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The Role of Organisational Network Analysis in People Analytics

David Green

Figure 1. (Source: Insight222 People Analytics Trends Report 2021)

Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) is growing in popularity among HR professionals. As Insight222 2021 People Analytics Trends report showed, with 61% of companies increasing their team size in the last 12 months, HR professionals and business leaders are looking for the best means of researching and creating data-driven decisions that lead to business values. ONA is a unique technique that gives an inside look at the inner workings of the human capital dynamics at the organisation, much like opening a classic watch and seeing how the gears work together to make the whole system function.

What Does ONA Measure?

Unlike human capital, which measures the traits and skillsets that assist employees with the performance of their jobs, ONA measures social capital. Social capital includes the relationships and networks employees create to help them get the job done, including networks for expertise, innovation, social learning, strategy, and day-to-day work. As such ONA plays a vital role in enterprise collaboration overall.

According to Rob Cross, ONA shows patterns of collaboration and influence that are entirely different from what the leaders of the formal structure are familiar with in understanding their operations to make decisions.

Here, ONA represents what's going on in the business by means of how people and teams interact and collaborate to get work done, which has a significant bearing on individual, team, and organisational performance and process and can contribute to company success. 

How companies see benefits from ONA?

Improved employee turnover – by showing who has a better support network

Identifying top performers – that otherwise are overlooked for promotion due to the hierarchy of an organisation

Lower employee burnout – with insight into people who are too connected and are overloaded

Improve diversity and inclusion – by recognising those that are excluded from unconscious bias 

Figure 2 - An example of the insights offered through ONA (Source: Rob Cross)

The example in Figure 2 is of an ONA project undertaken by Rob Cross with the exploration and production division of a large petroleum organisation. It identifies mid-level managers critical to information flow such as Mitchell, who is the only point of contact between members of the production division and the rest of the network. It also highlights that the Senior Vice President Mares is peripheral to the network and is essentially an untapped and underutilised resource, whilst the Production team is isolated and separated from the network. None of this is visible from the rickety old org chart.

Why is ONA Important?

Everyone is familiar with the organisational chart with the CEO near the top and branches of reporting lines underneath. Many of these charts are saved on a drive to pull up when it requires updating. But overall, besides visualising the organisation's hierarchy, it only provides a little information.

With ONA, a chart can be created to provide a more in-depth view of the organisation's function from a people connection point of view. From here, it can be determined who communicates with whom more efficiently.

Figure 3: The importance of social capital in ascertaining employee value (Source: TrustSphere)

What Business Questions Can ONA Answer?

If you want to dig deeper into why the company is not as competitive in the market or not reaching set goals, ONA provides a means to do this. Concerns that can be discovered by using ONA are:

Figure 4: Examples of ONA use cases (Source: David Green)

How to Implement ONA

There are two ways to gather information; both provide value through ONA. 

Active ONA Data Collection

This information is drawn by issuing surveys and self-reports to your employees and evaluating the results that come back to you. This enables employers to gather an understanding of how their employees (or groups of employees) feel about their colleagues, their relationships, and their place in the organisation.

Key characteristics:

  • Point-in-time

  • It can be labour intensive

  • Response rates critical

  • Enables a deep dive into a specific topic

  • Understands how employees feel

Passive ONA Data Collection

This is done by way of gathering information through employee email, calendar & phone metadata, social media, and collaboration platforms. This provides a different view across the entire company. Because this method is free of bias, it has more objective insight into how people collaborate at work. It can also measure changes in network behaviours after corporate events or significant changes. Additionally Passive ONA can even highlight the impact of relationships on diversity and inclusion.

Key characteristics:

  • Real-time and continuous

  • Provides scale

  • Privacy is a key characteristic

  • Clear communications on the "why" and benefits to employees required

  • Understand what employees do

Though each offers essential information, combining both methods is the best practice when implementing ONA for HR data analytics. Adding Passive ONA allows for the passage of time and measures ongoing behaviours. At the same time, Active ONA can produce great insight; employees risk fearing to respond truthfully or at all to the questions asked. In short, the two data sets provide a revolutionary 360-degree view of understanding how people feel and what they do. For a deeper dive into ONA, sign up to one of our myHRfuture Academy courses featuring Bennet Voorhees such as How To Use Python for Organisational Network Analysis.

