It stands to reason that our colleagues have a huge role to play in our effectiveness and productivity at work, but the scale of this impact was highlighted by new research from Harvard’s Growth Lab, which reveals that suggests our colleagues have a huge impact on our earning potential, productivity and even longevity at work.

The researchers assessed administrative data on all 9 million inhabitants of Sweden to enable networks of complementarity and substitutability to be forged among specific educational tracks.  Through this, the researchers believe they were able to gauge the importance of the skills our colleagues have in our own success.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that our best performances at work come when our colleagues complement, but don’t substitute, us.  What is perhaps a little more surprising, however, as having the right colleagues can be as beneficial to our careers as having a university degree.

How good are your colleagues?

The researchers developed a tool to help you assess whether your colleagues are the right ones for you or not.  They explain that this typically requires them to have skills you don’t, yet are crucial for the completion of the tasks performed by your team.  By contrast, the wrong coworkers tend to be those who share the same skills as you, and therefore make the risk of you being redundant to your team higher.

“We tend to think of skills as being something personal that individuals can market to a company,” the researchers say. “However, this vision of skills is too simplistic. One person’s skills connect to another person’s skills, etc., and the better these connections, the more productive workers will be, and the more they will earn.”

There appear to be clear benefits of the right colleagues in terms of our careers, with the data suggesting that these complimentary skills aiding our longevity in each role, with the results appearing to last for up to 20 years.  Interestingly, the authors believe that we’re more likely to find such complimentary co-workers in large cities, as the bigger talent pool allows us to specialize more.

The benefits also seem to accrue more for people with high education levels, and the researchers argue that people with college degrees have become increasingly adept at finding the right coworkers to compliment their own skills.

The value of the team is perhaps not that surprising, and there does exist concern around correlation and causation, but it’s interesting research nonetheless.  Check out the video below to hear more from the researchers.