Collaboration defined simply is two or more people working together toward a shared goal. Putting it into an organizational context, collaboration refers to the process of how one function feeds into the other to accomplish a common goal.

Over the years, meetings have become a linchpin for cross-functional collaboration. The number of meetings has doubled during the last two years of the pandemic-and yet collaboration across the meeting lifecycle (before, during and after the meeting) is broken. Phrases such as Zoom fatigue is a testimony to how we use meetings and lack of productivity from it.

As business professionals, we attend a lot of meetings but the information discussed is often siloed among the meeting participants. The intelligence derived from these meetings (internal or customer-facing) never becomes common knowledge to people across functions in the organization.