Figure 5: Active vs. Passive ONA - data sources, key characteristics and vendor landscape (Source: David Green)

How to Get Started With ONA

The first rule of people analytics still stands: start with the business problem. Successful people analytics teams remain focused on the needs of the business. When prioritising projects, the team concentrates on work that will drive significant business value instead of just benefiting HR functions alone.

ONA is a powerful lens to support and grow your impact with people analytics - learn and upskill your staff with the benefits and the procedures to implement this technique effectively.

Projects must be carefully scoped – create a data-driven culture within the organisation and the HR department. Have team members upskilled in asking the right questions, preparing and evaluating information collected and delivering to decision-makers to offer the most business value? 

With surveys, high response rates are critical - because, with a large pool of information to evaluate, it is much easier to draw the correct conclusions and make effective decisions. Make surveys specific and easy for employees to respond to.

Figure 6. (Source: 2021 Insight222 People Analytics Trends Report)

Of people analytics leaders who responded to our 2021 Insight222 People Analytics Trends report, 81% predict that their companies will invest in Second Wave and Third Wave technologies. Get to know the vendor market, be open to pilots and experiments - find what works for you. Try different methods to give you different perspectives on a situation. Explore outside assistance that can bring a unique approach to ONA.  

Transparency and effective communication with employees is vital. With data collected from email metadata, it is imperative to communicate with employees what data you, as the people analytics team, want to use, for what purpose it will be used and what benefits they may receive from it. 

Employee Privacy and ONA 

To note, when collecting data from your team in this way, there is the risk of employee concern about protecting their personal information. Be sure to create governance, work closely with legal, IT and employee representative groups, and establish transparent governance around data collection, access and storage, communication, opt-in/out, anonymity, etc. This can ensure your employees' information becomes one of the most valued and respected resources.

Case Studies of ONA

This is a question I am often asked, which not only provides evidence of the huge interest in ONA but also that the technique (at least when it comes to passive) is relatively new. There are plenty of case studies available if you look closely enough.

1. General Motors – Innovation

One of the most powerful examples of ONA is how GM used it to stimulate innovation and effectively disrupt themselves from the inside. The case study and the academic research behind it is documented in the wonderful MITSMR article How to Catalyse Innovation in Your Organisation, which was co-written by amongst others Rob Cross and Michael Arena.

The article outlines the different roles brokers, connectors and energisers (see Figure 7) play in a network in discovering, developing and diffusing innovation within an organisation and essentially how to disrupt from the inside.

Figure 7: How to catalyse innovation within your organisation (Source: MIT Sloan Management Review)

By analysing the connections between employees GM was able to determine how to bring together the people most likely to have the highest impact on innovation and product design to work together on projects and teams. They then used a variety of methods to help create the environment most conducive for ideas to be created and shared, which is known as the ‘Adaptive Space’ (which is also the title of Michael Arena’s book).

The MITSMR article outlines the methods GM used once it had identified and brought together the group of employees. This included:

  • Co-Lab – an event running for a maximum of 24 hours involving up to 60 people competing in small teams who pitch ideas to executives. A Co-Lab operates on the premise that sometimes the best solutions emerge when you have the least time.

  • Summit – up to 300 individuals acting as brokers and connectors from across functions, using design-thinking methods to share, create, and build solutions.

  • Tipping Forward event, typically comprised of 100 to 200 individuals, which provides the adaptive space necessary to openly share the many successes that have already been applied locally, and then tap into the passion of energisers to amplify these successes across the broader enterprise

This process, which let’s remind ourselves again was initiated by HR, has enabled GM to launch innovative products such as Maven and Book by Cadiliac, as well as initiate a new process to improve buyer-supplier relationships.

2. Global Consumer Goods Company & Trustsphere – Leadership Development Program

A common criticism of leadership development programs is that evaluating impact can be challenging as changes in the behaviour of participants is often subtle, invisible and hard to quantify. This example of how TrustSphere worked in unison with a provider delivering a leadership development program to R&D teams in five countries of a Fortune 100 consumer goods company illustrates how ONA can help shine a new light on this evaluation process.

Elements of the program included development areas for participants in key areas of leadership such as their network strength and reach, their influence, their leadership style and how they and their teams communicate and collaborate together and with the rest of the business.

TrustSphere worked with the provider delivering the program and the organisation itself to evaluate participants before the program began and then at two-month intervals during the eight-month program so delegates and the trainer could evaluate progress and identify areas for further development personalised to each participant of the program. Figure 8 below provides an example of the report provided to participants throughout the program and the elements covered.  

