Organizational Network Analysis
Every organization has people (nodes) who serve as critical storehouses for organizationally relevant information. The relationships between these nodes, in turn, are known as edges. Edges form the avenues or conduits through which information passes from person to person. By examining the locations of nodes, and the patterns of edges among them, we can help diagnose organizational problems and prescribe best practices going forward.
Some key concepts that directly impact your organization’s performance now, and in the future:
Formal v informal networks: the organizational communication chart you have on your wall is very likely not the actual way communication and information transfer happens in your organization. By using surveys, interviews, and existing data sources such as email and social media, we can help you uncover how people actually communicate, and who actually communicates to who.
Centrality: what nodes are structurally important in terms of how many people connect to them? Often, people who are important in the formal network are not necessarily important in the real-world network (sorry Executives!). If you’re trying to roll out a new policy, or implement cultural change, knowing who is influential in your informal communication network is critical.
Brokers: brokers are individuals who connect 2 or more otherwise disparate groups. These groups can be informal niches of people, or more formal groups such as departments. Without brokers, most networks become fractured and communication is not possible. If you are experiencing bottlenecks, information siloing, or about to make a big organizational change, it is vital you know who connects who!
Cliques and groups: unlike in your formal communication network, people often align themselves in ways not necessarily anticipated. These informal groups, or cliques, have dramatic impacts on how work is done in your organization.
Secondary network data: it is not just the people (nodes) and their relationships (edges) which are organized and dispersed in organizations in ways not necessarily anticipated. It is also their inherent human capital—the skills, traits, and life experiences they individually possess. We pair surveys, interviews, and existing communication data to advanced analyses to produce multi-layered network maps showing organizations where their most creative people are, where employee frustration seems high, and where to recruit for the future based on the human capital needs.
Using these ONA, we can quickly and efficiently assist with a variety of organizationally relevant problems:
Communication/knowledge silos, and the identification of critical brokers
Plausible pathways of learning and career development, from any point in the organization to any other
The different styles of communication within different functional areas, and the effect on knowledge flow of the whole organization
The level of importance of particular employees in the context of the communication network
Differences in communication frequencies by department, siloing of knowledge, and an over-reliance on single individuals to connect otherwise disparate departments in organizations
There are a host of critical organizational opportunities to explore and optimize, using the tools of ONA, including:
Job satisfaction/employee engagement
ROI on diversity and inclusion programming
Existence/prevalence of knowledge silos
Regrettable turnover/termination
The location of innovation hubs
The practice of real vs. espoused beliefs
The seeding of social contagion to support behavior change
We can automate the retrieval and display of this data for you, too—dashboards which show real-time connections being made by people in your organization, and whether people are feeling creative, or happy, or hungry!