3 ways to improve your business growth and break silos

Improving your business growth and breaking silos

Organisational silos tend to group and separate employees on the basis of similar factors, such as role type, geography or level of seniority. They are a natural part of the growth process in any organisation as people look for ways to develop expertise and identity within the business. However, they can be divisive and they are often a significant obstacle to the collaboration that is required to enable a business to develop. That’s why 42% of C-level executives at larger businesses make it a priority to get rid of them.

Why are silos not constructive?

• They block collaboration between different groups. It could be different office locations or teams within the same office, where silos form, information often doesn’t make it from one group to the next. The result is that it’s difficult to create the kind of genuine collaboration that fuels exceptional results.
• They can obstruct perspective. Where a business has multiple silos in place it’s often impossible to create an accurate perspective in terms of where the business is and where its strengths and vulnerabilities lie.
• They can be divisive and nurture the wrong ideas. Silos have the potential to create divisions within a business. They can also lead to poor ideas going unchallenged because the silo mentality is to think in the same way.

How to break silos within your business

1. Encourage staff to lead the way

Incentivising staff to work outside of their own silos can lay the foundations for creating that all important collaboration. There are many ways to do this depending on the focus and structure of the organisation. Gamification, for example, can be used to set goals and challenges that are won or completed by working with others outside of immediate locations, teams or groups.

2. Make sure you have management on board

Leadership within the business is often where the responsibility for implementing vision and values lies. So, if the leadership team is committed to a workplace where silos are disbanded then this will trickle down through all of the levels that sit beneath them. Organisational change needs to be implemented at the top levels of the business so, if you’re going to make dissolving silos a priority, consult and work with management to ensure that everyone is on board and to uncover any suggestions they may have.

3. Move to the cloud

Working within the cloud provides a transparent business environment that is naturally hostile to silos. Everyone in the business is working from within a single database and one central online system, which makes it much harder for insular silos to begin to form. The cloud can also help to remove the obstacles that silos can create, such as having to follow a paper trail or working out which team has the latest version of a file.

If you’re looking to improve your business and break growth silos then cloud software has a big role to play in that. Contact FinanSys today to find out how our SunSystems Cloud Hosting solution could help your business grow.