How to dismantle workplace silos

Silos aren’t terrible. Working closely with other people who have a similar skillset to you can be fast and very effective.

 

But truly impactful organisations are working to try to dismantle silos. Impactful leaders are actively bringing people with diverse skills and experiences together to create lasting change.

 

 

What types of silos are there?

 

There are sectoral silos: charities, NGOs and non-profits that work on the same issue, but decidedly against each other.

 

There are internal silos: teams working towards similar goals, but operating independently of each other.

 

And there are workplace silos. For example, groups who congregate more often in the office and groups who usually work remotely.

 

 

Silo busting

 

 

Sectoral silos

 

In the age of systems thinking, smart sub-sectors of charities, nonprofits, social enterprises and other stakeholders are organising themselves to collaborate closely and have more impact.

 

The Maternal Mental Health Alliance is a network of 120 organisations working together with clinicians and experts by experience to make perinatal mental health everyone’s business. They say: “From the very beginning, we knew change would be eminently more possible if we worked together and developed joint calls to action.”

 

It’s a similar story at the Fair Education Alliance. “We consistently work with other education and children’s charities to share strategies, take collective actions, and organise summits or webinars all aimed at protecting and promoting solutions in the best interest of children,” says Susannah Hardyman, Founder & CEO of Action Tutoring.

 

“Beyond education, we add our voice and collaborate with other charities working on issues that affect children and schools – Free School Meals, child poverty, safeguarding and child protection, among others.”

 

 

Internal silos

 

Amy Hutchings is Creative Strategy Director at Open. She has worked with more than 20 charities using integrated campaigns as an effective method for bringing people together and breaking down silos.

 

Hutchings works with cross-organisational teams to revisit the charity’s strategy and choose a campaign topic to focus on. The integrated approach means that there’s a rich mix of skills and a shared sense of purpose to help the campaign meet its goals.

 

Hutchings says: “Silos have held the sector back for too long and this is a problem we can fix, when we are facing so many other challenges as a sector.”

 

Campaigns can be immensely motivating, but what about the ‘business as usual’ stuff? Non-profits also need to be able to work collaboratively day-to-day.

 

“When we talk about silo-working, we’re not talking about physical constructs,” explains Yasmin Georgiou, Strategy Lead at William Joseph. “It’s actually about how people are communicating, how they’re working together, their processes and the culture underpin all of it.”

 

Georgiou used Communities of Practice as an effective silo-busting technique at Action for Children. A Community of Practice brings together people from different teams working on a common goal. They meet whenever the need arises (but regularly) to work together on meeting the goal. The community is for practitioners, not for managers - it’s for getting things done.

 

 

Workplace silos

 

Claire Warner, Founder of workplace culture consultancy, Lift, has seen new silos developing as a result of the pandemic and post-pandemic ways of working. For example, between staff who are mainly office-based and staff who tend to work remotely.

 

Warner describes the importance of asking staff to come into the office with a purpose like spending time getting to know each other, “not just because it’s Tuesday”. Warner argues that, “if you add up all those opportunities at the office where you would be standing next to the kettle, or the water cooler, or as you walk through the office in the morning they might add up to a day. So why not use the first Tuesday of every month to do relationship building.”

 

As people work remotely more often, it’s also really important to agree what your internal comms are for. Warner encourages charities to ask themselves which channels should be used for quick transactional communication and which for discussion and decision-making. It’s also important to find places online where water cooler chats are acceptable and even encouraged.

 

At an INGO, additional factors like timezone, geographic location, language, and work culture can also create silos. Sari Bashi, Programme Director at Human Rights Watch, says this  “has become more challenging as our staff has grown and become more globally distributed. Protecting human rights is incredibly hard. We can’t afford to do anything less than our best, which requires harnessing the diverse skills, expertise, lived experience and creative power of cohesive, multidisciplinary teams.”

 

Bashi and her colleagues are “creating spaces to learn together, modeling and uplifting effective teamwork, improving information flow and addressing the changes we need to make to our internal systems and incentives, to make collaboration easier and expected”.