Last month I was in Baton Rouge for, among other things, the Public Relations Association of Louisiana’s (PRAL) June meeting. The featured speaker was SSA Consultants partner Christel Slaughter, whose emotional plea was for everyone in the audience to “Stop The Silos!” as the first step in improving internal and external employee engagement.

Silos are a popular marketing metaphor for the formal compartmentalization of personnel, departments and functions. Silos not in the agricultural sense, but in the org chart ability to keep contents separate; corn from wheat, rice from peanuts, sales from marketing, pr from advertising, progression from regression – a.k.a., bureaucracy run amok.Cristel’s message was all about improving employee efficiencies by breaking down artificial barriers that exist more out of custom than necessity. The larger lesson is that a web 3.0 world no longer has the luxury of maintaining a corporate structure that segregates talent and stifles cooperation.

The problem revealed in hierarchies that continue to foster formal distinctions along familiar fault lines is that whether you’re talking about internal employee communications or leveraging social media, the very nature of silos is to propogate internal competition at a time when business survival requires maximum utilization of resources.

Breaking down silos doesn’t translate into HR suddenly adding PR functionality to their brief. It does promise that better communication between various departments and admin levels will naturally result in decreased tension and a lighter atmosphere that’s almost certain to deliver better, brighter, faster results.