What Happens in a Company Where People Work in Silos? Here’s a Walkthrough

Imagine you’re a developer in a company where you use dozens of apps to manage projects. 

You don’t really know what you need to work on. 

You don’t know what others are working on.

And, yet, as always, your team is expected to deliver quality work, and on time.

What problems do you encounter? 

How do you handle them? 

Can your projects even see the light of day if you’re in the dark about who should be working on what?

Let’s find out.

A head’s up — while the story you’re about to read is fictional, it’s very much inspired by real-life experiences of working in siloed companies. 

Whether my friend, family member, or colleague, real people experienced every one of the following situations.

Phase 1: You’re green and unassuming

Even though the recruitment process took 3 months, you are finally formally accepted to the company.

You get put into one of the many teams working on a big project but are then awkwardly seated far away from any team members. This is a bummer, but you decide to focus on work. 

In the next few weeks, you’re frustrated having to take the long walk over to your team members whenever you have a question. Most of the time, the walk doesn’t even pay off since the answers are vague and contradictory.

On the other hand, your manager is MIA most days. He doesn’t respond to most of your messages, and you think he must be very busy. With no input from the manager and little use of your peers, you can only hope you are doing an okay job.

Phase 2: Something’s off

Whenever you complete a task, you notify your manager. As you agreed during onboarding, you contact him via text.

But he rarely answers, so you’re not sure if you’re doing a good job. Reluctantly, you ask your colleagues how they communicate with him. 

Weirdly, they all send him emails. They don’t know why, other than that “that’s what everyone’s doing, I guess”. 

So, you go back to your desk and email your manager. Surely — surely — he’ll read it.

Phase 3: You’re on your own

One day, you finish your task, and you’re faced with an unavoidable question — what should you do next? You didn’t get any notifications, and nobody contacted you about it. This is pressing since you can’t just sit around idly at work.

So, you do the most logical thing — message the manager.

And the next day, you send him an email. 

The day after that, you call him.

For the millionth time, you try his office — not there, again. You leave a message with your manager’s assistant. Lots of last year’s PTO to spend, they muse.

Well, it seems like that PTO stretches for over a couple of weeks. That whole time, you are coming to work to twiddle your thumbs, yet nobody seems to notice. 

Finally, your manager answers — over a text message. You’re down to work again, like nothing happened. 

But something is off. Turns out the manager was laid off. You can cut the tension with a knife.

Phase 4: Clients are on their own

A new task has you refer to the sales team.

You ask your team members, but barely anyone seems to know who works in sales — a coworker finally refers you to his friend in sales.

The sales team is a mess. You want to ask about a client, but it’s hard to pin down whose client it is. At first, nobody knows. Then, 3 people claim the client.

You ask how clients like the new feature you built, but it appears sales didn’t even know there was one. You explain what you’ve been working on to the sales team, and they are thrilled to have something new to offer to clients. 

You promise to come over whenever you know something new is up. This seems to lift the atmosphere in the sales office.

You overhear a conversation with a client, where they complain about how many times your company called them. They say everyone offered them different packages, and all at different prices. 

That’s all you hear before you remember you shouldn’t even be able to hear this conversation — as the client isn’t even aware you can hear them.

Phase 6: Everyone’s on their own

Your team remains managerless for the foreseeable future. Instead, you are temporarily appointed as team leader.

By this point, you are tired of the way things are going and call up a meeting with your team. About 40% of them actually show up.

You mull over how to get the team back on track. You read online about important project management skills and figure leadership is the one you need to work on.

So, you motivate your team as best as you can and show them how this product’s success can become their collective success.

There is just one issue — your team can’t decide how you should notify them of their tasks. 

One team member likes IM apps. Another prefers email. Another can only be reached through his social media account. And no one will budge on their preference, citing that no collaboration software is mandatory at the company level.

So you send a request to standardize communication in your team. While waiting, you try to keep up with all of the messages in so many apps. 

But you keep getting them mixed up. You fail to notice when a team member misses their shift, and you keep getting lost in a sea of information. Using an online calendar is insufficient. 

Phase 7: You’re in too deep

After some waiting, your request to introduce a standardized communication tool is approved. You think the best option is to create a group chat.

It didn’t cross your mind that, the thing with group chats is no one likes their phone to blow up with group messages, most of which do not concern them directly. So, most team members just mute it.

But the real issue emerges when you send a message saying “Can someone *do a task*?”

At first, no one replies, and then multiple people just send you the completed task. To avoid this repeating, you clarify that only the first person who replies should do the task. 

However, some people seem to have missed that message, and you keep receiving 2 to 3 copies of the same completed tasks. 

You conclude that his solution is inadequate. As productivity is dropping, you are scolded by the branch manager.

Game over

One of your team members quits soon after, dissatisfied with the working conditions. However, you are misinformed about it. 

All you are told by the branch manager is: “We had to let go of them. They weren’t meeting expectations, so let that be a lesson to all of you. We can’t tolerate this disorganization anymore.”

A week later, you go up to your office front doors, but to your surprise — your keycard isn’t working. You call a coworker to check what’s up.

“Of course it’s not working. The branch closed down, we bankrupted. How did you not know?” is the response you get. “There should be an email about it somewhere in your inbox.”

Ah, of course.

An email.

But, what if?

Let’s rewind time for a moment when there was still time to escape this fiasco.

What if, back then, the branch manager thought “There must be a better way to do this.” Not just communication but everything — the issues everyone could see that kept popping up out of the woodwork as soon as you spoke to any employee at the company.

Let’s say they wanted to pivot to an online solution. But after searching through many project management tools, there was an issue — they didn’t want to spend a dime on a tool they’d never used before.

So, they searched for the most beneficial free version of project management software — and came across Plaky.

How Plaky solved your company’s issues

Your team was the first to transition — as development, it made the most sense. You realized how easy to learn and intuitive it was, and soon, every team was using it.

As a team leader, Plaky solved many of your own issues — setting clear tasks and tracking deadlines took almost no effort. The extra transparency meant everyone knew what their teammates were working on, so no two people worked on the same task.

Communication also became much easier. With a PM tool came improved project collaboration, and no message was left unseen.

Using comments, you had no issue notifying whoever needed to be informed. With @mentions, no one was overflowed with notifications that were unnecessary to their work.

After the initial introduction to Plaky, the productivity of your team skyrocketed. Now that all communication obstacles had been dealt with, every team worked together without any communication issues.

After seeing this rise in productivity, the branch manager decided to upgrade to Plaky’s paid plans.

The new features they could use proved useful in combating all issues that had existed in the organization. The branch manager could see what every team was working on and get any information he needed in a couple of seconds. 

The sales team used Plaky’s CRM template to track clients and avoid any confusion.

Every team manager encountered the same benefits you did — every team had a personalized board with customized fields for their needs. Some used labels to track project resources. 

They used the summary row to track when tasks were due or how many were urgent.

Even the recruitment pipeline was improved, using Plaky’s recruitment template. You had your company’s productivity soar, with record profits — all due to resolving their communication issues.

Break the silos — use Plaky

Unfortunately, the stories that inspired this one didn’t have a happy ending. The big issue was — the companies involved didn’t look for solutions. 

So, if you notice an issue in your organization’s communication — for example, you see that other team members don’t know who’s working on what — suggest using a project management tool. Or better yet, don’t wait for them to show up — avoid them completely by being proactive. We promise it’ll make your work much easier.

If you want to avoid these common pitfalls and many similar stories that we didn’t have the time to include, try using a project management tool. Plaky’s extensive free plan will make a big difference in your project collaboration, so check it out and sign up for a free account today.