The Office Amenity That Actually Improves Teamwork
How do the best teams improve their teamwork? Is it ping pong tables? A gym? Providing a kitchen/meals? Open floor plans? Hybrid work arrangements? Diffused leadership? We’re all looking for that secret sauce that helps our teams perform at their best. Why is the answer so elusive?
Please tune in this week as Wayne discusses Harvard Business School research which identified ONE FACTOR the highest performing teams had in common. What do you think of this finding? Can it really be that simple? Please give us the benefit of your thinking by emailing me at [email protected].
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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors where We Build Better Contractors.
This week I want to talk about the office amenity that actually improves teamwork. Okay? Yeah. Before I get started, Boot Camp in November, contact Charlotte for more information and get your high-potential people enrolled.
This comes from Harvard Business Review, Ron Friedman, July of '26. And what about this is important to you? We're always looking for that advantage, right? Should I put ping pong tables in the break room or should we offer a different variety of coffee? Always looking for something to make your people happier, more comfortable, more part of the team, more part of the culture. What's the one amenity that Harvard at least says actually works? Is it private offices, a gym in the office, whatever?
What they did was they studied. They interviewed over 6,000 knowledge workers across a wide range of industries. Then they identified several small groups of what they called super teams, highly effective teams. And they analyzed all the inputs and tried to control the variables. So what was the leadership like? What were the team habits? What were their work arrangements, hybrid or whatever? What they determined, there's one factor that all these super teams had. What was it? Let me see if I can come to that.
The author said that collaboration requires more than togetherness. Remote work versus in-office work, there's study after study after study, mixed results. Some people say that people are more productive at home and some... I guess I could argue either way. Super teams, he said, are just as likely to be remote as in the office. It ain't remote, it ain't hybrid, it's something different. What's the one factor that these super teams had in common? A quiet place in which to do focused work. A quiet place somewhere in the office, places plural perhaps, where the team could do focused work.
Dan Sullivan, I know I talk about Dan Sullivan all the time, but the man is a genius. Dan Sullivan was on this 20 years ago when he talked about focus days. So entrepreneurs had three kinds of days, buffer days, focus days, and what is it? Two kinds of days. I forget. It's been a long time. But the focus days were when you do work that is directly income producing. So it might be going out to a client presentation to close a deal to do a new project. So the idea of focus has been around for a long time. Dan Sullivan was focused on entrepreneurs, individually focusing. This is about focusing teams.
Three tips that the author gives. Treat focused work as a necessary ingredient. And he said it's brainstorming on steroids. Brainstorming works. I like it. It's fun. It generates often really good ideas. He said one way to supercharge your brainstorming is to have people generate their own ideas individually before they come together for brainstorming. He said that produces even better results. So again, you want to focus your team, give them that space to work in, but you also want them to prepare and be ready when they come into the room.
The second thing is allow your employees to focus. Don't expect them to respond immediately to phone calls and emails and interruptions and other things. Honor their focus time. Dan Sullivan said this is so simple. Just put on your door, close your door to your office or your conference room and put a sign on it that says focus. And everybody in the place knows, hey, this is a no-interruption zone. And maybe it's just for an hour or two hours or three hours, but let that be a part of your culture in your company that when people are actively seeking focus time, everybody else respects that.
And the third thing he said, allow your employees to control when they decide to do this focus work. Maybe they want to get together on Saturday morning. Okay, that's fine. I mean, if that's what you want to do, do it. But the idea that the entrepreneur has to control all aspects of the business is really rather counterproductive, isn't it, when you're talking about getting super teams together to achieve great results.
Let me read the closing here. "Our findings suggest that leaders may benefit from asking a different question. Have we created the conditions to allow our people to do their best thinking?" That's what it's all about, right? We sort of think about the old days of the carrot and the stick, and I think if you put your people in a place, a position to win more often, you're going to get better results and you're going to have happier people. That's the way I look at it. What do you think? Email me at [email protected].
This is Wayne Rivers at PCA where We Build Better Contractors.
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