Help! We got silo culture

silo culture

By Jan Marsli

Silo culture kills the work experience… and in some cases also the organization! Do you have poor collaboration across departments? Leaders who do their own thing? Infective processes that frustrate employees? Have you checked if you suffer from silo culture?

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Jan Marsli

Senior Manager Projects

Jan has a background in psychology and he has many years of experience in organizational culture, employee experience, competence and talent management. He has worked in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America.

Silo culture - what exactly is it?

Silo culture is when there are partly independent units within an organization, which operate on their own, making collaboration difficult. Silo culture is a major organisational challenge as siloes are often resilient and difficult to break down. The main reason for this is that no one will admit that they actually have a silo culture and therefore the focus is on treating symptoms (collaboration, knowledge sharing and the like) instead of attacking the problem itself, ie the silos.

Silos lead to poor employee experience

It is not uncommon for a customer to ask for support building a better work experience for employees, whilst what is really required is to have a look at the culture - specifically, silo culture.

There can be several reasons why organizations experience a under par working environment, and a poor ability to attract and retain talent. In our experience one of the biggest challenges to a great employee experience is precisely silo culture, and for many, the pandemic has reinforced the impact of such a culture. There is little that frustrates employees more, or makes talent more readily flee - and perhaps they should; silo culture is an "organizational killer" (Think Kodak or Blockbuster!)

Warning signals of a silo culture

No rule without exception - but below we have outlined some of the most typical employee experience signals you can look for to identify silos. In short, "good on the inside, bad on the outside". A good employee survey will let you identify and map these signals:

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Negative attributes of silo culture

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There is poor cooperation between teams and departments

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Information is locked in the silos and is difficult to unlock outside the silo

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Organisation-wide processes do not work very well

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Positive attributes of silo culture

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Cooperation in the teams is very good and people are engaged in their own job

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Employees have a good relationship with line and department management

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Employees think internal processes internally to their team or department are working

How do we deal with silo culture?

There are 2 key steps HR can take to map the extent of silos and build a case for changing the culture:

  1. Identify the extent to which employees are able to be innovative and deliver to customers through the value chain
  2. Clarifies how silo signals flow through the value chain - is it endemic within some parts of the organization or pandemic throughout the value chain?

When employees feel that innovation is difficult and unable to meet customer needs, it means that the silos are so extensive that there is a risk of a downturn on the bottom line. When this is made visible through an analysis of the flow in the value chain from, for example, development, production, marketing, sales and delivery - then we have created a burning platform for change that managers listen to.

Action based on understanding

As mentioned, it is not enough to just treat the symptoms, you have to understand why the silos are there and what anchors them to the organization. The most common causes of silos occur are:

  1. Expertise silos: Managers with high professional competence focus on delivery within their own areas of expertise. Expertise silos are extremely good at delivering high quality in their own field. They are often leaders in their field, and it is this competence that has created the company. The challenge here is that leaders are often unmotivated when it comes to broader organizational management and interaction between units, and silos easily arise in the lack of central management and control.
  2. Hyper-growth silos : Hyper-growth organizations have often grown so fast that "split and rule", ie that you divide the organization into silos that are manageable for a small group of leaders, has been the only way they have been able to respond to the growth. Such silo cultures often lack processes and control mechanisms across devices, and need key people to maintain efficiency and navigate complexity.
  3. Geographic silos: Geographic silos occur when organizations want to create proximity to customers and the market, or add parts of the organization to more cost-effective areas. Thus, the organization is divided into different geographical areas that can easily become silos. It requires solid resource management and global management to ensure that silos remain cost-effective, delivering efficient services to the same standard and quality across geographies.

Silos do not exist just "because". They exist as they once had an important function - and in most cases that function and several of the positive aspects are still present and act as an anchors that holds the silos in place. It is therefore difficult to break them down and create change, without the anchors being lifted first.

In addition, silos can be so effective that managers and employees within a silo have a perception that their silo performs while "the others" underperform - this can often lead to an "in-and-out" group thinking that acts as a reinforcement to silos. Leaders are blind to the fact that the good performance they achieve is good for them, but bad for the overall performance.

We must therefore not only understand the positive mechanisms that anchor silos, but the attitudes and behaviors of individuals that reinforce their existence. Breaking down silos is about tackling processes, culture and attitudes.

Sariba helps you break down silos

  • Tired of poor collaboration across departments?
  • Leaders who run their own race?
  • Processes that are not efficient and frustrate employees?
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