Breaking Down Organisational Silo Mentality

Silo mentalities can create significant discourse in operational workflows and procedures. Organisational silos have become all too common, with different departments or groups operating in isolation of others, resulting in a lack of collaboration and the fragmentation of important business functions.

Only about a third of companies (36%) prioritise a few cross-functional capabilities at the company level and expect functional leaders to identify how they contribute to the mission. Most of the rest work in silos, with each function making its own decisions on which capabilities matter most (55%).PwC

Identifying silo mentality

Identifying silo mentalities in an organisation is a vital step in removing disruptions that negatively impact business and employee performance, customer experience and revenue.

Silo behaviours are usually characterised by individuals or departments withholding information; departments or teams unaware of activities being undertaken by each other; limited bottom-up communication and free-flowing top-down communication; duplication of tasks; an us vs them approach between business units; and a fractured organisational culture with no real alignment to company values or objectives.

True multidisciplinary collaboration requires people to combine their perspectives and expertise and tailor them to the client’s needs so that the outcome is more than the sum of the participating individuals’ knowledge.Harvard Business Review

Breaking down silo mentality

There are multiple ways to break down silo mentalities across an organisation, we examine 3 of them.

1. Team collaboration through common vision and goals

Creating a collaborative team culture starts from the top. Managers must be unified in their approach of shifting from siloed business practices to the sharing of information across teams that will inevitably help the entire organisation. Stakeholders and C-Suites need to buy in to this common vision – they must properly understand and align on key company objectives, values and long-term goals – before communicating this bigger picture perspective to their respective teams. It is critical that every team member also understands how they each contribute to this unified vision to encourage the move away from “my” to “our” modes of thinking and behaviours.

A recent study by Deloitte’s found that shifting to a team-based organizational structure improves performance, with 53% of respondents reporting significant improvements in performance, and 21 % reporting a minimal improvement in performance.”

On a practical level, this doesn’t necessarily mean holding daily or weekly meetings to ensure ongoing alignment. An innovative real estate CRM platform like Qobrix offers collaborative functionalities to track company wide performance against goals, centralising all critical information and metrics (in real-time) for everyone to see.

2. Fostering communication across teams

Eliminating silo mentality doesn’t necessarily mean removing the silos altogether. Organisations will always be comprised of different divisions with their own sets of tasks and responsibilities, and one could argue that these are silos in themselves. But the objective is not to get rid of these divisions. Instead, it’s to encourage the sharing of information between them, a coming together of different teams and departments to collaborate on how to work towards a common set of goals.

“The financial benefits of multidisciplinary collaboration are unambiguous. Simply put, the more disciplines that are involved in a client engagement, the greater the annual average revenue the client generates.” Harvard Business Review

Only when a collaborative environment where the want to understand what other departments do and the challenges they face is fostered – where communication is encouraged and information sharing becomes the norm – will organisations have the ability (and the insights) needed to make more informed decisions, improve customer service and ultimately, boost ROI.

Software tools like Qobrix real estate CRM enable teams to collaborate and share information, with a variety of dashboards that can be customised to provide the data your organisation needs to monitor sales, performance and any other metrics you deem necessary (in real time) to achieve business objectives.

3. Education and collaborative training

Another way to reduce silo mentality is to have employees from different departments come together in educational training courses to better understand the crucial role that other individuals and groups play in the overall success of a company.

“61% of operations leaders believe cross-functional collaboration has the greatest potential for helping the company reach its strategic goals.” PwC

Encouraging interdepartmental and cross-functional collaboration breaks down barriers and changes corporate culture by helping employees get a proper idea of what their colleagues do all day. In turn, silos begin disintegrating, the gap between different departments and teams are bridged resulting in a unified vision of goals with employee buy-in, improved performance, increased customer satisfaction levels and boosted ROI.

Qobrix real estate CRM software provides the tools that can assist you in breaking down silos in your organisation, promoting a more collaborative corporate culture and bringing employees together to work towards common company goals. Schedule a demo of Qobrix or Start your free trial and learn how you can tranform your business.