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Given that there are over 12 members in each group, this a very small number compared to the potential number and thus a very tenuous link between the groups.

ACTION POINT: Create a boundary-spanning link between Transport and the rest of the departments.

 

Network 2 – Co-Teaching

As with the Teaching Information network, it’s important to understand why Sustainable Planning is so peripheral in this network.

ACTION POINT: We advised the university what group members to bring into the co-teaching relationships that they have forged—either as co-instructors, guest lecturers, teaching assistants, etc.

 

Network 3 – Research Information

 

A familiar pattern is beginning to emerge. As with the two networks based on teaching relationships, we observe that six groups are very interconnected while a seventh— Sustainable Planning —is only peripherally so.

ACTION POINT: We suggested implementing a Monthly debrief to ensure that members of other groups obtain a detailed awareness about research conducted by Sustainable Planning, as well as what skills and capabilities its members possess more generally.

 

Network 4 – Research Collaboration

 

First, let’s consider what’s similar. Again, we observe that all seven groups for a single, interconnected component.

The density of those connections among them is much lower, however. What puzzled us is why information seeking for Research and knowledge creation is stronger than collaboration.

ACTION POINT: As cross-domain collaboration provides better knowledge creation and, ultimately, a better learning experience for the students (AKA. University customers), we advocated for a less bureaucratic way of doing cross-research.

 

The ties that bind – strong or frail?

We uncovered that all linkages between pairs of groups in the network are forged by just 1 or 2 people. Is this slowing down communication? What happens in the absence of these people?

We recommended all parties to the intergroup links be made aware of the bridging roles that they play in and find out if they need help or support in maintaining the relationship. We also advised the faculty members to brainstorm how others can play a similar role, as better-positioned people are more productive and help create a healthy work environment.

It is generally the case that relational “bridges” between all groups are anchored by just one to two people in each group. This latter observation represents the biggest opportunity for increasing the density of connections among all groups.

And finally, we saw a lot of peripherals and gave a heads up to Department Heads to dig deeper and see what led to this.

 

The 3-month notebook

The next step on the list is creating a set of tasks to be implemented by key people in the university over the span of 12 weeks, followed by a remeasurement.

Want to find out if your organization is good at creating knowledge?

 

 

 

This tendency of not connecting in more formal networks was true for networks shaped by information-sharing, both when it happened directly between people in the network as well as in collaboration platforms like Workplace by Facebook.

ONA is a technique for identifying hidden but vital patterns of interaction among workers. It accomplishes this by mapping informal relationships and interactions, with special emphasis given to relationships that span locations, functional silos, hierarchical levels, and socio-cultural differences.

Analyze “Status Quo” and Identify Improvement Areas

 

Companies use ONA to identify problems with the flow of information, decision making, influence, or energy across their teams and departments so that they can promote innovation and propel organizational effectiveness.

Companies use ONA to solve specific issues and address challenges, including:

Hybrid Work Analysis

Analyze relationship patterns to support a hybrid work strategy. The Hybrid Work Network Analysis is aimed at helping companies that are currently transitioning from Work-from-Home to a hybrid office model.

Onboarding

Analyze achieved connectedness and overall performance of onboarding process. We analyze communication and expertise flows, as well as Aspirational Networks (key people that would make one’s efforts more productive) to discover key areas of improvement.

Engagement and Top Talent Retention

Analyze levels of connectedness that ensure retention.

The core idea behind the ONA is that connectedness and exchange of information and knowledge play a vital role in engagement. To truly understand how your organization works you need to be able to visualize and analyze the ties between employees.

Transformation

Knowing how your organization really works is of the essence whether you’re restructuring, need to become efficient in a new capacity, or you are merging with another organization and need to understand how to bring people together.

Innovation boost

Organization Network Analysis will show you how to awaken the leader in every employee and how to restructure and break down silos, and connect people, teams and projects for the best possible outcome.

Due Diligence

A typical Due Diligence looks at founders and management, legal matters, financials, employees, and clients. But what if something is missing from the Data Room? Although collaboration is at the heart of modern business processes, very few investors analyze this, and most companies are still finding it hard to manage it. Ensure the success of an investment by uncovering the hidden weaknesses of a company’s collaborative network.

Time Wasters

What if you could uncover a hidden cost within your organization and save millions of wasted dollars? Focus your attention on the hidden costs that go undetected, never show up on the financial reports but impact the bottom line.

 

Who is ONA for?

Organization network analysis can be done on a wide range of companies, from small organizations with only 20 to 50 employees to large multinational corporations with hundreds of employees.

There are no size restrictions for organizational network analysis, and no one-size-fits-all solutions can be applied to all companies. Each company benefits from insights gained from the data and from visualizing relationships between employees, customers, suppliers, or partners.

