Is your team working in silos? Do you feel like everyone is doing their own thing without collaborating with each other? Let's talk about how we can break these silos and get everyone working together.
Are you familiar with the phrase "working in a silo"? It refers to people working in isolation without sharing information or communicating with their team members.
Silos can be helpful in larger teams as they allow different departments to focus on their own projects without getting distracted by irrelevant information.
However, in smaller teams, silos often occur when leaders fail to establish clear communication and shared processes among team members. For virtual teams, it's so important to be intentional about involving everyone and creating resources to keep them engaged and in communication with each other.
Are you unintentionally creating silos?
Are you unsure of how to position or prepare your leadership support properly to create a supportive hierarchy?
Are you working 1:1 with each team member vs. encouraging collaboration?
Are you the sole source of knowledge, giving feedback and sharing updates with multiple people for the same process?
Denise the owner of a non-profit organization called The Alexander Street Project. For over 5 years, she worked tirelessly on her own before finally getting some support. Now, she has three long-term contractors working with her: an Operations Manager, a Graphic Designer, and a Social Media Manager.
Denise is excited about growing her team and hopes to make these roles full-time. However, she's finding it challenging to manage the team effectively. With the three contractors reporting to her for feedback, next steps, and directives, it's creating more work for her. She's been trying her best to have weekly 1:1's, send tasks, and provide feedback as quickly as possible. But unfortunately, things aren't flowing as smoothly as she hoped.
Denise reached out to The Digital Jane for help in defining her team's roles and creating the necessary systems and processes to work together effectively.
✅ Together, we identified the need to improve the team's communication. We set up a Slack workspace that reduces the back-and-forth emails and gives the team designated communication channels.
✅ We also repositioned the Operations Manager to be a true "2nd" to Denise. The Operations Manager now collaborates with the other support team members, oversees the processes that they mutually share, and acts as the first point of contact before anyone reaches out to Denise.
✅ We worked with the team to streamline their marketing and campaign planning process, including how the content calendar is managed, approval timelines, and processes for client projects. By revamping their processes, the team can now work together more effectively and efficiently, without solely relying on Denise.
Denise's busy schedule of in-person events and meetings made it necessary to make adjustments to prevent her from becoming a bottleneck due to her limited availability. As a result, the Operations Manager started leading a weekly social media call to ensure smooth progress.
Although the following reel was recorded some time ago, it serves as an example:
If your team is working in silos, here are a few things we can help you with to bring communication together:
Implementing one meeting with all contractors instead of a bunch of separate ones.
We can create custom processes within your project management system to keep everyone updated on progress.
We'll help you launch a new communication hub for the team so that you can share general updates and encourage communication about projects.
Let's document how everyone's work should flow. We'll create custom processes that outlines what each person is responsible for and the timeline for their tasks, and gather all the resources and folders that anyone coming in to support might need
If this sounds like what you need, schedule a quick informal call with me here and let's discuss how we can help.
Until next Tuesday, have a wonderful and productive week!
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