Team work is one of the most sought after capabilities in the workplace, so it’s perhaps no surprise that researchers have devoted a lot of time and attention to understanding how teams can best function.  The latest study in the field comes via the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The team collected data on the interactions within a four-person team as they undertook a range of tasks.  Each task was graded for the quality of the work by the researchers, with this then correlated with the nature of the communication between the group.  Each interaction was recorded and modeled so that a network could be created based upon the intensity of each persons communication with their team.

The power of communication

The data revealed that the best performing teams tended to communicate often with one another.  What’s more, this boost emerged early on, with the high performance persisting throughout the duration of the experiment.

Two network models appeared to be particularly strong, and the researchers typify these as connected and robust networks.  Connected networks had a large number of connections between each node, whereas robust networks had a high number of ways of connecting each node, or a high degree of redundancy if you like.

Of course, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but nonetheless, the team believe that it might benefit teams if they establish robust reciprocal communication channels between co-workers.

This should be easily doable as the results were achieved whilst people used a system called the Platform For Online Group Studies (POGS), which exists purely to allow academic experiments to be conducted on group dynamics.  It’s functional but lacks the features of commercial platforms.

The relatively rudimentary nature of POGS does limit the research a touch, and the team are hoping that the functionality of the platform will be enhanced so that they can conduct the same research again but with tools that are more analogous to those found in platforms such as Slack.  It will still have research specific functionality however, such as allowing researchers to manipulate channels of communication between participants, or create subgroups within teams.

As more and more of our collaborative work takes place on online platforms, this kind of research should help managers better understand the dynamics of team working, and work more constructively to ensure the team works to the best of its ability.