Welcome to Read: 14b
Read: 14b - What Google Learned About Teams”
In this Read: 14a, I will talk only about:
- What Google Learned About Teams?
What Google Learned About Teams?
Like most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit. Or perhaps a fast-growing start-up. All she knew for certain was that she wanted to find a job that was more social.
Every day, between classes or after dinner, Rozovsky and her four teammates gathered to discuss homework assignments, compare spreadsheets and strategize for exams. Everyone was smart and curious, and they had a lot in common: They had gone to similar colleges and had worked at analogous firms. These shared experiences, Rozovsky hoped, would make it easy for them to work well together. But it didn’t turn out that way. ‘‘There are lots of people who say some of their best business-school friends come from their study groups,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘It wasn’t like that for me.’’
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. Today, on corporate campuses and within university laboratories, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians are devoting themselves to studying everything from team composition to email patterns in order to figure out how to make employees into faster, better and more productive versions of themselves.
Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers)..
Project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked. Were the best teams made up of people with similar interests? Or did it matter more whether everyone was motivated by the same kinds of rewards? Based on those studies, 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.
For further information please see the reference [1].
| Read | Title | ToGo |
|---|---|---|
| Read: 01 | Introductory HTML and JavaScript |  |
| Read: 02 | HTML Text, CSS Introduction, and Basic JavaScript Instructions | |
| Read: 03 | HTML Lists, CSS Boxes, JS Control Flow | |
| Read: 04 | HTML Links, CSS Layout, JS Functions | |
| Read: 05 | HTML Images; CSS Color & Text | |
| Read: 06 | JS Object Literals; The DOM | |
| Read: 07 | HTML Tables; JS Constructor Functions | |
| Read: 08 | More CSS Layout | |
| Read: 09 | Forms and Events | |
| Read: 10 | JS Debugging | |
| Read: 11 | Assorted Topics | |
| Read: 12 | Docs for the HTML canvas Element & Chart.js | |
| Read: 13 | Local Storage | |
| Read: 14a | CSS Transforms, Transitions, and Animations | |
| Read: 14b | What Google Learned About Teams | |
| Number | References |
|---|---|
| [1] | https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html |