New Science on Building Great Teams
hbr.org
hbr.org
"For example, we now know that 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members"
Can I get a reference to a scientific paper that measures this or where this result is discussed? Off the top of my head - this depends hugely on the task at hand. Certain tasks require constant nonstop communication and updates - other tasks are more modular and the communication sweet spot is different. Even within the same task, different phases of the task require different amounts of communication - when you are whiteboarding the design of a particular library, constant feedback is exceptionally useful. When it's time to sit down and write difficult code involving pointer math, constantly discussing things will just throw you off.
I am sure there was some proper science done behind that number - but that number refers to teams of a certain size, working on a specific task, in a given context (I would also be curious to know the C.I. on that 35% too). Trying to draw a nice narrative with a simple message from a narrow experiment is basically everything that I dislike about this Gladwellesque style pop science.
Reading narratives like this gives a completely unwarranted sense of confidence into something which we still understand very, very little about.
We’ve been able to foretell, for example, which teams will win a business plan contest, solely on the basis of data collected from team members wearing badges at a cocktail reception.
Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect.
* Social time turns out to be deeply critical to team performance, often accounting for more than 50% of positive changes in communication patterns, even in a setting as efficiency-focused as a call center.*
Our data also show that exploration and engagement, while both good, don’t easily coexist, because they require that the energy of team members be put to two different uses.
in a typical high-performance team, members are listening or speaking to the whole group only about half the time, and when addressing the whole group, each team member speaks for only his or her fair share of time, using brief, to-the-point statements.
making the tables in the company’s lunchroom longer, so that strangers sat together, had a huge impact.
The best-performing and most creative teams in our study, however, sought fresh perspectives constantly
we found that the more of these charismatic connectors a team had, the more successful it was.
Observation: I wish I had a tool for writing short notes on things I read. It seems I end up doing this in the form of HackerNews comments.
I think I want conclusions.
As someone who lives in a rural area I see a distributed team as the way to go for hiring talented individuals. I also know that working remotely can hurt communication and collaboration if extra effort is not given. It would be interesting to see a similar study on distributed teams and a comparison of how effective their different strategies and communication tools are. Do any remote workers here have any observational evidence on this?
I will say I get more solo work done when I'm around people. It's hard to stay on task if you don't have the ambiance of people with expectations. I go to coffee shops, because even though they aren't my co-workers, if they see me working, they still have expectations. If they look over my shoulder and see me on social media, I've failed their expectations, and just that subconscious feeling does wonders to motivate me. I want to be a people pleaser and remotely that can be tough.
You've hit upon the key point that many remote workers neglect. It doesn't hurt, and oftentimes greatly helps, to consciously make the extra effort to relentlessly, while appropriately, seek out moments for personal bonding time between team members. Remote staff may need to take this to gentle professional extremes to glean tidbits of personal information on their teammates (i.e. small talk).
Examples:
- Few minutes early to conference calls? Don't always let the line remain silent.
- Schedule formal 1-1 calls and purposely build in some "meandering" time into the agenda (especially for managers of any team who should be scheduling 1-1s with their directs anyway on some cadence).
- Jump on rare lulls, pauses or other appropriate moments during phone calls or IM chat conversational flows.
- Reach out and IM somebody during a known break period (admittedly, this has a low success rate for me due to differing timezones).
Remote staff are starved for information about their teammates. Some remote staff don't care. Others are clueless, in which case they should be classified as-such and you may adapt your style of interaction. From my personal experience[NB] managing remote technical consulting teams, most people do in fact crave more personal connections across teams, but they need to make continuous, concerted (and sometimes disconcertingly) conscious effort.
This type of cognitive overhead is fair to classify as "extraneous" and "bothersome" by certain people, and some extreme cases of successful remote teams (examples: interacting almost entirely via mailing lists, high ratio of long form vs. short emails) do not seem to maintain or require this overhead.
However, for the rest of us working in 99% of other organizations, remote staff can generate the same type of buzz, high-energy and high-performing team outcomes that Dr. Pentland studied, iff the remote team members are collectively willing to build personal relationships with each other.
[NB] Anecdata trigger warning
It's curious to me how when a lot of discussions on remote workers, especially those negative to the idea, I rarely see mention of chat rooms, when I've used them at every single place I've worked remotely. Most of my career success is due to connections I've made on IRC. I don't think this is that rare of a scenario, see the #w00w00 folks.
In the era of "catfishing" where people can fall in love with people based solely on chat and online relationships, I think it's hard to deny it's possible to form meaningful connections online. Emails, conference calls, and video conferences aren't going to do it. If you spend 8+ hours a day "talking" to some one in a chat room, you can learn more than 15 minutes at a water cooler now and then. As well, the whole team/group can read the backlog and know what's going on with everyone else. No need to repeat the same story to x, y, and z.
