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. ‘‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’ says Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University who studies how people share information.
‘‘All of a sudden, we can pick apart the small choices that all of us make, decisions most of us don’t even notice, and figure out why some people are so much more effective than everyone else.’’
- How to Build a Perfect Team
- The War on Meetings
- The Case for Blind Hiring
- Failure to Lunch
- The 'Good Jobs' Gamble
- Rethinking the Work-Life Equation
- The Rise of White-Collar Automation
- The Post-Cubicle Office
- The New Dream Jobs
Many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers — a practice is known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based.
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).
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