit.
Silo mentality in the workplace is a problem but a curable one. The trick is to be proactive and don’t let isolation bubbles develop into concrete silos. Identify the signs and crush them promptly. All you need is to follow a shared vision, use collaboration tools, promote flexibility, build shared accountability, & let teams mingle outside the work.
Recommended Reading: How to Conduct Effective Employee Evaluation in 2023: A Comprehensive Guide
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