Look at your calendar for next week.

Wall to wall meetings. Daily standups. Cross functional syncs. Slack channels that never sleep.

From the outside it looks like a company that communicates. A place where no one is left out of the loop and collaboration is a core strength.

From the inside it feels different. People are drowning in calls. Real work gets pushed to nights and weekends. Decisions keep getting revisited because no one is quite sure who owned what.

Here is the hard truth.

Your problem is not a lack of collaboration. Your problem is collaboration that never turns into clear ownership and finished work.

Modern companies are not failing because people are in silos. They are failing because everyone is involved in everything and nothing actually moves.

When Collaboration Becomes The New Busywork

After years of worrying about silos and remote isolation, leaders went all in on connection.

More cross functional squads. More channels. More standing meetings. More people invited to every discussion so no one feels left out.

It felt like progress.

Then the side effects hit.

Days turned into a blur of Zoom links and Slack pings. Work got chopped into tiny fragments that never added up to anything meaningful. People started doing their real thinking before 9 and after 5 because the middle of the day belonged to everyone else.

Researchers Chip Heath and Nancy Staudenmayer called this problem coordination neglect. Smart teams underestimate how much overhead it takes to pull lots of people into lots of shared work. Every added participant and every extra project inflates the coordination burden much faster than leaders expect.

You see that burden every time a simple decision threads through five meetings. You see it when a cross functional initiative needs three different decks because each org heard a different story. You see it when people walk out of a session with pages of notes and zero clarity on who actually does what.

The real issue is not that your people will not collaborate. It is that collaboration has replaced focus.

That shift does something dangerous to your execution system that most CEOs never inspect.

Everyone Is In The Room And No One Owns The Work

There is a pattern Workplace sees across organizations when collaboration volume spikes.

Decision threads get longer. More people comment. Ownership words like 'I will' and 'my team will' start to disappear. In their place you see 'we'll try' and 'should be fine' and 'let's revisit.' Hedging rises. Commitment drops. Execution risk climbs.

It makes sense. When ten people are in every meeting and twelve names sit on every Slack channel, who actually feels responsible for the outcome.

In the office era, leaders could lean on proximity. You saw people at their desks and felt confident the work was covered. In hybrid work that comfort vanished. Teams that thrived were the ones that stopped relying on who was in the room and started making ownership visible in writing. Studies on remote productivity from Nicholas Bloom at Stanford showed that structured goals and clear check ins made all the difference in outcomes, not whether people sat together.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Most companies never upgraded their ownership habits. They just tried to recreate the room on Zoom. Same meetings. Same fuzzy decisions. More faces in tiny boxes.

When everyone is invited, no one really owns. When no one really owns, decisions die on impact.

That lack of ownership does not just slow you down. It erodes belief in leadership. People stop trusting that decisions will stick, so they stop betting their energy on them.

Once that happens, collaboration turns from a strength into a smokescreen.

How Constant Collaboration Destroys Deep Work

There is a simple test for whether collaboration is helping your company or grinding it down.

Pick a random week and count how many hours the average manager spends in meetings. In Workplace's research and in external work on burnout and overload, once people cross roughly half their working time in meetings, quality starts to slide and error rates go up.

That is not a personality problem. It is biology. Human attention does not like being sliced into ten minute chunks.

On a heavy collaboration day, here is what really happens. Someone spends 8 hours across 12 different calls, with Slack lighting up between each one. They touch 8 projects, make 20 micro decisions, and answer 50 messages. At night they sit down with their laptop and actually build the deck, write the code, or think through the strategy that will be judged next week.

Your system trained them to perform collaboration during the day and squeeze contribution into the margins.

This is not just about 'too many meetings.' You can cancel three and still lose if the work stays fractured and the decision system remains vague.

The deeper issue is that your company now measures presence in collaboration more than progress in outcomes. If people are visible in calls and channels, they look committed. If they block time for focus, they look unresponsive.

That incentive structure rewards shallow work and punishes depth. It creates a culture where speed means how fast you can reply, not how consistently you can ship.

Leaders tell themselves they are being agile and inclusive. What they are really doing is spreading attention so thin that nothing compounding ever happens.

To fix that, you cannot just beg people to 'protect deep work.' You have to rewire how collaboration itself shows up in the system.

The Signals Hiding In Your Own Tools

This is where CPOs and CEOs have far more power than they realize.

You do not need another engagement survey to see where collaboration is breaking execution. Your tools are already telling you.

Look at your calendar data. Which teams regularly spend more than four hours a day in meetings. Which functions are double booked across conflicting sessions. Where do long recurring meetings keep going even though no one can remember why they started.

