Unlock Team Productivity By Breaking Down Silos

Collaborative tools can facilitate teamwork cross-functionally and help organizations stay on the same page.

Silos are great for holding grain, but not for holding information. An Article from the Harvard Business Review examines the 3 Types of Silos That Stifle Collaboration—and How to Dismantle Them. “The silo effect, characterized by limited communication between specialized business departments, has long been a pervasive issue in organizations,” explains the article.

“Multiple studies highlight the profound impact of silos: a Salesforce study revealed that 70% of customer experience professionals and executives view silo mentality as the biggest obstacle to customer service, and a 2017 Harvard Business Review Analytics Services survey indicates that 67% of collaboration failures are due to silos. These findings emphasize that the silo effect presents a significant challenge that organizations must address to enhance their operations and enhance collaboration,” the HBR article adds.

However, an Asana article Organizational silos: 4 common issues and how to prevent them argues that silos aren’t necessarily bad and views silos as a way of organizing a business by team structure. “Without the proper tools and integrations, segmenting your enterprise by function can create organizational silos. While strong organizational silos can cause communication issues, silos are not an inherently bad part of business,” explains Asana’s article.

But if your organization is experiencing challenges with communication and information sharing, then you may need to explore what is causing the silos to occur. For example, organizational silos can form unintentionally when teams use their own tools to do their work. They can also happen when teams are in separate locations or have different schedules and information isn’t shared.

Departmental silos typically form when one department is closed off from one another. “Because enterprises are commonly organized by job function, this is the most common organizational silo," explains the Asana article. Another way teams can be siloed is by job level. When higher or lower level teams don’t share information between them, it can negatively impact their ability to contribute to the bigger picture.

An effective way to eliminate silos is when leadership teams share the company goals and vision. This can facilitate cooperation. Cross-functional teams can also set individual goals with an understanding of how they contribute and align to the big picture.

Silos can also be broken down by improving communication and supporting an open dialogue that can help build trust. Teams collaborate better when they can access and share resources and data, and they build stronger relationships when there are opportunities for informal interactions.

Using collaborative tools that can help facilitate teamwork cross-functionally can bring groups together and help them stay on the same page. “Without a central system of record, there’s no way for cross-functional teams to share information or communicate with others. Teams lose information across different communication platforms and miscommunication. This can lead to missed deadlines, lost documentation, and duplicative work,” explains the Asana article. 

Work Trail provides an interface for users to improve collaboration and stay informed.

Our Work Trail app is a tool that can help break down silos, so teams can work together more effectively within Salesforce. The app empowers teams to bring action items and status updates to the forefront, remove roadblocks and increase productivity.

When different teams work together on different types of objects for a given account, they need to be able to collaborate and share information. For example, while your operations team is busy tackling cases, your sales can be working on opportunities — all on the same account.

As a record moves along its lifecycle, team members can display task sets and see which tasks have been completed, preventing duplicate work. They can also easily view notes for related records or customize which tasks to display for different types of records. 

By making it easier for two teams to share notes, it can help improve customer relationships. For example, when the support team notes ongoing issues with an account in Work Trail, then the sales team can review the notes and discuss the issues on sales call. Or if the sales team has numerous pending sales, the support team can see how their speedy resolution of ongoing issues could impact those sales. 

Work Trail is designed for any Salesforce user or team, whether it's sales, customer support, marketing, or any other role. To learn more, go to the Work Trail Overview page on Passage Technology's website.