To touch base is to make brief contact: a short check-in to swap status and confirm nothing is on fire. The idiom comes from baseball, where runners must touch each base as they pass, which explains why it mystifies many non-American colleagues hearing it in London or Sydney.
The workplace failure mode is the recurring thirty-minute “touch base” that could have been a message. The fix is matching format to need: asynchronous updates for status, real meetings for decisions, and calendars that are not wall-to-wall bases being touched.