Look at your message data. Where do words like 'urgent' and 'ASAP' cluster. Which leaders trigger long reactive threads whenever they post. Which projects generate constant 'quick revisit' and 'small tweak' comments as people scramble to fix work that never had clear ownership or criteria in the first place.

Workplace scans communication exhaust for more than a thousand signals across burnout, alignment, conflict, and execution health. It sees when ownership language fades. It sees when corrections spike. It sees when after hours volume climbs inside one org long before anyone resigns.

These are not mood swings. They are early indicators that collaboration has turned from coordination into chaos in that part of the business.

Most companies still treat that chaos as the cost of doing business. The smart ones treat it like an operational fire alarm.

Once you can see those signals, the next move is not a softer town hall. It is a hard redesign of how, when, and why collaboration happens.

The CPO Playbook To Turn Chaos Into Execution

If you are a CPO or HR leader, this is where you stop being the person who launches programs and start being the person who fixes how work actually flows.

1. Run A Collaboration Overload Review

Pick one critical slice of the org. Put the data on the table. Total meeting hours per week. Number of recurring cross functional meetings. Number of active Slack channels per person.

Then pull a month of Workplace language signals for that same group. Look at ownership words, corrective phrases, urgency language, and after hours volume.

You will see the pattern. Where collaboration time spikes, ownership and clarity usually sink.

Take that map into your next one on one with the CEO. Do not talk about 'meeting culture.' Talk about execution risk. Show how cluttered collaboration is showing up as rework, reopen rates, and stalled initiatives.

2. Turn Every Meeting Into A Decision Forum Or Kill It

Set a simple rule. Every meeting must have a single outcome, a named decision maker, and a DRI who owns follow through. If any of those three are missing, the meeting does not happen.

Borrow from your best operating teams and set decision SLAs. For example, all decisions raised in a meeting must be closed within 48 hours. No 'we'll circle back.' If you cannot decide, you are not ready to meet.

Once you hold that line, something powerful happens. People stop inviting everyone 'for awareness.' They stop booking ninety minutes for something that needs twenty. They stop hiding vague decisions behind long conversations.

3. Shrink The Collaboration Surface Area

Most managers are juggling more cross functional work than any human can track. Product sits on three squads. Marketing joins every launch thread. Ops touches every customer escalation.

Use your authority to put limits on how many active cross functional initiatives a team can carry. When something new starts, something else finishes or stops. Tie that practice directly to your portfolio reviews and performance conversations.

This is where Heath's coordination neglect research becomes practical. If coordination cost explodes with every extra project, the only realistic way to win is through subtraction.

4. Make Ownership Unmissable In Writing

Every shared project should have one DRI whose name is visible everywhere the work is discussed. Every deliverable should have a single accountable owner and a deadline. Not a group. Not 'the team.' A person.

Workplace data can show you instantly where that discipline is missing. You will see more 'we'll try' language, more hedging, and more reopens. Put those signals on the same dashboard as revenue and customer metrics.

Then coach leaders in public. Praise the VP who writes 'My team will deliver X by Y date and I own the outcome.' Challenge the leader who always talks in vague group language.

5. Protect Deep Work Like A Strategic Asset

Set hard caps on synchronous time. For example, no one spends more than three hours a day in meetings. Everything else lives in written updates that can be consumed asynchronously.

Tools like Workplace help you track whether those rules are real or fake. If one org keeps creeping past the cap, you can see it. If late night messages surge after you roll out a new program, you can see that too.

The point is not to create a prettier calendar. The point is to create enough space for people to think deeply about the very decisions you keep asking them to care about.

Once you treat focus as a resource, not an accident, collaboration volume stops being a vanity metric and starts being something you manage on purpose.

The Question Every CPO Should Put In Front Of Their CEO

Here is the one question that cuts through the noise.

If we muted every meeting and every Slack channel next quarter and only judged ourselves on what shipped, would our current collaboration habits still look like a strength?

If the honest answer is no, you do not have a people problem. You have a work design problem and a leadership problem.

The good news is that you can fix it. You can use the data you already own to see where collaboration is helping and where it is just motion. You can redesign meetings so they serve decisions instead of avoiding them. You can make ownership so explicit that no one confuses being in the room with being accountable.

The companies that win the next decade will not be the ones that talk to each other the most. They will be the ones brave enough to cut collaboration down to what actually moves the work.

Your job as a CPO is to walk into the CEO's office with proof, not opinions. Show them where constant collaboration is shredding execution. Show them what the signals in Workday and Workplace and your calendars are already screaming.

Then ask a final question.

Are we willing to build a company where collaboration serves focus, or are we going to keep mistaking noise for momentum?

How they answer that question is your real culture strategy. Everything else is decoration.