Culture management has always been a difficult mission for HR teams. At the same time, HR teams have no shortage of instruments to resolve this problem—rewards and incentives software, employee recognition software, etc. The primary challenge is that HR tends to be more reactive than proactive in dealing with this matter. The most common shortcoming is finding the cultural weak links in the company’s social fabric. 

Organizational network analytics (ONA) can map out a visual overview of how your employees interact with one another to find the collaboration and innovation quota.

Visualizing employees’ social connections

Source: TrustSphere

Some platforms strictly measure the frequency of communication and the preferred channel, such as chat, email, and video conferencing. Other platforms are multi-modal and include sentiment analysis, which incorporates the content of the messages into their analysis output. Examples in the latter description show how it provides powerful insights into employee behaviors and trends.

Since the normalization of hybrid work settings, many businesses have been deeply concerned about culture loss and fragmentation that could negatively impact team cohesion and innovation. However, the sudden transition to work from home (WFH) situations provide an opportunity for data analysis. Shifting the entire workforce to a remote setting rather than an in-person work dynamic allows your HR team to gather and track more social interactions between employees. After all, the water cooler is no longer an option for employee gossip.

Virtual workspaces have become the digital counterpart to the social office space where your employees interact, socialize, collaborate, negotiate, compromise, and discuss work problems. Site traffic in this software category has steadily grown by 240% in the last three years. Since then, companies that have adopted these platforms early have accrued a treasure trove of ONA data to use to improve their culture.

Retention: Job embeddedness predicts voluntary turnover

ONA creates an excellent means of visualizing an employee’s degree of job embeddedness when it measures communication frequency and messaging content. Job embeddedness is the degree of inclusion experienced by an employee into their company’s culture and social network. The more employees feel embedded in a company, the less likely they choose to leave. In other words, employees who feel socially ostracized from social cliques or unengaged with company culture will have little reason to stay. An ONA map showing an employee with few connections is at risk for turnover, and this can inform HR professionals to act decisively before the employee decides to depart.

Productivity: Giver persona types should be strong influencers and connectors

In 2013 Adam Grant, a professor of organizational psychology, published an article on HBR describing how employee persona types impact a business and are affected by business culture. One of these personas, the "giver," is overly generous and kind with their time and resources. They support those around them by plugging work gaps. Interestingly, these employees tend to be found in the highest and lowest performance ranks. The difference between successful and struggling givers is that, while both helped their colleagues succeed, successful givers knew how to establish boundaries, recognize their own needs, and most importantly, seek help from others.

HR has a commitment to company culture and maintaining productivity by creating a healthy, supportive work culture. Savvy HR professionals can read an ONA output and ask the right questions about why some employees are underperforming or separated from the greater social network. In turn, HR can coach giver employees struggling with their workload by asking their managers or employees for help. Once these potential givers are identified, HR can consolidate a giver-focused work culture by moving these individuals into central positions in the network. HR can measure giver success after coaching by seeing if their position in the network changes from one as a pariah to one as a connector.

Accountability: Toxicity creates emotional labor and wastes company hours

Unfortunately, some employees are consistent sources of toxicity and cause undue stress to a team (just ask your nearest employee relations specialist). If time is money, all these minutes and hours spent wondering about the toxic behaviors of these problematic employees can cost businesses substantial amounts of money. Teams work best with trust and transparency. It’s wasteful for employees to spend time and energy thinking about a problematic colleague or manager. Negligence toward toxicity creates an environment where employees become burdened with the emotional labor of constantly walking on glass, code switching, and self doubting. Instead of promoting understanding, communication, and problem solving, which is indicative of a good work environment.

Imagine a new manager or team member being introduced into a high-performance team, and within three months, the entire relationship network on an ONA output has fragmented. The connections between employees have become weaker, and the frequency of collaboration has plummeted. At this point, HR professionals can use this information to intercede as soon as possible to salvage the collaborative cultural framework being pulled apart. This isn’t just a loss in performance where deadlines aren’t met, but a loss in company culture because an environment of trust and transparency has been violated, which will need time to recover.

Cross-collaboration: Silos can isolate critical knowledge and opinions from helping other teams

A common challenge for companies that have become too bureaucratic to the point of dysfunction is siloing of subject matter expertise. Siloed teams show up on an ONA as having many connections within their group but very few, if any, connections with employees outside of their immediate department. HR should take steps to improve communication between departments so that collaborative opportunities can happen organically. More importantly, beyond encouraging the spread of institutional knowledge, it also informs employees of what kind of data has already been collected, thereby reducing redundant work.

How will ONA support your team?

By analyzing the frequency and content of communication between employees, HR teams can proactively address issues related to job embeddedness, productivity, accountability, and cross-collaboration.

ONA can also help HR professionals identify and support "giver" employees and intercede in cases of toxicity before it has a negative impact on team performance and company culture. Overall, ONA provides valuable insights into the social fabric of an organization, allowing HR teams to make data-driven decisions that positively impact the company's success.

Edited by Jigmee Bhutia