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How to Create a Practical Crisis Management Plan [+ Templates]
When it comes to building an effective team, solid collaboration is key. All team members need to work together to get projects done well and on time.
However, there are a number of things that can disrupt collaboration and cause roadblocks. Silo mentality is one of them.
Throughout this article, you’ll learn what silo mentality is, a few main signs and causes, and how to overcome this obstacle to collaboration.
The silo mentality occurs when a team or group of teams purposefully keeps information from other teams in the organization. There are a number of reasons why this might happen—and we’ll dive into those shortly—but it hurts collaboration and stops the company from getting things done in the long run.
A team silo is a group of people that have created a mindset that makes them feel like they need to keep valuable information, goals, priorities, processes, tools, and more to themselves rather than sharing with the entire team or organization and building a cohesive working environment.
There are a few different causes of silo mentality, or types of working environments that can contribute to silo mentality.
Let’s walk through three types of silos that can occur and how.
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Geographical silos can easily occur when companies are distributed all over the world. When different team members have different working hours, are together in different offices, have a different first language, or work within different time zones, it can easily cause separation between those in other areas of the world.
Hierarchical silos can occur between higher- and lower-level employees. Higher-level employees often have access to more information. Not knowing what to share or feeling like they can’t share some of this information can create silos that make it difficult for lower-level employees to work effectively.
Silos can also occur between departments. This may be caused by employees in one department working to finish their department’s tasks before collaborating with other departments on their projects or employees across departments not wanting to share information with other departments.
If you suspect that silo mentality may be the underlying issue with your team’s collaboration and communication processes, here are four key signs and negative effects of a silo mentality to keep in mind.
If you’re seeing little to no collaboration amongst your team or across departments, it may be a sign of silo mentality. When silos appear, it can cause groups of people to stick together, all but cutting off communication with others in the organization.
Low collaboration within your organization can cause work to be done improperly, duplicate projects to occur and more. It causes wasted time—and time is money. By using a tool like Visme, you can easily collaborate with team members, leaving comments and getting approval on designs before they’re shipped.
Another side effect of these silos is that when communication is cut off, important information goes unshared. This means other teams in your company may not have the proper information they need to complete projects on time or properly.
Again, Visme’s capabilities can help your team overcome this. It’s easy to share projects, documents, presentations and more with other team members in your Visme workspace so that everyone involved in a project has the necessary details.
Silo mentality hurts teamwork. Your teams aren’t properly working together, projects aren’t getting done, team communication is at an all time low, and more.
Due to hierarchical silos, sometimes leadership can be unclear and even hide information from those beneath them. This is a major issue and can lead to poor company culture, unrest, and higher employee turnover.
As we can plainly see, silo mentality is something you want to avoid within your organization at all costs. So how do you break a silo mentality?
Overcoming this issue can help get your teams back on track and on the same page with projects, improving efficiency and hitting your bottom line faster. Use these six strategies to help your teams break out of their silos and get back to collaborating effectively.
Good collaboration and communication starts with the right tools. Building a proper tech stack that supports collaboration within your organization is key.
Here are a few tools to consider:
Visme makes it easy for your team to collaborate with whiteboarding tools, collaboration options, real-time simultaneous editing and more.
Use a template like the one below to work together with your team building out a new project task list and timeline.
Getting your company together regularly for events is a great idea, even if you have a widely distributed team. Some companies—like Buffer—get together in person each year for a company-wide retreat.
However, there are still a number of virtual team building and company events you can plan and host to engage your entire team and get them to meet other colleagues across departments.
Here are a few team building ideas and activities to get you started:
Hold a poll to find a time that will work best for the majority of your company—depending on the number of employees you have, it may not be feasible to have every single person join. Instead, find the best time for the most people and plan out which events or activities to have your team participate in.
If you want to help your teams collaborate better, start by setting them up for success. Have team leaders schedule consistent collaborative meetings so various teams are able to talk face-to-face about projects and how to ensure they’re done on time.
Consider having cross-departmental collaborative meetings as well to overcome departmental silos that may be forming. This will encourage employees to get to know each other better and understand the types of information-sharing they need to be doing across departments.
Use whiteboard software and template like the one above to help your meetings stay organized. Whiteboards like this help keep track of your agenda, ensuring that everyone gets a chance to participate. This is key for encouraging collaboration across the board.
When each department has their own goals, it can create silos that cause team members within these departments to focus only on their own department’s goals and tasks—rather than the big picture. Set common goals for the entire organization as well as for multiple departments.
This will encourage collaboration, communication, and information sharing between departments and their team members, breaking down silos and improving efficiency.
Use a template like the one above to set SMART goals that everyone on your team or within your organization contributes to and agrees on.
Silo mentality causes valuable information to be withheld from other team members or departments. And one cause of this may be due to uncertainty regarding said information and who gets to know what.
To combat this, create policies and processes surrounding what information should be shared with who and on what channels teams should do so. This can help your employees feel more comfortable sharing information with each other, fostering a better relationship with each other.
Include these policies within your employee handbook by using a template like the one above. This way, the information is front and center each time you hire someone new, helping to remove the possibility of future silos forming.
Finally, make sure you’re building an environment that encourages communication between employees. Creating processes, activities and other avenues that enable team members—especially remote ones—to get to know each other can foster better collaboration overall.
A few ideas include:
Build a positive workplace environment, a collaborative company culture and bust down silo mentality.
Collaborate and create with your team
Don’t let silo mentality get your team down. By improving collaboration and using the right tools to help, you can easily improve efficiency and ensure your team communication is up to snuff. Get started with a Visme workspace for your organization.
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