As social business gathers momentum through enterprise adoption of social technologies, the inevitable shift to breaking down organisational silos towards a more social organism will become evident. This will create opportunities to do things differently, as three generations of workers collide in the workplace. The legacy of silos causes many problems in terms of knowledge mobilisation, agility of response to disruptive market forces in terms of strategic decision making and overall engagement of the workforce.

Jack Welch deemed speed to be of the utmost importance to business advantage. The transition from predominantly control and command structures that have dominated historically towards a more informal system will demand new practices and novel interventions in order to accelerate the workplace satisfaction quotient and encourage employees to co-operate together in a contemporary business climate. This video outlines the problem and solution : The lowest levels of engagement ever measured

A recent blog piece published by the RSA indicated that ‘most organisations want their employees to be more engaged. Most individuals want to contribute and to find meaning at work. Yet research suggests that more than two thirds of people are not engaged with how they spend their working hours. Instead of contributing their creativity, employees seem numbed by work, stressed by seemingly unreasonable demands and, in the UK, absent to the tune of 180 million days a year. This carries with it significant costs to the individual, to business and to society’.

It’s likely that silo culture does much to engender the disengagement factor and to apparent bottom line cost as well as trust factors, a key contributor to job satisfaction. How long before businesses realise that a failure to tackle the silo issue by encouraging a greater collaborative culture is very real, financially measurable and potentially damaging to the future survival of the organisation? As Jack said ‘The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important and then get out of their way while they do it’.