Traits of High-Performing Teams

Traits of High-Performing Teams

High-performing teams don’t just work better. They live better.

How people sleep, eat, move and recover isn’t random. Our data suggests it is shaped, in part, by the team around them — and that this has a measurable relationship with cognitive performance.

How people live predicts how they perform

Across more than 10,000 participants, OwnLife data shows a consistent relationship between cognitive function and the way people sleep, eat, exercise and recover.

We bring these factors together into a Ways-of-Living (WoL) Score, which reflects areas including sleep, glycaemic load, caffeine and alcohol consumption, exercise and the space people create for cognitive recovery.

At an individual level, the pattern is clear: lifestyle behaviours and cognitive performance are closely connected.

But what happens when you look beyond individuals and compare entire teams?

The differences between teams are significant

You might expect individual differences to average out when looking at larger teams.

They don’t.

Across 84 teams of more than 50 people, the lowest-scoring teams had an average Ways-of-Living Score of 31%, compared with 60% among the highest-scoring teams.

That is a gap of almost 30 percentage points between teams.

The implication is important. How people sleep, eat, exercise and recover appears not simply to be a collection of individual choices. Team culture, working norms and environment can have a significant influence on those behaviours.

Better Ways-of-Living are associated with better cognitive performance

The relationship also appears when we compare team Ways-of-Living Scores with team cognitive performance.

Across the same population of 84 teams, OwnLife data shows a statistically significant positive relationship between the two, with a correlation of 0.46 and p < 0.001.

Put simply, teams with stronger Ways-of-Living Scores tend to perform better cognitively.

The data does not mean that lifestyle alone determines performance. But it does suggest that relatively small differences in the environment and behaviours surrounding a team can be associated with meaningful differences in collective cognitive performance.

Team culture is a performance lever

This has practical implications for leaders.

Creating an environment where people can exercise, switch off at the end of the day, sleep properly and recover should not be viewed simply as a wellbeing initiative.

These behaviours are direct inputs into how effectively people are able to think, concentrate, adapt and perform.

That might mean creating a culture where people can get to the gym during the working day, discouraging unnecessary late-evening communication, protecting recovery time and examining the working norms that make healthy behaviours easier — or harder.

The objective is not simply to reduce burnout or improve employee sentiment.

It is to create the conditions in which a team is better able to perform cognitively.

Leaders set the norms — and the ceiling

A team’s culture can either support or constrain its performance.

The data suggests that teams with stronger Ways-of-Living perform measurably better. So the norms leaders establish around work, exercise, recovery and boundaries matter.

This isn’t only about how your people feel. It is about how your team performs.

Data source: OwnLife Analytics platform, 10,000+ participants and 84 teams of more than 50 people, 2026.