They looked at lines of code written, bugs fixed, customer satisfaction, and more. Once they understood what constituted a team at Google, the researchers had to determine how to quantitatively measure effectiveness. The teams studied in Project Aristotle ranged from three to fifty individuals (with a median of nine members). Organizational charts only tell part of the story, so the Google research team focused on groups with truly interdependent working relationships, as determined by the teams themselves. Team members need one another to get work done. Teams are highly interdependent - they plan work, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress in service of a specific project. Work groups may meet periodically to hear and share information. They are based on organizational or managerial hierarchy. Work groups are characterized by the least amount of interdependence. At the most fundamental level, the researchers sought to distinguish a “work group” from a “team:” Many definitions and frameworks exist, depending on task interdependence, organizational status, and team tenure. The term team can take on a wide array of meanings. The first step in answering this question of “what makes an effective team?” is to ask “what is a team?” More than an existential thought exercise, actually figuring out the memberships, relationships, and responsibilities of individuals all working together is tough but critical to cracking team effectiveness. Read about the researchers behind the work in The New York Times: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team Code-named Project Aristotle - a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' (as the Google researchers believed employees can do more working together than alone) - the goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”

But it’s also where interpersonal issues, ill-suited skill sets, and unclear group goals can hinder productivity and cause friction.įollowing the success of Google’s Project Oxygen research where the People Analytics team studied what makes a great manager, Google researchers applied a similar method to discover the secrets of effective teams at Google. The team is the molecular unit where real production happens, where innovative ideas are conceived and tested, and where employees experience most of their work. Much of the work done at Google, and in many organizations, is done collaboratively by teams.

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