Collaborating Across Departments: The No Silo Rule
When we look at companies like Apple and Tesla, it’s hard not to notice that their company culture of collaboration is leaps and bounds ahead of their competition. In fact, if you zoom in on their marketing messaging, you’ll notice that they are leading with purpose, not product. This methodology extends beyond what their stakeholders and customers see. It’s deeply ingrained in how they run their operations.
Companies that see departments as parts of a whole, not silos, are more likely to achieve long-term success than those that don’t communicate. For example, when the iPod was released, there was already a myriad of other mp3 players on the scene. Additionally, there were competing streaming and download services out there.
Apple won the mp3 player game because the company didn’t break itself into divisions. Success belonged to everyone. Empowerment belonged to everyone. An unhealthy relationship many leaders have towards their duties is to control as much as possible. It’s an innate human desire to know the outcome of a situation and thereby not have to manage our own expectations. If we structure our organizations in the way we feel is correct, we’ve already set ourselves up for failure.
Why Structures Don’t Work
Structures are complex and don’t foster collaborative communication and cohesion. Instead of encouraging departments to align to achieve overarching goals, we are setting up invisible red tape within the organization that complicates communication flows and stalls productivity. Silos are just that, placing your people into walled structures that don’t enable a flow.
By decentralizing, we can better achieve our goals and relinquish control. Managers of different divisions can understand how everyone is working together, thus enabling the innovators to ideate and the company to achieve long-term growth. Not understanding what other departments are doing contributes to a silo-ed structure. Information is walled in and suddenly, people are working as marketers, IT, or operations personnel, not as the team members under the umbrella of the company. This poses the question, “How do we decentralize such that work is getting done in the most effective way possible and information is freely available?” The answer lies in infrastructure, namely, software.
Some Chief Knowledge Management Officers are tasked with taking all the company information and centralizing it. This actually wastes resources because they’ll create a wiki that not many people will use and creating controlled access is more difficult. Team members need tools that everyone can seamlessly use that are also updated in real-time, not when one person is tasked with it.
Collaboration Through Powerful Software
Productivity and management software should above all, save time for the users. It’s not about maintaining control, it’s about enabling empowered ownership. In one platform, they should be able to communicate via chat and email, collaborate on documents, conduct meetings, track progress on projects, and access needed information to complete tasks. This structure enables anyone, from any team, to reach who they need to reach to get the job done quicker. It’s also bridging knowledge gaps and ensuring that people understand exactly how all the puzzle pieces fit together.
Productivity and management software should solve problems and save time, not vice versa. Tuqqi is creating the future of work through its highly intuitive collaboration platform. Tuqqi’s founders saw the need for centralizing every necessary tool in order to save time and energy on the job. In one platform, users can chat, email, track project completion, call, email, hold meetings, and access the information they need to move work forward.