Figure 8: Using ONA to measure and accelerate the impact of a leadership development program (Source: TrustSphere)

The impact of the initiative has been significant, including evidence of measurable behavioural change by participants. Providing objective data about their own networks resulted in participants proactively building these networks across the organisation over the course of the program. TrustSphere’s network analysis acted as a “mirror” which helped participants reduce bias and use data to understand where to spend time building and enhancing their key relationships across the organisation.

The reports were considered so valuable by participants and the program considered so useful by the company, that there are now plans to expand the service to broader groups across the company.

A key next step of evaluation will also be to look at the impact of the initiative on the business such as whether the speed, quality and financial impact of R&D innovation has improved.

3. European Retail Bank & Humanyze – Network Strength & Branch Performance

Like Rob Cross, Ben Waber is an invaluable resource for articles and case studies on ONA and people analytics. The video below and accompanying article in re:Work recounts an example of when Ben’s company Humanyze conducted an analysis of the differing branch performances of a European retail bank.

As Ben describes, despite employees in each branch having the same training and similar demographics, performance was very different. Humanyze used their digital badges to test whether there was a correlation between network strength and branch performance. The results were illuminating. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highest-performing branches had the most cohesive, interconnected social networks.

The results for lower-performing branches were more interesting. In one example, new hires were being excluded from what was a tightly-knit employee group, which led to a program to better integrate new hires being implemented. Whilst another example, saw two distinct networks within a branch – one on the first floor, the other on the second. Despite it taking only a matter of seconds to walk from one floor to another, the study suggested no one did it. As a result of this insight, the bank shifted away from multilevel branches where they could and rotated desks more frequently elsewhere.

The impact on the bottom line was impressive. A/B testing saw the 50% of branches where the new procedures were implemented enjoying an increase in loan sales of 11% compared to the branches where nothing was changed.

4. Microsoft – Measuring Manager Effectiveness

Microsoft acquired VoloMetrix back in 2015 and have since integrated what is now known as Workplace Analytics into its Office 365 suite. In this article, Dawn Klinghoffer who leads the people analytics function at Microsoft, describes how they ran a project that combined data from Workplace Analytics (email and calendar meta data, not content) with engagement and business data to better understand manager effectiveness.

The key findings, which are described by Dawn in the article and summarised in Figure 9 below, in part validated hypotheses that Microsoft had long believed but also contained some unexpected results too.

Figure 9 Using ONA to measure manager effectiveness (Source: Dawn Klinghoffer)

As Dawn outlines in her article, the insights the project revealed are helping Microsoft develop guiding principles and coaching programs for managers that drive team engagement and business performance. This is another example of how ONA can reveal hitherto hidden insights that can be used to improve productivity and employee experience.

Where Can I Find Out More About ONA?

There’s a wealth of articles and case studies available on ONA, which illustrates the sheer breadth of what can be achieved. A selection of resources is provided below. Please feel free to suggest additional resources and particularly case studies in the comments section of this article:

ONA as the Future of HR Analytics 

Social capital plays a vital role in the organisation's success, and ONA provides the insight HR professionals, and analytic leaders need to improve their people capital. Learning the ins and outs of ONA gives the company the edge over its competition when making changes to all business functions involving the people who work for them and is an example of effective HR analytics gathering.

 

Thank You

My interest in ONA is being sated through my recent appointment as a Board Advisor at TrustSphere. I’d like to thank Manish Goel, Greg Newman and Priya Bagga for their support in writing this article.

Thanks also to Kat Khramova of UNLEASH for asking me to prepare a speech to ‘demystify ONA’ for the Las Vegas show. It forced me to learn more about a topic that had already become a passion.

Finally, thank you to the other speakers I had the privilege of introducing on the Smart Data breakout at UNLEASH: Charlotte Nagy, Daniel Morales, Madelyn Torres Nichols, Chris Louie, Daniel Shapero, Todd Horton, Lexy Martin, Gary Blake, Christopher Eamiguel, Sheri Feinzig, Mary Ellen Slayter and Jason Pagan. Together, I believe we ably demonstrated the promise and variety of ways in which people analytics is providing quantifiable value in terms of improved business outcomes and better employee experience and wellbeing. Long may it continue.  

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Green is Executive Director and Member of the Board of Insight222, host of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, and an influential speaker and writer in the HR and People Analytics sphere.

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