How a Siloed Departmental Culture impedes Service Quality Delivery

Does the siloed departmental culture in which you reside impede or promote customer success through service quality delivery?

Consider findings from the 2017 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends study (and the 2018 study builds on these findings). In this report, tomorrow’s workplaces are characterized by networks of interoperable teams. However, when today’s business models remain stuck in siloed departmental cultures, the workplace resembles an assembly-line mindset. Input-throughput-output is linear.

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When a siloed departmental culture is your workplace norm, the relationship between people and processes is linear.  

When you work in a departmental silo, and hand off output to someone else in another silo, you both develop professional myopia regarding how service quality impacts your customers. Not only that.

The culture within these siloed departments often discourages employees from defining the networks of colleagues, outside of their own function, which are critical to service quality delivery. As a result, after output is handed off to “someone” on the other side of a departmental silo (throwing your output over the wall to someone else, as I recently heard in a Quality speech), this work often is perceived as someone else’s problem moving forward.

How QMS-focused and collaborative is that mindset, model, strategy and process?

So, how do you transform a siloed departmental culture into a vibrant, engaged and interconnected one?

First, consider the reality of the workplace, regardless of whether the business model promotes a siloed departmental culture or not. No matter what your business model looks like on paper, in reality, the workplace is non-linear and involves lots of people and processes.

Each workday represents a multitude of continuous handoffs of input, throughput and output. Now, in enlightened, holistic organizations the business model morphs into flattened hierarchical structures. As a result, the culture continuously operates with a sight line laser-focused on the customer – and one other. Consequently, service quality delivery is directly correlated with human capital strategy, the value stream and the customer’s measurable success.

The best way to discover whether your organization is characterized by a siloed departmental culture is to consider whether you know what happens next.

Or, alternatively, whether -or not – you care to know what happens next, after you complete your work. Then, you have your answer: interconnected vs siloed departmental culture.

If you feel your output ceases to be your problem once it is handed off to the next person, service quality delivery suffers. So does customer success. The right hand does not really know (or understand) what the left hand is doing. 

It matters not whether you are part of a sales culture where you are compensated for competing against one another and external competitors. Or, whether you are part of a Quality, technical or engineering culture based on collaborative problem-solving.

When you literally are unable to:

1. walk a contract through the front door of your company;
2. across the organization to everyone who touches that contract; and
3. out the loading dock and into your client’s house;
4. how can you best contribute to your organization’s value stream?

Time to rethink how a siloed departmental culture impedes service quality delivery? You can create extraordinary and enduring client outcomes by extending the boundaries of your imagination, creativity, innovation, competition and collaboration beyond the confines of your siloed mindset.

What are you waiting for?

A little bit uncomfortable? Good. You have started moving one millimeter forward. Let’s continue, shall we?

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Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™ serves organizations as a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention, especially in challenging Industrial Internet of Things environments. Babette’s playbook of IIoT team collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.

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