 

Conclusion: Your Network is your Net Worth

 

 

A famous “quote” is the dialogue between two managers:

Question: “What happens if we invest a lot of money in our staff and then they leave?”

Reply: “What if we don’t invest in them and they stay?”

The most valuable resource for many companies is their people – their network.

◾But how many have a plan for how to develop them in a 12-26 months timeline? 

◾How do companies ensure that the organization and its employees have the opportunities they need to develop and grow? 

◾Are companies aware of how they function internally and of problems that could arise?

◾Do they even have a way to assess this? 

If people and organizations do not focus on these questions, they will experience a brain drain, an arduous process of attracting top talent as well as a lack of innovation and competitiveness.

More than ever, Organizational Network Analysis is needed to show how your organization works in today’s business landscape, and how it changes over time (for the better or worse). With minimal effort, you get critical insights and competitive advantages on how your organization works as a network of relationships both internally and externally.

 

 

3) Analytics is descriptive, rather than prescriptive or predictive. 

More than two-thirds of organizations practice descriptive analytics, using talent-related data that describes what has happened in the past.

 

 

On the other hand, prescriptive analytics allow leaders to gain useful insights, while predictive analytics uses “tools such as statistical models and machine learning to make predictions about the future.”

Currently, 43% of respondents make at least moderate use of prescriptive analytics, while 34% make at least moderate use of predictive analytics. “Only 15% of organizations make high or very high use of predictive analytics,” Oracle researchers noted.

 

4) Most organizations face hurdles when it comes to people analytics.

When it comes to HR professionals’ abilities to make decisions based on HR analytics data, most see their efforts as lacking. 

This leaves roughly a third who are poor or very poor at making positive changes based on people analytics,” according to the report. Only 36% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their people analytics platform delivers actionable insights.

 

5) Clean data is hard to come by

Among the most challenging elements of people analytics are data integration, cleaning and visualization, according to the report. Nearly half rate their data integration as “fairly difficult” or “very difficult,” while 42% said the same about data clean-up and 38% about analytics visualization.

 

 

Conclusion

Is HR data a type of big data? The term big data typically refers to data sets so large and complex that they are difficult to process using traditional statistical methods. To answer that question, Oracle asked respondents about five characteristics typically associated with big data: value, validity, volume, velocity and variety. They discovered that more than half of respondents believe that the HR analytics data they use, do not reflect these characteristics to a high or very-high degree.

Therefore, they concluded HR data—at least these days—must be cleansed and refined to yield meaningful insights. Good HR data analysts do not typically need to be “data miners” or “data scientists,” but they do need to have a clear understanding of how to see patterns and draw insights from the data.

Although a minority of organizations, many companies are skilled and successful at implementing HR analytics. If you plan carefully and use the available resources, your organization can be successful as well.

 

 

Why should leaders care – The Great Resignation

 

People are resigning from their jobs at a record pace, and this is being called the Great Resignation. This phrase was coined by Anthony Klotz, a professor of management in Texas, who said a wave of resignations is coming as people abandon the workplace.

 

If the top performers are leaving, then those valuable skills and abilities that they possess might also leave with them. It is a loss to your organization, especially if those departing employees feel that your organization’s leadership is lacking.

It’s becoming increasingly harder for leaders to crack down on the right hybrid work set up, and keep the employees engaged and connected.

 

Organizations need to become more agile and understand how people work. One of the key insights any organization can get is how their employees, partners and customers work as a network, rather than a formal, hierarchal organization.

In front of you are the network maps that JOIN21 created upon gathering data points from surveys and the organization’s existing communication tools.

Here is a quick explanation: Each dot represents an employee. The arrows between dots show whom each employee consults or sends information to, the line’s thickness representing the frequency. The larger the dot, the larger the volume of requests from other people.

1. Brokers

A broker connects many unrelated parts of the organization and has ties both internally and externally. With their visibility into several groups, brokers can help change efforts by creating balance and mutual understanding. However, without them, knowledge sharing and information between distributed units stop.

2. Silos

A silo is a group of people that is unable to freely communicate with other teams or departments. Communication within a silo is usually vertical, making it difficult or impossible for this group to collaborate with unrelated systems (e.g., merchandisers from different areas).

These isolated groups in the organization are linked only through a few individuals who serve as gatekeepers. It is not uncommon to find entire departments, branches, or even sister companies working as completely isolated silos. This means they are cut off from the information sources, unable to learn from best practices, company expertise, and basically condemned to repeat the mistakes of others. On a company level, it costs money, time and makes the organization less likely to innovate or even keep productivity level competitive.

3. Central employees

Often, people who are important in the formal network are not necessarily important in the real-world network. 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.

