Are Knowledge Silos Sabotaging Your Productivity?
Practical Tips to Connect Teams and Share Knowledge
Hi, this is Samuel from Enginuity 👋 This post is part of the Tech Leadership track and focuses on boosting engineering productivity by identifying and breaking down knowledge silos.
You can find all three tracks in the main menu of the Enginuity Newsletter.
“30% of developers say knowledge silos impact their productivity ten or more times per week.” — StackOverflow
If your team suffers from a lack of cross-organization knowledge sharing, you are not alone. Knowledge silos are a productivity killer, frustrating developers and slowing down innovation.
But why do they happen? And more importantly, how can you prevent them from forming?
Let’s examine their root causes and practical, no-nonsense advice on preventing them and eliminating them if they’re already causing chaos.
Why Knowledge Silos Matter?
Knowledge silos happen when information, skills, or expertise are confined to specific individuals or teams rather than being shared across the organization.
They are often created unintentionally by incorrect processes, lack of communication, or even a sense of ownership over information.
When it happens, it becomes difficult for others to access it, leading to slower decision-making, slower collaboration, and duplication of effort.
Knowledge silos are a significant productivity blocker.
The 2024 StackOverflow Developer Survey shows the real impact of knowledge silos:
45% of developers report that knowledge silos negatively impact their productivity three or more times a week.
45% of developers say that these silos prevent them from getting their ideas across the organization.
Think about it—almost half of your team is frustrated several times a week because they can’t find the information they need or their ideas are stuck in the same feedback loop.
Knowledge silos don't just waste time. They kill momentum and slow down creativity.
Root Causes of Knowledge Silos
Organizational Structure
Isolated Teams: When teams are too isolated or too specialized, they usually develop their own processes and their way of working.
This specialization can lead to “us vs. them” thinking, where teams focus more on their tasks than the organization's goals. This leads to a fragmented organization where knowledge doesn’t cross team boundaries.Information Flows Only Vertically: Many traditional organizations are hierarchical. Information flows up and down the chain of command but rarely horizontally.
This means knowledge is locked within departments. Employees may feel they have no voice and valuable knowledge never reaches decision-makers or other teams who could benefit from it.
Cultural Factors
A Culture of Control: In some organizations, information is treated as a commodity — something that gives power to those who hold it. This is called the “information is power” mindset.
Teams or individuals might withhold information intentionally, believing it makes them irreplaceable and protects their status.Lack of Trust Between Teams: Teams become protective when they fear sharing knowledge will expose their weaknesses or lead to negative feedback.
One cause can be a highly competitive environment where departments compete against each other — for headcount, bonuses, praise… you name it. Without trust, knowledge remains confined to its original holders.
Lack of Tools and Processes
Absence of Effective Knowledge-Sharing: Without dedicated platforms for sharing knowledge, information gets lost in emails, Slack discussions, or ad-hoc documents. Teams spend valuable time reinventing the wheel because they can’t access existing resources or learnings.
Inadequate Onboarding: Onboarding is a time for sharing knowledge. And many companies struggle at this critical phase. When new employees don’t know where to find the information or who to ask, knowledge silos are created from day one.
How to Prevent Knowledge Silos
Knowledge sharing must be a fundamental part of your company culture. This is the only proactive approach that works.
Teams should be encouraged to hold regular cross-functional meetings to discuss ongoing projects, share learnings, and openly ask questions. These can be regular meetings organized by a “virtual” horizontal group:
Guilds: A"guild" is a group formed around shared interests like frontend guild, backend guild, machine learning guild, or product design guild. These guilds meet regularly to share best practices, discuss challenges, and collaboratively solve problems.
Architecture Review Sessions: These sessions open up technical decision-making to the whole organization. Everyone can participate as a passive listener to gain knowledge or as an active contributor to influence decisions. This ensures everyone has visibility and can contribute their insights.
Meetups: Whether in a longer form or a lightning talk format, these sessions are open to anyone to share knowledge internally and, at the same time, offer an opportunity to gain experience in presenting to a broader audience.
Effective Knowledge Management
The single must-have, non-negotiable functionality your knowledge management tool (Confluence, Notion, etc.) must support is effective searching. Luckily, with LLMs being integrated into these tools, searching is becoming more and more effective.
Even if your knowledge base is spread across multiple platforms (wikis, docs, chats, etc.), having a centralized search (tools like Glean) across all of them will tie all these sources together in one knowledge-sharing platform.
But still, two problems need to be addressed:
(1) This sounds great on paper, but most of the documentation becomes obsolete quickly, and no one reads it anyway.
Minimum Viable Documentation (MVD)
The purpose of writing documentation is not to produce a lot of text. It’s to capture the most vital knowledge about the reasoning behind crucial decisions and fundamental principles (architecture, protocols, etc.).
Minimum Viable Documentation focuses on capturing only the essential knowledge people need to perform their jobs effectively. This keeps it relevant and actionable for the whole time of its existence.
(2) Writing documentation is a tedious process. Where and how should I even start?
Standardized Documentation
When everyone uses the same templates and tools for documenting their work, much of the work can be automated.
Engineers do not need to think about “Where should I create the documentation?” or “I’m not good at writing. How and what to write?”. They generate a predefined skeleton for the document, fill in the blanks, and it becomes part of the searchable shared knowledge.
Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) are a great example of embedding crucial knowledge directly into the codebase with a shared format and goal.
ADR is a short document that captures:
Problem
Important context
Alternative decisions
Chosen decision
Impact and consequences
By keeping these records close to the source code, developers always have the information they need to understand why specific decisions were made, who are the contact persons, and what their impact is.
How to Remove Existing Knowledge Silos
In case knowledge silos have already formed, a strategic approach is needed to create an environment where information flows freely.
All the techniques discussed above can be used, but apart from them, it’s important to understand what has caused these silos to form and how to tackle them as soon as possible:
Organizational Network Analysis
ONA can help visualize communication paths and identify isolated areas. By mapping out these connections, you can find the bottlenecks and areas where knowledge is trapped.
See this document from Delloite that explains Organizational Network Analysis in detail.
Rotating Team Members
One of the most effective ways to break down silos is to rotate team members across different teams. Ideally, the teams or individuals that you have identified via ONA as holding the most knowledge or the ones that are the most isolated.
Benefits:
knowledge exchange
building relationships between teams
sharing best practices in team processes
gaining a different point of view on the product
Team members should ideally be rotated at the beginning of a new product or a feature development so rotated members get a whole end-to-end experience with the hosting team.
Summary: Take Action
Knowledge silos are a common and costly problem, but they are not impossible to overcome.
Don’t wait for someone else to solve this problem. Start by sharing what you know and documenting your work—improve your team’s knowledge base, host a cross-team knowledge-sharing session, or propose ADRs. When others see you taking the action, they’ll follow.
And never underestimate the power of curiosity. The more questions you ask, the more you learn and the more connections you build across your organization.
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