From Google’s re:Work blog comes the fantastic post “The five keys to a successful Google team”. As People Analytics Manager Julia Rozovsky explains:
A group of us in Google’s People Operations (what we call HR) set out to answer this question using data and rigorous analysis: What makes a Google team effective? […] Over two years we conducted 200+ interviews with Googlers (our employees) and looked at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams.
(New York Times Magazine has a much longer and thorough article about that process here.)
The main takeaway:
Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.”
This is a message that resonates deeply at Timyo. We believe that how team members interact is crucially important, which is why improving that interaction is our mission.
Rozovsky goes on to identify the important factors that lead to successful teams:
Psychological safety: We’ve talked about the importance of respect here before. When it comes to team communication, Timyo helps make sure that respect is the default setting. And we feel that this respect is a key component toward creating an open, secure environment.
Dependability: Sharing clear expectations in email—what you want and when you want it—helps the whole team be dependable.
Structure and clarity: We’re all about this one: “clarity” is one of Timyo’s three guiding principles, one that we feel is essential to productive teamwork and company-wide peace of mind.
Meaning: By helping team members focus on what matters, when it matters, Timyo empowers individuals to prioritize tasks and manage their own work flow.
Impact: When each team member is bombarded with tens or hundreds of unsorted emails and threads every day, it can be hard to keep track of why any one task is worth doing. By enabling clear email, Timyo helps you see individual items and tasks according to where they fit in the larger whole—making it easier to appreciate the role each constituent part plays in creating a collective impact.
Using Timyo to fix the way that teams communicate has a profound impact on the team’s culture as a whole. We believe it is a key component to helping teams reach their full potential.
