reading-notes

What Google Learned About Teams

our data-saturated age enables us to examine our work habits and office quirks with a scrutiny that our cubicle-bound forebears could only dream of.

• THE WORK ISSUE: REIMAGINING THE OFFICE
  1. How to Build a Perfect Team
  2. The War on Meetings
  3. The Case for Blind Hiring
  4. Failure to Lunch
  5. The ‘Good Jobs’ Gamble
  6. Rethinking the Work-Life Equation
  7. The Rise of White-Collar Automation
  8. The Post-Cubicle Office
  9. The New Dream Jobs

‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’

software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems.

• In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more.

  In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. the researchers scrutinized the composition of groups inside Google: How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the same hobbies? Were their educational backgrounds similar? Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy? They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had exceeded their departments’ goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender balance seemed to have an impact on a team’s success.

  

  Succesfull team works like: divided between successful executives and middle managers with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of discussions. People interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk about their lives. because the group has discourage equal speaking; there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid.

  ‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘‘who’’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’ ‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well. But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’