People Working in Silos

Lately I’ve started noticing another shift that is increasingly more important for me to address. Departments are becoming compartmentalized and I’ve noticed that we’ve got too many people working in silos. This is affecting collaboration, increases likelihood of error and certainly doesn’t stimulate growth as a company. I started to think about ways to combat this problem and I came up with something that we implemented today.

We added big white boards to the main hallways of our office. These hallways are the primary access way to every office in the building; so naturally people are walking by these whiteboards all the time. I broke the whiteboards into sections for different departments: Development, Customer Service, Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Business Development and Operations. In each section I listed initiatives or “to-do’s” for different people within the applicable department.

What I’m hoping this will achieve is two-fold. First, I will gain some much needed visibility into what’s going on in each department. Second, people within each department will get a sense of what’s going on with the company as a whole; and how what they are doing may impact, or be impacted, by initiatives in another area of the organization.

We’ll see if it works. I was encouraged today as I saw many people who normally wouldn’t know what was going on in other areas of the company, stop and study the boards. One person said “ah, I see, I didn’t realize we were doing that.”

As my dad always said, throw a bunch of stuff out there and see what sticks.