4. Isolated employees

Isolates are unconnected to the rest of the network and can be easily overlooked. If they have high potential, they are a flight risk and can be easily convinced to take their talent elsewhere.

Scandinavian leadership advantage – Using network insights

No organization is the same and every network will look different and ask for different leadership decisions. But from a value perspective, leaders who understand networks (who are brokers, silos, isolates, etc.) have a unique advantage compared to those who cling to the old, hierarchical power structures. That’s exactly where the Scandinavian leadership model has advantages. Its inclusivity makes for a perfect basis for network leadership.

With good algorithms, new technology, and smart collaboration tools, JOIN21 can help leaders gain unique insights and get ahead of the vast majority of companies worldwide.

 

Hybrid workers may also be confronted by challenges related to work-life balance according to the study. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of the business and HR leaders surveyed say they are not fully confident that workload is manageable enough for employees to make full use of their personal time, and burnout may be partially responsible.

Technological advances have been met with a mixed response from workers because what skills are needed in the future is still unclear. Only one in four respondents are confident they can identify the skills they will require in the future.

How to avoid the most common hybrid work problems?

In the past two years, we have made a radical change in the way we work, and more and more companies are seriously considering how they can make changes that will last.

 

 

Hybrid work environments aren’t a sudden fix for every business. In fact, they’re not a fix at all, but a way to enable employees to be more productive and feel more satisfied in their jobs.

The key is making sure the structure fits the work being done and that managers and workers understand how it will work. That means employees have to understand why the company is moving to a hybrid space, who has immediate responsibility for them, and what they can expect from their manager.

If you implement a hybrid working arrangement without giving it much thought, you can end up with serious communication and collaboration problems. One of the main appeals of hybrid working is the balance between autonomy and collaboration.

Within hybrid teams – those with people working from home as well as those at the office – disagreements and tension can develop. This can lead to a fractured team and an ‘us and them mentality.

Listening to workers is crucial to making sure the hybrid environment functions properly. Holding one-on-one conversations, conducting focus groups, and using HR surveys to solicit feedback is among several methods for satisfying this need.

Employee incentives can also help develop a supportive culture that increases employee commitment.
When people feel appreciated for their hard work, they are more likely to be committed to the organization.

Researcher Marcial Losada has found that among high-performing teams, the expression of positive feedback outweighs that of negative feedback by a ratio of 5.6 to 1. By contrast, low-performing teams have a ratio of .36 to 1.

Takeaway: You can adapt to hybrid work by adapting your attitude

Melanie Collins, the chief people officer at Dropbox, wrote a case study about how the company changed its operations as a result of the pandemic. Before the shift to 100% remote work, only 3% of employees worked at home.

To establish new rules of the road, the Dropbox team took the engineering product lifecycle data, company and financial goals and employee engagement data into consideration.

Based on the data and discussions, Dropbox leaders laid out five guiding principles:

1️⃣ Support the company mission: to design a more enlightened way of working

2️⃣ Provide flexibility and freedom for employees

3️⃣  Preserve human connection while maintaining a level playing field

4️⃣  Support long-term business health

5️⃣  Maintain a learning mindset by being flexible and adaptive

Experts in behavior modification understand that incorporating new habits takes time, especially among large groups of people. As we learn to work virtually, we’re bound to mess up every now and again. Give yourself and your teammate’s permission to make mistakes, so you can learn from them.

 

 

 

The questions in this checklist are designed to help companies initiate a more effective employee listening program and to use the results as a guide as they develop their novel approaches.

 

When to listen

You should upgrade your listening program when you notice the following signs:

 Strategy and implementation in the post-pandemic phase are off course and leaders are ignoring early warning signs

Managers express a lack of clarity on what is expected in the new normal

 Employees are suggesting they feel disengaged, disconnected, hopeless and/or lack confidence in leadership

Increased employee attrition rates

 Employee feedback suggests a widespread shift in morale and/or productivity, with a greater number of employees reporting lower levels of engagement, productivity and/or innovation.

 

What to measure

If you’re using a listening program to track employee experience, you’ll want to make sure it allows you to measure the following:

Technology satisfaction. Are your teams equipped with the tools they need to work at their most effective in their evolving work environment?

Productivity. Are your employees working efficiently in their new environment? Are they working as productively as they were in their old environment?

Well-being. Do team members feel overwhelmed by the number of tasks they have to accomplish? Do they feel that working from home has improved or worsened their situation, relative to office work?

Sense of belonging. Do employees feel that they belong – in their environment, team, and in the company more broadly?

Employee intent to stay. Has the average length of time that your staff members intend to stay with your organization changed?

Work environment. Are your employees happy with how they work? Are they able to suggest ways of improving things, and do you seriously consider those suggestions?

