Google’s Strive Towards Creating Perfect, High Functioning Teams

Google doesn't have a human resources department, not like other companies. Instead, they have a People Operations Division, aka POPs. And like everything else that Google does, POPs is completely data-driven and it is obsessed with employee happiness. When someone gets pregnant at a normal job site and complains about how short maternity leave is, human resources might send payroll a request to see if they can get an extended vacation just once. But when Google realized new mothers were quitting the company, Google turned its social scientists and vast analytics network onto the problem.

POPs crunch the numbers and found that yes, the maternity leave was too short, and by increasing the amount of paid time for new mothers, they could reduce their attrition by a whopping 50% because it was far less costly to pay maternity leave and keep the new mothers than to hire and train all new techs. Google also used their vast analytics to determine that four interviews was the optimum number for new hires. Any more than four, the information gleaned during the interviews came at diminishing returns and scares off other job seekers. POPs also discovered that middle managers were, in fact, a good thing despite their negative reputation. Skilled middle managers also lowered employee attrition rates. POPs also found that base pay means more employees than bonuses or perks, and POPs was the reason Google started putting gourmet food in their lunch room and Wi-Fi in their parking shuttles. It was all a calculated balancing act to maintain the employee happiness index.

But there's one question POPs couldn't seem to get it right - one dilemma that every business under the sun faces today. The same issue spawned a multi-billion-dollar team building industry, which seems to annoy employees at best and so mistrust that it's worse. The problem was teams and team building, and how to make the most efficient business teams. POPs and Google's social scientists tried over and over to discover the ingredients that went into crafting the perfect corporate team. What they found was both surprising and something their data engineers couldn't have anticipated.

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Last month during our episode about building a productive entourage, we briefly referenced a study that came out about the HR department within Google, the infamous People Operations Division. That's because POPs uncovered some very interesting and very surprising data on how high-achieving teams work and why some all-star dream teams underperform despite having all the talent on their side. So today, we want to use Google's data to bust a few myths we all share about building successful teams.

We'll dig deep into the research, and if you stick around the end, as a bonus we will answer the burning question that fuels a multi-billion-dollar industry - do corporate team-building exercises actually work?

Myth 1: 80% of corporate meetings are wasted time. Maybe all team meetings are unnecessary and if everyone just pitched in equally, the work would just get done.

So, this comes from a New York Times article, which is kind of amazing. It's called What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build A Perfect Team. And basically, we're covering our entire episode on this. It is rich, dense, and interesting. Now, we were in a club that fell apart despite it being an all-star team with tons of different backgrounds. That's why I want to cover this because we had basically a group of superstars, and it still didn’t work out.

Have you ever worked at a job where you see people being verbally abused or just treated unfairly? It makes you feel like you're the immovable object and everybody else is just passing through and that that in itself can just slowly wear away you. Have you ever noticed that the people you love and look up to seem to always leave or move away? They came to their senses. With that being said, we are going to get into what makes a good team according to science and Google. Starting with a question, have you been a manager in the past, and when you were a manager, how much was it collaborative? Like how much was getting people to work together?

I kind of assumed before this episode that collaborative teamwork was overrated. I felt that meetings were overrated that we actually don't need to have as many business meetings as we do. But the research shows that we can expect more of those team meetings in the future. I myself like to believe in the individual creator or artists who just quietly whiles away the hours themselves, but that's not actually the case. Collaborative activities have ballooned around 50%, according to a Harvard Business Review article called Collaborative Overload. So, we are slowly doubling how many business meetings we do. The article talked about how 20-35% of value-added collaborations only comes from about 3-5% of the people in an organization.

So, if you were sitting in a meeting room, basically one person is contributing the bulk of the progressive ideas, and that's a problem. If you let somebody be the driving or linchpin for a team for too long, they will become disengaged; They will lose their steam. We're going to look at that as sort of like a phenomenon. We're going to talk about what happens when you make the team full of extra milers and we're going to talk about what happens when you build a dream team because oftentimes, a dream team is not what we would think. According to this New York Times article, it basically comes down to saving space, which is an interesting way to sort of put this in a nutshell.

Myth 2: The best teams in business are all-star teams, where everyone in the meeting room is a pro. Or maybe the best teams are made up of friends, or all introverts or all extroverts.

Do you want to get started on what project overview? Google is one of the first and definitely the biggest to start watching their employees to see how they could be more productive. The reason they did this was to make more money, right? I think this article comes off a little bit like they just want you to care about people down. They wanted more production and they wanted to do it cheaper. This isn't just HR doing workplace surveys or sitting down with your middle manager, and they give you a review. This is a whole new level. They spent millions of dollars and not over one year, but over an entire decade. Doing this saved and made them a lot more money.