I agree with what you've said about having some informal conversation during lulls on calls. Those moments can be very valuable. Another thing I've done on some teams is after a major release or milestone achieved, everyone grabs a drink of their choice and joins a group video chat and virtually goes out to the bar to celebrate as a group.
Lastly, one of the things I've done is occasionally send small gifts to other team members. As an example after explaining rubber duck debugging to a team member who solved their own problem immediately after asking me and wasn't familiar with the term, I sent them an awesome rubber duck overnight. (Total cost <$10 via prime)
Because my teams are typically customer facing, we have enough team conference calls (both internal and external) that there are enough moments for people to perform a similar function, albeit most of the time truncated or abrupt.
I share your enthusiasm for chat rooms ala IRC but as you've already noticed this only appeals to a certain subset of [technology] people. #w00w00 is more of an exception in my mind; most IRC channels aren't exactly the hotbed of singularly driven participants, but then maybe the channels I frequented had a low SNR.
>Another thing I've done on some teams is after a major release or milestone achieved, everyone grabs a drink of their choice and joins a group video chat and virtually goes out to the bar to celebrate as a group.
This is a good idea! When a sufficiently important milestone is completed I endeavour to have geographically close clusters of folks fly/drive to meet up, if possible. However, joining a group video chat (hell, video chat in general) would be interesting to introduce. I think video goes a long way to closing the personal gap because you can immediately pair a face with a known name and voice. Sadly (in my view anyway), there are a few folks I still haven't met in my organization face-to-face despite working over 8 years together.
Re. small gifts -- completely agreed.
I look at these things as performance art. Theory goes in the background when you perform all that is left is execution.
It's nice that there's a 'Human Dynamics Laboratory' out there that does so much research and puts out the findings.
I'm not a musician, but I disagree with the first part of this statement. My impression has been that understanding the theory can make the difference between a good musician and a great one.
One could apply the same to programming -- understanding the fundamentals of computing is not necessary but it can mark the difference between good and great.
Programming is not a performance art it's more akin to composing which is a little different.
Still, in a vein similar to a comment that I made about education yesterday, I wonder if there is such a thing as a "theory" of the formation and administration of work teams, i.e., of a level of reliability similar to music or programming theory.
A lot of projects went over budget or were delivered very late and over time I came to notice that the projects that weren't late or over budget were executed by people who'd worked together before on two or more projects. It meant that this team had already gone through a bonding experience and that their lines of communication could be kept short. I referred to this at the time as "the band" since it was like playing in a band. If the chemistry matches between people then communication will happen automatically and magic "just" seem to happen.
1) Taken at face value, managers might try to directly change the positive metrics. For example, since face-to-face communication is shown to be superior to conference calls, ban remote work and mandate all meetings be in person. Obviously this probably wouldn't make people too happy.
2) On the other hand, understanding what is really driving the metrics can generally improve workplaces for everyone. For example, the article points out that instituting team-wide coffee breaks not only increased productivity, but also employee satisfaction at a call center.
As with all research like this, some companies will make good use of it, and others will not.
One interesting point in the book is that Taylorism suffers from the garbage-in-garbage-out problem. Large firms are islands of calculational chaos because they suffer from the economic calculation problem [1] pointed out by Mises and Hayek. Similar to centrally planned economies, large firms cannot intelligently allocate resources or make other managerial decisions because there are heavy distortions in incentives / price signals.
He further points out that economic distortions occur not because of socialism per se, since large capitalist firms also suffer the same problem, but rather long hierarchies. He explores other modular and co-operative organizational models in the book also.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
I've been on teams that did a lot of self-measurement, and it has generally been fine. But the problems I recall are when people with managerialist inclinations seize upon something measured and use it to try to sound smart or exert control. E.g., the time a CEO, on his occasional visits, noticed our project LoC measurement. We all knew the dangers of that number, and treated it very lightly. But he kept trying to do MBA math with it (e.g., $/LoC), and I ended up having to tell him that if he didn't knock it off, we'd stop displaying the metric.
1) "Every day for a week, we provided team members a visualization of that day’s work, with some light interpretation of what we saw. (Keep in mind that we didn’t know the substance of their work, just how they were interacting.) We also told them that the ideal visualization would show members contributing equally and more overall contributions. By day seven, the maps showed, the team’s energy and engagement had improved vastly, especially for the two Japanese members, one of whom had become a driving force."
2. "The manager wanted to raise energy and engagement in lockstep. We suggested instituting a common coffee break for each team at the call center. This increased the number of interactions, especially informal ones, and raised the teams’ energy levels. And because all team members took a break at once, interactions were evenly distributed, increasing engagement. When we mapped energy and engagement against AHT afterward, the results were clear: Efficiency in the center increased by 8%, on average, and by as much as 20% for the worst-performing teams."
People often forget that communication is a skill that can be honed. Certain behaviors - body language, active/passive, talking versus listening, etc. - can be adjusted to make you a better communicator.