Imagine your organisation is given the task of preparing for a global flu pandemic. Not an easy assignment – especially when you have 100,000 employees in 119 countries. Yet this was the situation that Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK), the pharmaceutical giant, found itself in two years ago when workers in Philadelphia needed to brief their counterparts all over the world.

“It was a complicated exercise and very difficult to do remotely,” says Elaine Macfarlane, the vice-president of corporate identity and communications at GSK. “We set up same-time meetings to allow employees to access their foreign colleagues’ computer screens, walking them through what was expected of them.”

Welcome to collaborative working. Forget cosy team huddles – you don’t need to be able to see your colleagues to work with them. “The intranet is a powerful tool in our business,” Macfarlane says. “People said they wanted to work together without getting on a plane. That’s when we introduced web-conferencing.” This is one of a range of virtual collaborative tools used by GSK. Secure databases allow external stakeholders to access data, while the company’s virtual workspace knows no limits. “I can be in London at six in the morning delivering a presentation to a colleague in Tokyo,” Macfarlane says.

For a company with nearly 300 brands, Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) strategy for developing talent is to build from within. “Organisations today are matrixes, not pyramids,” says Madalyn Brooks, the HR director for UK and Ireland at P&G. She talks about cross-fertilisation: identifying talent and encouraging promotion across company divisions. Employees must be flexible and the ability to collaborate is one of nine core competencies set out by the company. “We have gone so far as to suggest a career elsewhere for people who have not shown this competency,” Brooks says. As the pace of business gets faster, working together is the only way to keep up. “Things that used to take months or years take days, even hours. Being collaborative internally means we can get decisions made very quickly, which is critical when you’re responding to customers.”

External is also important. P&G now refers to outsourcers as strategic partners. “We are seeking to achieve joint objectives. They are instrumental in helping us to reach our business goals,” she says.

It is not just the private sector that is keen on joining up, says Joan Munro, national adviser for workforce at the Government’s Improvement and Development Agency. “Fragmented recruitment procedures were an obstacle to attracting talent until we set up the National Graduate Development Programme, which covers all local authorities. Before we joined [recruitment] up graduates didn’t know how to apply.” Now, graduates are placed in one authority then encouraged to change “so they don’t get stuck”. Silos still exist, Munro says, but the lines are less defined. “We are looking at opportunities for councils to work more with the private and voluntary sectors.” One significant change has been to encourage job applications from the private sector. “We recognise that ten years’ experience in business can be valuable for local government.”

Even competitors will soon be working together, says Scott McArthur, an executive consultant at Atos Consulting. “There was a time when we would never have sat in a room with Accenture or McKinsey,” he says. But this is changing. “Organisations have realised that they can benefit from sharing information.”

McArthur believes companies will eventually become “knowledge communities”. Open source software, which allows multiple contributors to pool their expertise, is already being adopted by firms. “Wikipedia is a powerful example. [Its] error rate is 3.2 per cent – only marginally higher than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Future collaboration will mean that individuals are rewarded on the basis of talent, he says. “Traditional management hierarchies will be broken down. If you have the knowledge I need, I may have to pay you more than the chief executive.”

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