This tech giant analyzed every part of their employees’ life and found that great managers are not critical or micro-managers, but they are the best communicators. They can talk to people, are not overbearing, and listen to their employees because communication is 90% listening. Google got granular with this team stuff because they couldn’t get data they could duplicate. Before this study, experts at the company thought like-minded people like being around each other. But the research started really scrutinizing the compositions of the groups - the winning teams, the social teams, and then the losing teams. The one that they really thought was going to win was similarities in educational background, but they couldn't find a mix with it. They couldn't find what the right gender balance was either. They didn't know if the group should be all outgoing or all shy, and they looked at 180 teams with still no luck. What they found from 180 teams analytics wise was it was inconclusive. There was no common makeup for a winning team.

Now, we found out in our entourage episode that friend groups look like chemical bonds. They look like a cluster of chemicals sharing bonds and then there will be one connector who shares that information to the next group of bonds. So, that's kind of what Google found out during their research. They found out that groups of people kind of act that same way. They look like that in a boardroom. If you have 17 people sitting in a boardroom, one person will actually be a connector bond for several groups and bring that information into the group. It will just be somebody who just has a lot of experience with other groups and you find out that they are a wealth of information. This study that Google did found out that the is the absolute key. The people who are actually doing the communication effectively are the linchpin of the team, not necessarily the biggest expert in the room. They also talked about how individual intelligence, personality, and skill all combined do not outweigh communication itself.

Myth 3: Any team can thrive if you have the right atmosphere. The best team atmosphere is when everyone gets down to business right away. Or, is it the other way around? Maybe the best teams are all chatty and friendly with each other, and a little wasted time is just part of the process.

Teams/groups are the most productive when they are in a setting where they feel comfortable and can feel vulnerable enough to give ideas. This is why middle managers get a bad reputation. They tend to jump in and tell you how your job is supposed to be done, etc. The best atmosphere is where everyone gets a chance to talk, whether you've been there one day or there your whole life. Another big thing was the average social sensitivity. It's kind of a fancy way of saying having intuition on what other people are feeling through their tone of voice and nonverbal cues. So, great teams are not about social status or roles; it is about how well everyone blended together, how much respect they had for one another, and how they communicated. Far too often, the person who does the talking is the person who feels like they earned their role for being there the longest, and that is a complete waste of time for everybody.

Also, if you want to build a good team, not only does communication and side talk matter, so does physical movement. The Harvard Business review article basically supports everything Google found. They talked about how in a highly successful team, everyone talks and listens roughly in equal measure. So, when we talk about the chemical bond that is in friend groups, that seems to be one of the super key parts of it. This article also talks about how good team members are able to face each other and shared gestures. They can connect directly and can carry on back-channel conversations or side conversations. Everything Google found out and what they talked about in this HBR article is that a huge portion of being on a productive team. It's being able to communicate and carry on outside of the team.

Now, something they do point out in this article is that a lot of the engagement the one-on-one conversations are quite short. It does not seem to be individual time outside the boardroom. It is effectively what we covered in another episode Robin Dunbar called social grooming. In short, it's people killing time and not trying to make a point. You're not trying to convince anybody of anything; just people come together, socially groom, and communicate to work things out. I think that is why Google had such a hard time with this because they should be able to instantly crack any nut. I think it didn't make sense to them because it proved that communication is much more important than individual ability. It really just comes down to good communication and not forcefully. We all know how that can get uncomfortable. Just let it happen organically.

Final Thoughts

Teams are huge. From 2001 to 2021, collaborative activity in business has risen 50%, and yet the best resource people and employees in the highest collaborative demand are often the least engaged. They are also the least satisfied teammates. As research shows, teams that failed at one activity often failed at everything else. So, once you burn out those hard workers, you can kiss the team goodbye.

To get everyone engaged and build the ideal team, you can't just stick all of your all-stars in one boardroom. You can’t stick a big group of work friends on a project or expect all your extroverts to slay the problem. Instead, try to foster a diverse atmosphere that has open and safe communication. Good communication plays more of a role in team success than intelligence, personality, and skill all combined.

When you go looking for team leaders, they should understand the value of openness and vulnerability. They should be able to talk about what's bothering them and what's putting pressure on them outside the meeting room. But they should also consider the value of face-to-face interactions like respectful side chats and social turn-taking. Again, it’s all about cultivating strong communication on every level.

When we think of the ideal team, we shouldn't think of a room full of hot-shot, suit-wearing experts. We should imagine a functional workplace culture filled with high-fives, Game of Thrones chats, and baby pictures. This might not seem important at the time, but in between the social grooming, you'll see the light of creative innovation shining through. That or the light is from Google's HR spotlight recording your every bathroom break and office birthday party.