Companies of all sizes face lots of challenges in their day-to-day operations. There are ones like time theft, which most business owners are well aware of. Then, there are those like what we’ll be covering today—working in silos.

Working in silos—sometimes referred to as the silo mentality—can have many negative consequences. It can cause miscommunication, delays in your firm’s work, and more. As a leader, breaking down these silos should be a priority for you, as it can help your business avoid being slowed down.

This guide will help you understand the concept of working in silos, why it happens, and how to address it effectively. With the right strategies, you can create a well-connected and efficient team—free from the silo mentality.

What is working in silos?

Working in silos is when people work in isolation within a company. While it can refer to individuals, the silo mentality commonly affects teams or departments in a business. These groups will work on their own goals, largely ignoring those of the firm as a whole. Working in a silo will lead to little or no communication between the affected team and the rest of your staff. Communication is key to sharing knowledge and working towards common goals effectively—both of which are challenging for siloed businesses.

Besides affecting departments as a whole, it can also occur within one team. The silo mentality can split a department into many groups. For example, your marketing team might get divided into several parts, with each working on different campaigns. In such cases, parts of your team might work on the same thing independently—leading to duplicated and redundant work.

The negative effects of working in silos

Besides what we already discussed—lack of communication and duplicated efforts—working in silos has many other negative consequences. Siloed companies struggle with innovation, as they waste their resources on the aforementioned duplicated work. Communication is also key for coming up with new ideas, which is another weak point caused by the silo mentality.

Another problem of the mentality is reduced employee engagement rates. Without communication, siloed teams will struggle to see the impact of their work on their organizations. Low professional engagement will lead to high turnover rates—further wasting your business’s resources.

Reasons why working in silos happens

Before getting to time tracking, let’s briefly explore the causes of organizational silos.

Lack of communication

While a lack of communication can be a result of the silo mentality, it is often a cause as well. When teams don’t talk to each other, they’ll slowly start establishing their own working silos. They will then not share what they’re working on with each other and end up doing the same work twice.

Company culture and management style

The culture of your business can play a major role in the formation of work silos as well. If your managers value personal achievements over collaborative ones—or don’t adequately reward teamwork—your staff will shift their focus away from collaboration. They’ll be incentivized to work alone or only with their department-mates, establishing the silo mentality at your firm.

Internal competition

Another popular reason why working in silos happens is internal competition. You might be dealing with this if you have multiple of the same teams at your business. A common example of such a company is a software development firm with two or more core products. In this case, you might have dedicated development teams for each of your offerings. These teams can start competing with each other over time, creating a siloed environment.

Lack of shared goals

Having shared goals is vital in establishing healthy communication in your team. Not having such goals will help form organizational silos, as your professionals won’t have to work together anyway. Consequently, your staff will be incentivized to focus on their own achievements—or at least those of their departments.

How time tracking can prevent working in silos

Having explored the nature and causes of the silo mentality, let’s now explore how time tracking can help your fight against it.

Enhance and encourage collaboration

Time tracking software can make it easy for your team to work together. By tracking their work hours, you can dedicate time to collaboration each week. You may do this with traditional meetings, brainstorming sessions, or other similar activities. Some high-quality time trackers can even enhance collaboration with dedicated tools. For example, WebWork allows you to chat and host video meetings with your team directly in the tracker. This functionality eliminates your need to pay for several apps dedicated to collaboration.

Set clear and shared goals

As we discussed, having shared goals is important to avoid organizational silos. Setting these up and ensuring their clarity is easy with time tracking apps. High-quality ones with project and task management features let you write down your targets in a centralized place—where all of your team members will be able to see them. You should then use the tracker to monitor progress toward these targets in the long run.

Key time tracking features for breaking down work silos

Before closing off this guide, let’s briefly explore a few more time-tracking features that can help you break down work silos.

Productivity tracking

Tracking the productivity of employees can be beneficial for a few reasons. As for fighting against the silo mentality, you may use productivity data to ensure effective collaboration. Detecting internal competition will also be simple with this. If your staff aren’t productive on collaborative tasks but perform well on their own assignments, they’re likely working in a silo.

Work-life balance tracking

The balance between work and personal time is critical for the staff of any company. In fact, employee work-life balance can drive business growth. It also helps avoid personal silos by ensuring high professional engagement for each of your team members. Professionals who are dedicated to their work will be less likely to isolate themselves in the workplace.

Final thoughts

Working in silos can be a measurable problem for lots of companies. But, the right strategy makes it easy to fight against it. By ensuring staff can collaborate effectively—and are incentivized to do so—you can avoid the negative effects of an organizational silo. Using a high-quality time tracker will make the process easier—while offering many benefits for your firm’s productivity.