 

 

How to measure

What exactly does a future-proof approach to employee experience measurement look like?

Listening and measuring continuously

Continually looking for opportunities to improve your program based on insights gained

Understanding gaps and drivers in key employee metrics

Speeding up decision-making and automating actions

Using the expertise of your customer experience and research and insights teams in your people operations

Having every employee’s voice heard at crucial points in their journey – such as when changes involving the make-up of teams, policies around flexibility or new technologies are implemented

Establishing key relationships with senior leaders, particularly the CIO, is key to effective internal communication, especially in the remote setup.

 

The outcome to aspire to

 Signs that you have a fit-for-purpose listening program in place include:

Human resources, operations, policies, and investment decisions are based on data

Employee feedback is actionable, HR teams and people managers can design experiences that better support your employees.

The people who are involved in future work policies understand the impact that these changes are having on the workforce, as well as culture and workplace experience

Insights are accessible via a team health dashboard

You are starting to detect patterns that would allow for greater predictive potential – the coming frontier in employee experience management

 

Conclusion

 

The company’s vision, mission, values, and culture need to be communicated effectively through internal communications to create a sense of belonging among employees. Internal communications form an important part of employee engagement as it helps build a positive culture.

At the end of the day, communication is key to employee engagement. When employees feel engaged, they will perform better in their job, thereby creating value for the business.

If you want to learn more about knowledge flows and how to approach any issue through the power of data-driven methods for studying communication within your company take a look at this course.

 

 

 

In a high-performance culture, management is comfortable with taking risks. Risk-taking is an essential part of innovation and creativity, and when people feel safe within the culture, they are willing to try new things even when there is a chance they might fail. That innovation can lead to new products, new ways of doing business, or new ways of making customers happier — all of which can help the business grow in ways it hadn’t thought possible before.

High-performance cultures have strong leadership

Leadership in a high-performance culture isn’t about power or authority but about trust, vision, caring, and accountability. In a high-performance culture, leaders earn respect by being trustworthy and having integrity, demonstrating caring through their actions and behaviors, being accountable for their own performance as well as for the performance of others, and showing they have a clear vision for what needs to be done to achieve the company’s goals.

 

Conclusion

 

Culture is the soul of a high-performance organization. It’s the value system that guides the decisions and behaviors of all stakeholders involved, including management. If culture is not managed or it’s managed in an ad-hoc manner, it will be inconsistent with the vision of the company and will lead to dissension among employees.

Whatever your culture is today, it might not be the right culture tomorrow. If you want your culture to support your strategy, you need to be ready to reexamine it at least once a year. JOIN21 has the perfect technology for that. If you want to build an inclusive culture and receive feedback on how to strengthen your employee networks look at the Baseline. Ground your future organizational decisions in data and measure the progress, digital fitness, and performance over time.

 

 

 

The first order of business is to set ground rules that will lay a solid foundation for everyone working on this project. This is where you’ll begin setting expectations of what’s required from everyone involved.

This means setting the tone from your first interaction with your team members. You’ll want to make sure they know that change is constant, and their plan will inevitably change as the project progresses. In addition, everyone should understand that they must work as a team – there can be no lone wolves working on their own tasks. They need to be flexible and adaptable to changes that inevitably arise as a project continues – it’s just not possible to map out every step of a project in advance.

Agile teams also need to be comfortable with reporting progress periodically and explaining why something was done or how it was done. Finally, make sure everyone understands that they shouldn’t take failure personally – agile teams don’t succeed because one person succeeds.

 

Curiosity towards failure

 

Simply put, people learn more from failure than success. So, if you make sure that your employees feel safe to try new things and to fail (safely) in order to learn, they’ll not only get better at their jobs, but they’ll be happier in their jobs, too.

A great leader will be able to use failure as a teachable moment; the important thing is not to let it tear down the team or the project.

Fail early and often. By working in short sprints with small checkpoints along the way, you can create structures that allow for quick course corrections when a failure arises. This allows you to fail early and often in order to succeed sooner.

 

Track progress over time

 

Building agile teams is not that easy to do. You need to keep the team members motivated and working in sync with each other. Set goals and targets for your employees. The goals will not only help the team members to achieve the targets but also help to grow their morale.

You can keep your team engaged in work by building an effective continuous performance management system. This will help you to track the performance of employees from time to time and not once a year. This process keeps the teams engaged and also motivated. The employees will never get disengaged and lose track of work and goals. They will be ready to battle any environment and no matter how uncertain.

Apart from this, the work of agile teams can be facilitated by scheduling regular meetings and workshops. These workout sessions enable the members to understand the roles and responsibilities better, which helps them to contribute more effectively towards achieving the business goals.