5 factors for outstanding team performance
Learn how to use the 5 factors Google identified that lead to standout team performance.
In 2012, Google launched a multi-year internal study codenamed ‘Project Aristotle’ to identify what factors lead to outstanding team performance.
Their data-driven analysis concluded with 5 factors.
The 5 factors that lead to standout team performance
Psychological Safety – Team members feel safe taking interpersonal risks, such as asking questions, admitting mistakes, or challenging ideas without fear of ridicule or punishment.
Dependability – Members can rely on each other to complete high‑quality work on time and meet expectations.
Structure & Clarity – Roles, plans, and goals are clearly defined and understood by all team members.
Meaning of Work – Individuals find personal significance and purpose in their tasks.
Impact of Work – Team members believe their efforts make a difference and contribute to broader organisational outcomes.
How to pragmatically use these 5 factors
When it comes to culture and continuous improvement, less is always more. These 5 factors provide you with a clear focus of what to improve on within your team or organisation.
There are other cultural elements that matter beyond the 5, but personally I would focus on nailing these first.
Option 1: Survey
One approach is to turn the 5 factors into a survey that you can share with your team or employees.
Use this survey once a quarter to gather data to identify where you are weakest across the 5 factors.
Select a single factor to improve on each quarter and identify experiments to run.
Link to a survey you can copy.
Option 2: Team Discussion
An alternative approach is to use these 5 factors in a team discussion. Write up a meeting agenda with the 5 factors, explain them to your team, and then discuss:
Where do we think we are doing best across these 5 factors?
Where do we think we need to improve the most?
What experiment can we run in the next week to improve our team effectiveness?
Why I would personally follow the team discussion route
There are several benefits to a discussion over a survey:
Transparency: you can’t hide what isn’t going well. It forces you to address the actual problems and creates a public commitment to improvement.
Richer detail: the qualitative insights as to what is and is not working is likely to be more actionable than a score 1-3.
Up-skill: you are up-skilling team members in terms of knowledge of what leads to team performance and how to improve it.
Faster improvement cycle: you can run experiments every week and get the whole team focused on improvements as opposed to a formal quarterly experiment with less employee buy-in.
If you use retrospectives, I would bake it into that process. Ideally, every week you can review how your team is performing against these 5 factors and then implement new experiments every week to improve where you need to.
This approach would provide you with a rapid trajectory towards a fantastic team environment that leads to high-performance, 1 of the 4 outcomes that we think culture should contribute to. (See here for more discussion on culture and the outcomes we think culture should contribute to.)