The unexpected Consequences of coffee

I did a summer internship in a large Irish bank as a teenager. This was my first kiss with the corporate world, and one thing that struck me immediately was the dedication to the mid-morning break.

At 10.30 on the dot, everyone in my section of the floor would down keyboards and march off to the canteen. I was delighted with this social moment -- and the resultant break it gave me from pretending to be fascinated by photocopying -- but I was also secretly judgmental of it, in the way that only an uppity 19 year old can be.

Did we really need a break one hour and thirty minutes into the day?

In 2012, Alex Pentland and his team at MIT published a study that would have put me neatly back in my place.

They equipped 2,500 employees across dozens of industries with sociometric badges -- devices that tracked not what people said, but how they said it. Tone, turn-taking, and who spoke to whom. The goal was to work out what separated high-performing teams from everyone else.

The answer was fairly shocking, and great news for the mid-morning caffeine crew. The best predictors of productivity were a team's energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Those two factors explained one third of the variation in productivity between groups.

So what did Pentland recommend? He told the manager at a bank's call centre to change the coffee break schedule so that everyone on a team took their break at the same time. Among lower-performing teams, handling time fell by more than 20%. Across the whole call centre, the overall improvement was 8%.

We have spent decades obsessing over what happens inside meetings -- the agenda, the slides, the action items -- and almost no time on the conditions in which people arrive at them. What Pentland's data showed is that the relational texture of a team, built largely in the agenda gaps, is what determines whether the formal time together produces anything of value.

Later in my career, standing at the front of a room as a facilitator, I would feel a specific kind of reluctance to doing the polite but mobilising 'ok, let's come back together' announcement after a break. I had important things to cover. I also knew that what was happening in those conversations -- the ones I was about to interrupt -- was a significant part of why everyone had bothered to show up at all. Perhaps its not seen as worthwhile because its enjoyable - but nonetheless - the work of being social, matters.

The nineteen year old me may have been all business — but the adult me fully understands the cohesion that yaps can yield.