Working in silos: what it means and 8 fixes for teams

What does working in silos mean?

Working in silos means teams or departments keep their information, goals and work to themselves instead of sharing them across the organization. The phrase borrows from farm silos, which store each grain apart; in a company, the cost is duplicated work, dropped handoffs and surprises.

A team that does this is siloed or operating in a silo, and the attitude behind it is a silo mentality. Other words for silos in business: isolated, fragmented, departmentalized, compartmentalized, disconnected. To break down silos means to connect teams that have been working apart. It isn't the same as poor teamwork inside one team, which our guide to team cohesion covers.

Silos in the workplace: four kinds

• Department silos. Sales, finance, product or support each work to their own plan and rarely see each other's.
• Level silos. Leaders decide in one room and the people doing the work hear about it weeks later.
• Location silos. Offices, floors, shifts or time zones that never overlap.
• Information silos. Knowledge locked in one team's tool, inbox or head.

5 causes of silos

Most silos are built by structure, not by people who refuse to share. That's good news: structure can change.

1. Goals that stop at the team line. Each team is measured only on its own numbers, so time spent helping another team counts against you.
2. Separate reporting lines. Teams that report up different chains may only meet at the very top, where nobody sees the daily friction.
3. Separate tools and data. Every team picks its own systems, and information stays wherever it was first typed.
4. Distance. Different floors, offices, shifts or time zones mean fewer chance conversations, and those are where most cross-team problems get spotted.
5. Leaders who don't talk to each other. Teams copy the relationship between their heads. If two directors compete, their teams will too.

When clashing goals turn into friction between two people, our guide to handling conflict at work has the scripts.

How to break down silos: 8 fixes

Pick one pair of teams and one or two fixes. Each one comes with a step small enough to take this week.

1. 1.

   Give two teams one shared goal

   When two teams own one number, helping each other stops being a favor and becomes the job.

   This week: Pick the handoff that causes the most friction and write one measure both teams own for the quarter, such as days from signed deal to first invoice.

2. 2.

   Map who owns each step of one cross-team project

   A simple RACI chart, which names who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed for each step, ends the "I thought you had it" gap.

   This week: Spend 30 minutes with one lead from each team listing the project's steps and writing a single owner next to each.

3. 3.

   Run a monthly cross-team demo

   Teams that see each other's work every month stop duplicating it and stop getting surprised by launches.

   This week: Book a recurring 30-minute slot and ask each team for five minutes on what shipped and what comes next.

4. 4.

   Name a rotating liaison

   One named person sitting in on the other team's weekly meeting carries questions both ways and spots clashes early. Rotating the role each quarter spreads the contacts.

   This week: Choose the two teams that hand off the most work and send one person to the other team's next weekly meeting.

5. 5.

   Give each joint project one shared channel and one shared doc

   Cross-team questions asked in private messages vanish. In a shared channel, everyone sees the answer and the decision.

   This week: Open one channel for your busiest joint project, pin the shared doc in it, and move the next cross-team question there.

6. 6.

   Swap people for a job-shadow morning

   A morning watching another team work teaches its constraints faster than any process document.

   This week: Ask for two volunteers to sit in for a morning with the team they depend on most, then share three things they learned.

7. 7.

   Bring the other team in at kickoff, not at the end

   Changes are cheap in a project's first week and expensive in its tenth.

   This week: Add one question to your project kickoff template: which other teams does this touch, and who from each should be in the first meeting?

8. 8.

   Mix departments on purpose at team events

   People ask for help from people they know. Mixed groups at social events give everyone a name to ask in the other team.

   This week: At your next team event, assign groups across departments instead of letting people sit with their own team.

For meeting exercises that build the habits behind these fixes, see our communication activities and the skills list in collaboration skills.

Some silos are useful

Boundaries exist for good reasons. The goal is good bridges between teams, not zero walls.

• Focus. A team with a clear scope and protected time goes deeper than one pulled into every request.
• Expertise. Specialists sharpen each other's skills fastest when they work side by side.
• Accountability. Clear lines make it obvious who owns a result.
• Confidentiality. Some walls are required: HR case files, legal matters, and in finance, the information barriers between certain teams.

Journalist and anthropologist Gillian Tett makes the same point in The Silo Effect (Simon & Schuster, 2015): organizations need specialist groups to function, so the task is to master silos rather than abolish them.

Silos in remote and hybrid teams

Remote work removes the chance meetings that used to connect teams, and the research shows it.

• Write decisions down where other teams can find them. A remote team's private call is invisible to everyone else.
• Book cross-team time on purpose. Corridor chats no longer happen by accident, so put a monthly slot with each partner team on the calendar.
• Rotate meeting times. When teams span time zones, take turns with the early and late slots.
• Meet new people, not only new tasks. Give every remote hire introductions to two people in each team they will depend on.

Working cross-functionally

A cross-functional team brings people from different functions together for one goal, usually a project with its own lead. Your cross-functional partners are the people outside your department you depend on to get it done.

Cross-functional team examples

• A product launch team: product, engineering, marketing and support, with one launch lead and one date.
• A customer onboarding fix: sales, implementation and finance redesign the first 30 days for new clients.
• An office move: facilities, IT, HR and one person from each floor plan the move together.

How to work cross-functionally

• Agree on the goal and who makes the final call in the first meeting.
• Ask each function what a yes costs them in time, budget or risk.
• Drop your team's jargon in shared documents.
• Share your team's deadline calendar so partner teams can plan around your crunch weeks.

New cross-functional teams go through the same forming and storming as any other; our guide to the stages of team development shows what to expect.

Mix departments at your next team event

A game won't fix goals or ownership. What it can do is give people a name and a face in the other team, which makes every fix above easier.

Book a hosted trivia night, escape room or game show and ask for groups mixed across departments. Each runs about an hour with a live host, on Zoom by default or Teams, Google Meet or Webex on request. Book about 2 weeks ahead; teams split across time zones can play in two sessions. In the office, our games run in person in 17 US cities.

Team Discovery Challenge combines a scavenger hunt with show and tell, so people learn something real about colleagues they don't work with. Speed Networking is a 45-minute automated format on its own networking platform: after a short welcome video, it matches people into one-on-one, three-minute conversations. To see whether anything changed, send a short collaboration pulse before and after with KraftyLab Intelligence.