Collaboration at the core: Driving ROI in a disrupted world

C-suite Exchange: Turning collaboration from a buzzword into a business growth engine

In partnership with 

In an age defined by disruption—from global uncertainty to rapid technology acceleration—leaders face mounting pressure to prioritise investments that not only solve today’s challenges but also build long-term resilience. At the heart of this effort lies collaboration.

Far from being just a tool or buzzword, collaboration has become a strategic enabler. When embedded into culture, process, and technology, it drives organisational alignment, agility, and measurable ROI across cloud, automation, and security initiatives.

This C-suite exchange brought together executive leaders to share how they are harnessing collaboration to close gaps between people, processes, and platforms; empower distributed teams securely; and transform investment in collaboration into tangible business outcomes.

Collaboration isn’t soft anymore: Why leaders need a new way to measure it

For years collaboration has been treated as a cultural aspiration rather than a strategic capability. It sits in the vocabulary of modern work, but often without clarity. Teams collaborate in different ways. Tools overlap. Leaders know collaboration matters, yet struggle to explain how much it matters, or what, precisely, to improve.

New research from IDC and Shure suggests this is no longer sustainable. With AI accelerating disruption across industries, and employee expectations shifting again, collaboration has moved from a workplace ideal to a measurable driver of performance. It also comes with a cost that many organisations do not see: the cost of doing nothing.

This is where the idea of a Collaboration Quotient (CQ) comes in. CQ reframes collaboration as something that can be assessed, improved, and tied to business outcomes. For C-suite leaders, particularly in large or distributed organisations, it offers a timely way to understand where collaboration is helping and where it is quietly eroding value, as was enjoyed in a recent C-Suite Exchange, hosted by HotTopics, Shure, and IDC.

Collaboration is now a direct ROI lever

IDC’s starting point is simple: most leaders accept that better collaboration improves results, but few can quantify by how much. To bridge that gap, IDC analysed several hundred organisations across EMEA and built a calculator that traces the financial impact of common collaboration problems.

Some of the findings are stark. Meeting delays of ten minutes, averaged across a typical European workforce, translate into more than 16 percent of meeting-room time wasted. Poor integration between systems leads to repeated workarounds. Inadequate training means employees either call IT for support or default to gathering around a laptop and abandoning the room setup entirely.

These are familiar issues, but their cost is often hidden. According to IDC, collaboration ROI comes down to a simple formula: tech × process × people. 

Most organisations focus on the first. 

Far fewer consider whether their processes can support new tools, or whether people understand how to use them well enough to benefit. When any one of those variables is weak, the return collapses.

That explains the almost universal experience leaders have of buying technology without the right habits and workflows will not fix a collaboration problem. It may even make it harder for global teams to work together.

The iceberg leaders tend to miss

The research also highlights a second layer of value: the intangible benefits and risks that rarely make it into board papers but shape an organisation’s ability to perform.

One area is wellbeing. Studies show that poor audio quality increases cognitive load and stress. In IDC’s synthesis of the research, employees exposed to unclear, distorted or echo-heavy audio show rising physiological stress levels across the day. Many leaders have lived this experience themselves: the fatigue that follows a full day of hard-to-hear calls.

Another area is credibility and trust. Experiments from Yale and others demonstrate that speakers with clear, high-quality audio are judged as more intelligent, more trustworthy, and more compelling than the same speakers presented with degraded audio. Video quality matters too, but not as much as most people assume. When audio fails, a meeting fails. When video fails, people can often still work.

There is also the growing problem of meeting equity. Hybrid meetings can disadvantage both remote and in-room participants. Remote employees may struggle to be heard or identified correctly in transcripts. In-room groups, if forced to huddle around a laptop, appear as a single silent square while everyone else has a named presence. IDC found that this imbalance affects the one thing executives care about most: decision-making. The person with the answer may not be able to get their voice across.

These issues are hard to measure in a spreadsheet, yet they influence speed, culture, and customer outcomes.

Why generational differences matter

A notable feature of IDC’s findings is the split between generations. When asked how to improve meetings, younger leaders prioritised better audio and video. Older leaders prioritised clearer agendas and defined outcomes. Both are right—and both represent parts of the CQ equation.

Where both groups aligned, however, was on the importance of high-quality audio and visual tools. Around two-thirds cited AV solutions as the most beneficial for collaboration and productivity. After that, their preferred tools diverged: chat and AI for younger groups; email and phone for older ones.

These differences matter because they influence adoption patterns, training needs, and expectations of what “good collaboration” looks like.

Of course, not all organisations collaborate in the same way, as was raised during the audience Q&A portion of the C-Suite Exchange.

One of IDC’s most useful contributions is the shift away from simple categories like “small vs large” or “hybrid vs office-first”. Instead, it groups organisations into archetypes based on their complexity and collaboration intensity:

• Orchestral organisations: high complexity, high collaboration. Often global, cross-functional, and dependent on real-time coordination. These groups gain the most from enterprise-grade AI and integrated systems.
  
  
• Jazz organisations: low complexity, high collaboration. Often mid-size or regional, where agility and interpersonal connection matter more than scale.
  
  
• High-complexity, low-collaboration ‘electronic’ organisations: such as some financial services groups, where rigid structures can limit teamwork despite significant digital maturity.
  
  
• Rock organisations: low complexity, low collaboration. Stable, steady, and often focused on efficiency.
  
  

This matters because each type has different pain points, risks, and opportunities. CQ gives leaders a way to understand which levers are worth pulling for their context.

AI has entered the collaboration conversation rapidly

As attendees discussed and learned, AI adoption is rising quickly, reshaping collaboration in several ways.

The first wave has centered on transcription—a simple but powerful use case. Yet even here, quality matters. AI transcription is only as accurate as the audio it receives. A misheard word can shift intent (“consulting” becoming “insulting”) or distort a record of decisions.

The next wave includes real-time language translation, guided sales and service tools, improved developer productivity, and automation across workflows. For global organisations, particularly those with multilingual teams, these advances could remove major friction points. But again, accuracy is everything.

AI is also influencing employee behaviour. IDC notes increased investment in AI tools, rising expectations for better training, and a slight shift in return-to-office patterns as organisations try to balance collaboration needs with productivity.

What leaders should do now

A few takeaways stand out for the C-suite, as put forward by the C-suite audience:

1. Understand your collaboration problems before buying solutions.
   Most organisations share the same friction points: meeting delays, poor audio, weak integration, insufficient training, and unused rooms or tools.
   
   
2. Quantify the cost of doing nothing.
   Leaders often underestimate how much time, attention, and credibility are lost due to small, repeated failures.
   
   
3. Shape collaboration around people and process, not just technology.
   Tools fail when teams lack clarity on how to use them or what “good” looks like.
   
   
4. Recognise collaboration is changing in an agentic AI world.
   AI agents are increasingly likely to become active team participants in the near future. Leaders need to map and reason what this means for incumbent employee dynamics.
   
   
5. Treat collaboration as a strategic capability.
   CQ provides a way to benchmark, align, and improve — organisation by organisation, rather than through generic best practice.
   
   

Collaboration will always involve human behaviour, but it no longer lives only in the cultural domain. It sits firmly within operational performance, workforce wellbeing, and competitive advantage. For leaders navigating volatility, it is time to strengthen alignment before disruption exposes the gaps.