How to encourage collaboration and break down silos in remote teams?

Abstract

Purpose

One of the issues concerning businesses today, which are reconfiguring the workplace towards more remote working, is avoiding the build-up of “silos” – teams, which operate as sealed off windowless units within the business. These interfere with the creation and maintenance of a one-team culture within your organisation.

Design/methodology/approach

With everyone working from home, this situation can potentially become even more difficult to address. Teams may meet regularly over digital channels but they likely have less contact with the people in the wider organisation, who they do not work with directly. If you were to map the points of contact in your organisation, you would see that remote working in many organisations is very much reducing them and confining them to within teams. So, in remote teams, there is more of a need than ever for HR professionals and business leaders to work to break down silos to keep the one team culture.

Findings

Here are some tips from the author’s experience for breaking down silos in remote teams: create opportunities for more relaxed social interactions, focus on the customer experience and share information across the organisation.

Originality/value

There may be opportunities for these underused skills to be deployed in another area of the business. But if the resource availability is not visible, that is less likely to happen. Equally, if each team does not share what it is doing in an up to date and accessible way, other teams will end up stepping on their toes. So, having a way of sharing accurate, real-time information across the business underpins the effort of working together in a unified and efficient way.

Citation

Edwards, S. (2020), "How to encourage collaboration and break down silos in remote teams?", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 157-158. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-05-2020-0043