Hi there I’m Sabrina. Welcome to Sensible Practice where you benefit from my 25+ years of experience as a leader in Corporate America. In this post, I will share an example of how to break down silos and avoid inefficiencies in an organization.
Isn’t it strange that when people are asked what they do or how their process works, you sometimes get, why do you want to know, or it’s complicated, verses, sure let me show you?
In order to identify insights, gaps in processes, and improvement opportunities, you have to have collaboration across teams. Siloed areas tend to keep their work close and usually have tenured employees who have become subject matter experts in what they do.
Some silos are built around close connections with others in the department. Maybe they have a leader they are loyal to or friends in the department or maybe they just don’t know any different due to lack of training, or whatever.
There a lots of reasons, but unfortunately, silos do cause inefficiencies in organizations.
The primary reason companies need to avoid silos is MONEY. How?
- Duplicative work resulting in over-spending or too many employees doing the same job
- Extended Timeline product / service delivery
- Errors are made and need to be corrected
- Customers are not happy with the product or service
Let’s jump into an example of a siloed organization and how it impacted the end result
A few years ago I was tasked with organizing all the messages that went to a specific customer group from the company. Easy-peezy right? Wrong! Little did I know there were no controls in place on who could send messages to our customers. Messages were being sent from everywhere, no branding, no editing, duplicative messages, resulting in some of our customers receiving a significant amount of mail. So imagine opening your mailbox and you have maybe 20 envelops from the same company with similar messages. They’d look pretty unorganized right? You may even get concerned with how they manage the rest of your account details. (I know I would)
So here’s what I did to fix it.
#1 Stopped the bleeding – I created a Communications Governance, Intake Form and Tracking Sheet
#2 Executive Support – Gained buy-in from the Senior VP of the area to communicate to all employees, that any message going to the customer must go through the intake process first. This is a key step to ensure people understand the level of urgency to the situation.
#3 Organized all the messages that I was aware of and populated into the new tracking sheet to start the running list.
#4 Did a Stakeholder Analysis to understand who to work with for all communication in this customer group
#5 Setup meetings with the key individuals to start to build out the tracking sheet based on what was already in the works for messaging, then for each area represented, they were asked to share new communications with the group so we would all be aware of what is coming and ensure no duplicative efforts.
Check out my YouTube video about this topic by clicking here.
