New research reveals the significance of teams and coworkers in shaping productivity, earning potential, and job retention. The study looked at data from Sweden. It discovered that in order to earn high wages and returns on education, workers must find coworkers who complement rather than duplicate their own skills.
Most workers in today’s world are highly specialized, but this specialization can come at a cost, particularly for those on the wrong team. New research from Harvard’s Growth Lab reveals the importance of teams and coworkers in terms of productivity, earning potential, and job retention.
The study, which was recently published in the journal Science Advances, examined administrative data on Sweden’s 9 million residents. The research assessed the importance of coworker skills by constructing networks of complementarity and substitutability among specific educational tracks. It discovered that in order to earn high wages and returns on education, workers must find coworkers who complement, rather than replace, them. The benefits of having complementary coworkers are substantial: the impact is comparable to a college degree.
We tend to think of skills as being something personal that individuals can market to a company. However, this vision of skills is too simplistic. One person’s skills connect to another person’s skills, etc., and the better these connections, the more productive workers will be, and the more they will earn.
Frank Neffke
The research offers a tool to assess the right and wrong coworkers in fields of expertise. The right coworkers are those with skills you lack, yet needed to complete a team. The wrong coworkers are those who replicate your skillset and ultimately lower your value to the employer. For example, those with a degree in Architecture are best complemented by workers with engineering, construction, or surveying degrees, and negatively impacted by those with landscape or interior design degrees.
“We tend to think of skills as being something personal that individuals can market to a company,’ said Frank Neffke, Growth Lab Research Director. “However, this vision of skills is too simplistic. One person’s skills connect to another person’s skills, etc., and the better these connections, the more productive workers will be, and the more they will earn.”
There are numerous things you can do to make your company a more enjoyable place to work. You can improve employee morale among your coworkers and leave a lasting impression by making an effort to be a positive presence at work. Whether your actions are large or small, they can have a significant impact.
Careers are also driven by complementarity. According to the research, people tend to stay longer in organizations with many complementary workers and leave those with many substitute workers. These findings hold true for up to 20 years of a person’s career.
The study also backs up several well-known facts, such as the fact that cities and large corporations pay higher wages. Workers are more likely to find better-fitting teams in cities, and large corporations frequently allow employees to specialize.
According to Neffke, the benefits of working with complementary coworkers are not the same for all employees. Higher educated workers appear to benefit far more from working in complementary teams than lower educated workers. Workers with a college degree or higher have become increasingly able to find better-matching coworkers over the last 20 years.
