Tech giant Google has reported on a two-year effort to define the perfect work team.

Google has completed ‘Project Aristotle’; an initiative that interviewed hundreds of Google employees and analysed data from more than 180 active teams at the company to find out how to put people together in the most productive ways.

The project has come up with a surprising simple answer.

“We were dead wrong,” says Google people operations analyst Julia Rozovsky.

She said she was expecting to come up with an algorithm to form the best teams in future.

“We were pretty confident that we'd find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team,” she explained.

“Take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right?”

But that did not happen.

Essentially, the data could not provide a concrete recipe for success. Rather, it showed humanity is key to setting up effective teams.

“Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions,” said Rozovsky.

It appears that the best teams comprise people who respect each another’s emotions, can rely on each other and actually care about their task.

The full story is available in the New York Times.