The idea – and the complaint – that safety and health departments operate out of organizational “silos” has been around for decades. You can trace it back to the creation of OSHA in 1971. Safety and health became a compliance policing function in many companies. And many employers were angered at OSHA’s sudden intrusion into their operations. As a result, management put safety and health departments and personnel in a silo separated from mainstream business activity. For some employers angered at OSHA, the further distance between safety and the rest of the operations, the better.  And so, in a number of business-case scenarios, began safety’s segregation – a cause of frustration, resentment and insecurity for many safety and health professionals that persists to this day.

But the silo syndrome or mentality in corporations does not single out safety and health. Organizations of the twenty-first century continue to rely on time-tested forms of organizational structure built during the twentieth century, and perhaps the most common is the cultural cluster of silos. The idea is rooted in the towering grain silos that dominate the North American plains, protecting wheat and corn from rain and snow. It’s important that different grains remain separate, and hard to get at.