Face-2-face and telephone conversations are the most determining for team performance, thank you big data

I am fascinated by the use of sensors, which can generate all kinds of data, so that people can do their work better and with more pleasure. In the last years, one new sensor is launched after the other; you may have heard of the smart thermostat Nest, the smartwatch, etc. The word big data falls on and off. The term human analytics is increasingly mentioned in relation to HR or work. An appealing example is the approach of the authors in the book: The Decoded company; know your talent better than you know your customers! They talk about data like 'the sixth sense'; data for the benefit of the employee so that their talents can come into their own even more.

From sensing and interpreting data it seems a logical step to sense-making in other words: learning. In relation to behaviour and therefore also to performance, "sensing" is important in the interaction with others. In behavioural training you see that at a given moment participants are keen on the interaction with another person and have a keen eye / antenna about their own behaviour. You often see that sharpness in the work environment quickly disappears and people fall back into their old behaviour. Are there perhaps sensors that can help people, managers and companies in the workplace to remain sensitive about their interaction with others and also about themselves?

This article has been written in January 2015 and I published it in Dutch. To be able to say something about the core traits of successful teams, I now also publish it in English.

My eyes fell on Alex Pentland's book: Social Physics, how good ideas spread (2014). Alex is the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship program and he is co-leader of the World economic Forum Big Data. He leads a group of excellent top researchers. Alex and his team use big data to show interaction patterns between people.

Current social science so far had to draw conclusions based on laboratory analyses or through questionnaires and that feels artificial. The predictive value of testing, for example, is simply not high. In the meantime, the science of social psychology does not have a good reputation, see the Stapel affair. The conventional approaches do not take into account the complexity of normal life, they lack details with whom we interact and how we interact with them. Contact between people consists of millions of small transactions. New sensors with big data give us the opportunity to better view society in all its complexity with all its micro patterns, it offers insight into the many networks of person-to-person interactions. This flow of information is important to understand the diffusion and generation of new ideas and how they are a driving force in behavioural change and innovation. 

Social physics tries to understand how the ideas and information flow results in changes in behaviour and action; how human behaviour is driven by the exchange of ideas - how people work together to discover, select, learn and coordinate their actions. The sensors record everything during normal work; the work has thus become a "living laboratory". The engine that drives social physics is big data; huge amounts of data are increasingly available on many aspects of our lives. Because of the increased computer power, we can do calculations based on millions of data.

How is measured? 
Alex uses sociometric badges; it is a small box that you wear around your neck. The badge collects data and analyses social behaviour. It contains a location sensor, captures body language, determines who is close by and records when the person himself and another person speaks. The badge does not record what is being said. It is still a small box; I can well imagine that there might be a chip on your company ID card (note that privacy is nowadays much an issue).

The badge can also:

• make engagement and exploration transparent over time; 
• measure personal energy level; 
• measure the degree of extraversion and empathy through body language and the degree of "flow". 

 The data can then be combined with:

• mobile phone data (their "funf" system); 
• credit card statements; 
• logs from social media etc. 

When you make the interaction patterns visible, you can make remarkable observations, as Pentland shows at a German bank:

It is striking, for example, that managers have hardly any face-to-face contact with sales and customer services. Product development has hardly any face-to-face contact with customer service and with sales.

2 social physics concepts 
Social physics has 2 important concepts:

• Strengthen ideas flow within networks (creativity), with a subdivision into: 

          * exploration (finding new ideas and strategies with diverse network)

          * engagement (interact with each other and coordinate behaviour).

• Social learning: how new ideas become habits and how learning can be accelerated and shaped, among other things through social pressure. 

Pentland defines the ideas flow as the transfer of behaviours and beliefs into a social network through social learning and social pressure. The researchers measure the flow of ideas as the probability that a person's behaviour will change when a new idea appears in the network of those people. He also makes the comparison with the spread of flu. 

The most valuable flow of ideas within an organization are face-to-face and telephone conversations. This is not surprising in itself, but perhaps it is in the light of the fact that employees are increasingly interacting with each other via the computer screen. MIT, for example, visualized the interaction patterns at call centres and came up with the advice to facilitate more face-to-face conversations and showed that this significantly increases productivity. 

It is important that people have insight into the behaviour of others, both directly and indirectly. You should therefore see Yahoo's measure to limit working from home in this light. The more people want to learn from a certain peer group, the more they want to belong and are close to them. It is the flow of ideas within a community that generates knowledge and makes you successful. 

Exploration 

MIT concludes that the best ideas come from careful and continuous exploration of others. The most creative people with a lot of insights are "explorers." Working groups that generate a high amount of ideas from outside the working group seem to be the most innovative. His research shows that these people invest a lot of time in meeting new people with different ideas and they do not naturally look for the best people or best ideas. They are open to people with different and different ideas and ideas, especially outside their own team. 

