Do You Know How Your Teams Get Work Done?

New research suggests many managers don’t — but machine learning can help close the gap.

by

and

Kartik Hosanagar

by

and

Kartik Hosanagar

December 01, 2021, Updated December 01, 2021

Evgeniy Shvets/Stocksy

Summary.

In a research study at four Fortune 500 companies, when managers were asked about their teams’ work, on average they either did not know or could not remember 60% of the work their teams do. This is a major problem because it can lead to unrealistic digital transformation targets and the poor allocation of resources. But in the same study, machine learning tools were able to bridge the gap between manager intuition and reality. The study showed that employing ML algorithms reduced the average work-recall gap from ~60% to 24%. Managers should roll out such ML tools but take steps to ensure employees don’t feel surveilled — they can anonymize and aggregate data, and communicate openly with employees about what they are measuring and what they hope to achieve.

How much do managers know about how their teams work? We recently ran a research study involving 14 teams comprising 283 employees in four Fortune 500 companies. When managers were asked about their teams’ work, on average they either did not know or could not remember 60% of the work their teams do. In one extreme instance, a manager in our study could describe only 4% of their team’s work.

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RM

Rohan Narayana Murty is the CTO and founder of Soroco. He leads technology (read about his work here) and R&D at Soroco, where he is building the work graph – a new data fabric for understanding how teams get work done in the enterprise. He has a PhD in computer science from Harvard.
RD

Rajath B. Das is a senior research analyst at Soroco, focusing on analytical insights derived from the work graph — patterns in how teams get work done in the enterprise.
Scott Duke Kominers (@skominers) is a Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School; a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics; and Co-Principal Investigator of the Harvard Crypto, Fintech and Web3 Lab. He is also an a16z crypto Research Partner, and advises a number of companies on marketplace and incentive design. Previously, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the inaugural Saieh Family Fellow in Economics at the Becker Friedman Institute. His first book is The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create.
AN

Arjun Narayan is chief product officer and co-founder of Soroco. He leads Soroco’s efforts in using machine learning to discover and optimize how teams get work done in the enterprise. Arjun graduated from MIT and has worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and as a venture capitalist at Catamaran.
Suraj Srinivasan is the Philip J. Stomberg Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Chair of the Digital Value Lab at Harvard’s Digital, Data and Design Institute.
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, the director of Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute, and the author of Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries (Berrett-Koehler, 2018).
KH

Kartik Hosanagar (@khosanagar) is a professor studying technology and digital business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and faculty co-lead of its AI center. His current research focuses on AI-human collaboration and AI and creativity. He is the author of “A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence.”

New!

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Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning’s online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Team Management. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.

Build a better team and achieve more of what matters.

Start Course

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Do You Know How Your Teams Get Work Done?

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