We live in a data-saturated age. Psychologists, sociologists, and statisticians are researching everything from team composition to email habits today on corporate campuses and in academic labs in order to find out how to make workers quicker, better, and more efficient versions of themselves.
Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers — a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough.
Google, one of the most outspoken proponents of how learning jobs would boost productivity, became obsessed with assembling the ideal team back in 2011. The tech beast has spent tens of millions of dollars tracking virtually every part of its workers’ lives over the last decade. Google’s People Operations team has looked at everything from how many different people eat together (the most efficient workers prefer to create wider networks by rotating dining companions) to which characteristics the best managers have in common (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).
‘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.’