The most productive people constantly develop a new story and then test it countless times; they add new ideas to the story and try them out on everyone. For them, sculpting ideas is a game. In addition, they are very curious about the successes and failures of others and ask questions about what has played a role in them. They make their decisions based on all those experiences. 

Alex distinguishes 3 important factors for exploration: 

1. Social learning, learning from others (modelling and see also Bandura); 
2. Promote diversity of people and perspectives; 
3. Meeting opponents; they have independent information. 

A so-called "star" network is good for exploration and a smaller richly connected network (team) is best for engagement, idea generation and behavioural change. 

Engagement 

Pentland defines "engagement" as to learn from each other (social learning), often within a working group (peer group). This leads to the development of behavioural norms and social pressure to strengthen these norms. According to Pentland, there is increasing evidence that the power of engagement is vital for promoting collaborative behaviour. Even if intimately connected people cannot see each other, they have a higher performance with a shared rhythm, body language, speech and pitch. It appears that employees with the most engagement have the least difficulty in adapting new interaction patterns. 

When people see that many other people adopt new behaviour, they will often follow those others quickly, we are a bit a herd of animals ... When someone receives 3-4 invitations to participate in a network, the person will also participate quickly going to do. And that certainly applies when their trusted warm network contacts do the same. When the people you are talking to also talk to each other, you are "in". Moreover, social or peer pressure is one of the most effective mechanisms for promoting collaboration. 

The number of direct interactions that people have with their "buddies" was an excellent predictor of how their behaviour would change. This also applies to trust in each other. Changing behaviour was most effective when it strengthened social relationships. 

Given the importance of interactions, it is important to offer smart support through small, subtle incentives (triggers), so that people connect more with others. The most effective network influencing actions should be targeted at those people who have the strongest social ties and with the most interactions with others. According to Alex, social network promoting actions are almost 4 times as efficient as a traditional individual reward market approach. 

The most important factor in predicting group intelligence is the degree of equality in terms of conversation contribution. This means that you have to contain dominant speakers. In addition, the degree of social intelligence is important, something that women are often just a bit better at, often it appears that teams with more women do better ...

Engagement asks:

• Interaction; 
• Collaboration; 
• Trust, take care of building trust 

The pitfall of engagement in one's own team or network is the so-called echo-effect; not being open enough to outside sounds with the result that people only talk to each other. 

Performance 

Alex Pentland found in research that the interaction patterns between people determined almost 50% of the performance variation between high and low performing groups. The degree of face-to-face engagement (ideas flow within a group) has a huge impact on productivity. Individual intelligence, personality and skill, were much less significant than the pattern of ideas flow. This does not apply in situations with a lot of stress and enormous work pressure. 

Interaction characteristics of high performing groups were: 

• Many briefly formulated ideas; 
• Lots of interaction and overlapping cycles; 
• A high diversity of ideas. 

The pattern of ideas flow can be influenced by leadership. Managers should pay less attention to the individual talent approach and focus more on managing organizations and stimulating much interaction between team members. The social style of managers is then a good predictor of how well their team will perform. You could call a leader who knows how to properly influence interactions in a team a charismatic connector. Charismatic connectors also have a lot of influence on the interaction between teams (exploration). 

A note to this story is that social networking is less helpful in solving more complex problems that require reflection (Lyad Rahwan, www.socialphysics.org). 

Online Collaboration 

As far as digital networks are concerned, Pentland believes that there is still work to be done to make them effective in business. As a follow-up to studies in collaboration with MIT, Wooley and Malone (2015) investigated whether groups that collaborate online showed collective intelligence development and whether social capacity would also be important when people shop put in a platform. Again, it turned out that teams worked smarter with team members who communicated a lot, with equal participation and who had a high degree of emotion-interpreting reading skills. 

Make interaction patterns visible 

To get a good idea flow, you will first have to make people aware of their interaction patterns. Visual feedback of the interaction pattern is a useful tool to improve interaction. An app. developed by MIT can, for example, reflect to what extent the interaction pattern in a team is balanced. 

Also, with mindful observations you might become quickly aware of the interaction patterns and then a tool is not necessary. Especially the agile coach should be able to do that.

Finally 

It comes down practically to the following: encourage employees to come together: drink coffee, lunch, go for a walk at 3 p.m., ... In short: make sure that we talk a lot with each other. 

The layout of the workspace is therefore important. In my opinion, that does not automatically mean that you have to choose for an open space office; people must be able to concentrate ... ... and headphones do not promote the mutual communication that matters.  

So, organize regularly face-2-face formal meetings (rituals) and informal encounters and ensure that the exchange delivers as much as possible within as little time as possible. Guidance from an agile coach is then handy. 

Supervise or coach leaders how they can influence and strengthen the level of exploration and engagement within their team, in terms of communication and equal participation in conversations.