The Impact of Silos

By Matt Troxell, Costco, & Tyler McGary, Avant

Imagine a situation where you get flooded with contacts coming in to all channels and you have no idea where they’re coming from. Your chat queues are completely inundated, with those customers simultaneously calling your 800 number to see how they might get serviced first. The agents are overwhelmed, the Real-Time team can’t react fast enough, and your forecasters have no idea how this happened. The easiest explanation—SILOS!

After some digging, you come to find out that your senior leadership worked with the marketing team to send out a massive email blast to your entire customer base announcing the deal of the century, which in most cases would be great news for your business and your shareholders. Unfortunately, the only team that wasn’t in the loop was the Workforce team. This oversight not only caused stress and craziness for frontline employees, but it also created discontent among your customer base who now can’t get the service they’ve come to expect from your organization. This is a story that so many of us have run into, but it’s a story that could be completely avoidable by getting WFM a seat at the table.

So how does this happen? One of the best things you can do is to educate. Talk to the other leadership teams and build alliances. In many cases, the other departments may not know how much goes into this planning and they are operating within their team’s knowledge and wheelhouse. Workforce Management can be an area that many in your organization are either unfamiliar with, or unclear on all the impacts they have to the business, service levels, and ultimately your organization’s bottom line. Bringing all teams together and seeing a clear vision as one solid unit can help to knock down these silos and bridge the gap between groups.

Understanding Silos and The Challenges They Present

There are many different silos across all organizations. Operations, Marketing, IT, and HR are just a few of the more common ones in play. Identifying all of these silos is the first step in breaking them down. Once identified there are a few key things to keep in mind when beginning the process of breaking the silos:

1. What is the “political” landscape of the organization?
   • Who do you need to communicate with to gain traction on issues?
2. What are the impact and priorities of these groups?
   • Use this to your benefit to create a win-win situation where possible impacts are communicated ahead of time to WFM to work with them to achieve the desired results.
3. Is there a lack of communication and sharing of information?
   • Are the geographic differences or cultural differences that are causing these challenges?
4. Are there new key contacts in some departments?
   • Keep an eye on organizational changes and restructuring so that you are updated on these changes.
5. Do you not have the right tools in place to do the job?
   • Review current processes, procedures, and tools to make sure you have the information to take to other areas of the organization when challenges are present.

Strategies for Breaking The Silos

Everyone has silos in their organization. Now that we know how to approach many of those silos in our organization we need an action plan to connect WFM to those silos. Sometimes this is as simple as setting up a meeting with members of that group or sending a quick email. Other times navigating these silos can feel like a never-ending maze. There are a few ways we have used to gain traction with these groups and senior leadership:

1. Create clear roles and responsibilities for WFM and Operations.
   • This not only clarifies the WFM team but helps when Operations or other groups need information from us.
2. Clarify decision rights.
   • Knowing who the major stakeholders are and ultimately the person(s) responsible for any major decision helps the entire organization.
3. Get leadership onboard.
   • Getting your senior leadership on board is going to make the entire process smoother and will assist in closing any gaps identified in the previous two exercises.
4. Co-locate teams when and where possible.
   • A lot can be accomplished between teams that share the same break room as they will interact naturally during the course of working together.
5. Create cross-functional teams.
   • Challenges that WFM and other teams encounter can be worked through with teams made up of the different groups and functions.
6. Create two-in-a-box leadership.
   • Having two leaders responsible for overlapping parts of the organization allows more agile response to emerging challenges.
7. Create shared accountabilities between WFM and different teams or groups in the organization.
   • In many organizations, WFM is responsible for service level delivery, but doesn’t have direct control of the agent population so having operations and WFM responsible creates a mutually beneficial arrangement.

The journey to connect the silos at your organization is unique to your organization. These are just some of the common strategies that we have employed in our careers. Remember, the journey can sometimes be long and difficult with new challenges presenting them.

Ours Not Theirs

At the end of the day everyone has the organization’s best interest as their goal. The marketing team doesn’t send emails out with the plan to cause service level to drop and occupancy to go up in the contact center. IT didn’t update the website to cause customer complaints and handle time to go up. All of it was done with the best intentions for the customer and organization as a whole.

This is the most critical point to remember when working to break the silos in your organization. Success is everyone’s goal and together we are all stronger together. Aim to foster successful working relationships not just within WFM but everyone in your organization.

Matt Troxell is Costco Services Manager at Costco Wholesale.  He may be reached at matt.troxell@costco.com.  Tyler McGary, CWPP, is Senior Workforce Manager at Sun Life Financial.  He may be reached at tylmce@gmail.com.  Matt and Tyler presented a session at the 2020 Virtual Summit for WFM on this topic.