Hybrid work has left us in silos. How do we get people across functions talking again?
Silos are what happens when the informal room disappears. Hybrid work removed the corridor, the canteen and the ten minutes before a meeting, and no channel replaces them. What rebuilds trust across functions is doing something together that has no agenda, no function and an audible consequence when somebody stops listening. Singing does that faster than any other shared activity that has been tested against it, and it does it for a whole floor in a day.
The short answer. Silos are what happens when the informal room disappears. Hybrid work removed the corridor, the canteen and the ten minutes before a meeting, and no channel replaces them. What rebuilds trust across functions is doing something together that has no agenda, no function and an audible consequence when somebody stops listening. Singing does that faster than any other shared activity that has been tested against it, and it does it for a whole floor in a day.
- Its name in a budget line
- Cross functional collaboration. Belonging. Breaking the barrier between teams.
- The programme
- Paadi Munneram, Let us Sing. One day, seven working hours, for mixed groups of up to sixty in one room. Larger groups run in parallel. Also available as a ninety minute opening.
- Where
- On your own site, in Kochi and across Kerala, and elsewhere in India for a full day or more. Eight people or more. No artistic background is assumed and nothing is graded.
What is actually going on.
Most of what held an organisation together was never in a process. It was in the informal room: the corridor, the canteen, the ten minutes before a meeting when someone from finance and someone from engineering discovered they had the same problem. Hybrid work removed that room and nobody noticed, because nothing on an org chart changed. Then the requests between functions became tickets, the tickets became slower, and each function began to describe the others as the problem.
You cannot schedule the informal room back into existence. A cross functional town hall is a formal room with a different name. What rebuilds trust between strangers is a shared activity with no function, and the evidence is specific about which one. Across seven months of adult education classes, singing groups bonded significantly faster than creative writing or craft groups. The comparison is the point: singing against other shared activity, not singing against nothing. The effect holds in groups of twenty and in a choir of 232.
A cross functional town hall is a formal room with a different name.
What a session does about it.
The room is mixed on purpose. Groups are built across functions, across levels and across the people who have only ever met as a name on a ticket. The day begins with games, because ice breaking is a real technique rather than a warm up, and a group that has been slightly ridiculous together has already crossed the barrier it came in with.
Then each group writes and sings its own song about what the work is actually like, in words that have to scan, which means finance and engineering have to agree on a sentence. Rehearsal makes dependability audible: if one voice comes in late everybody hears it, and the group repairs it in the next bar without a review. By the afternoon the people who arrived as functions have spent four hours depending on each other in public.
For an in house team that wants to keep the openings going, the twenty theatre and music games used across the day are available as a facilitator handbook.
How you would know it worked.
Psychological safety on the seven item team scale, before and at thirty days, read across the mixed groups rather than within the old teams.
Named behaviours rated by managers thirty to sixty days later. Does this person now pick up the phone to the other function before raising a ticket. Does a cross functional problem now get solved in a conversation rather than an escalation.
What we do not claim.
We do not claim that a day undoes a structure that rewards silos. If two functions are measured against each other, they will behave like rivals again within a month, and no song changes an incentive.
We claim that the people in the room will have depended on each other in public several hundred times, and that the informal room can be rebuilt from that. Keeping it open is Monday's job.
The full list is on one page, alongside the evidence and the claims we have retired.
In Kochi and Kerala.
Kerala's IT services firms and larger hospitals are where this question arrives from most often, usually after a return to office that brought people back into the same building without bringing them back into the same room. The session runs on your site, and for a whole floor at once the evening format, Unwind, takes a hundred people and more.
We work from Kochi and run sessions on the client's own site anywhere in Kerala. Elsewhere in India we travel for a full day or more. If you would rather meet before you book, here is how.
Related questions.
Hybrid work has left us in silos. How do we get people across functions talking again?
Silos are what happens when the informal room disappears. Hybrid work removed the corridor, the canteen and the ten minutes before a meeting, and no channel replaces them. What rebuilds trust across functions is doing something together that has no agenda, no function and an audible consequence when somebody stops listening. Singing does that faster than any other shared activity that has been tested against it, and it does it for a whole floor in a day.
Can this run for a large mixed group?
Up to around sixty in one room for the full day, with larger groups running in parallel. For a hundred people and more in one evening, Unwind is built for exactly that, though its purpose is recovery rather than collaboration and we will tell you which one your brief actually is.
Can our own people run the openings afterwards?
Yes. The twenty theatre and music games used across the day are available as a facilitator handbook for in house teams who want to run the openings themselves. The full day needs a working artist trained into facilitation, and that is what we bring.
Does it work for a team that has never met in person?
It works especially well for them, because the day is the first shared experience they have had that was not a call. Nobody is asked to talk about collaboration. They collaborate, for seven hours, on something that only works if everybody listens.
The informal room can be rebuilt in a day. Keeping it is Monday's job.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.