Rethinking Employee Experience: Breaking isolation, not silos

Silos isn't the enemy, it’s the isolation that breeds as an outcome of silos. It’s time to rethink employee experience and recognize where to dissolve the silos and encourage cross-functional conversations

- Bhavna Sarin

When looking at an organization’s overall components, be it people, infrastructure, expenses, or revenue pockets, it helps to break them down into individual segments based on their function and similarities in characteristics, and then focus on the one segment at a time. This concept of segmentation, in other words, silos, is often helpful to bring structure into the organization but ends up creating an invisible distance that is likely to keep the organization from reaching its potential, despite having the best in-house talent.

Structure is critical, and there are no two ways about that. With variations in the size of the business, geographical spread, and multiple functionalities, it is essential to have a mold to define each unit within the organization with an individual set of expectations and goals. What gets missed out often is tying up these individual goals and standards of conduct to an overall unified organizational vision, which if done would not only increase the chances of profitability and revenue but also contribute to creating a unified employee experience, with clarity in expectations, a common big picture to work towards and individual goals to help move forward towards the bigger picture.

Silos isn't the enemy though. The enemy is not knowing where to dissolve the silos and encourage cross-functional conversations and brainstorming sessions to come up with the best solutions. There is a famous saying that goes like this:

There is nothing wrong with silos. The actual problem is isolation!

The issue again isn’t silos, but the inability to recognize when to bring down those walls and allow free-flowing two-way communication.