Why Your Company Needs Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)

Good managers engage with their employees. Great managers ensure their employees are also engaging with each other. 

There’s a strong link between collaboration and productivity. So strong, in fact, that organizations that effectively nurture collaboration are five times more productive than those that don’t. 

Collaboration enables creative thinking, enhances problem-solving, keeps employees accountable, and boosts cohesion among teams.

Companies looking to reap all the benefits of collaboration must first ensure they’re doing it right however. Not all communication is equal. That’s why managers need tools that give them insight into the how, when, where and why of their employee interactions. 

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) provides those answers - mapping out your staff touchpoints to help managers understand employee engagement, identify key influencers, and highlight gaps in Communication.

What is Organizational Network Analysis?

ONA is a map of how the people in your network interact with each other. Instead of the traditional hierarchy of the boss at the top and junior employees at the bottom, ONA provides a more organic and informal structure that shows information flow, decision-making, and pivotal players.

This type of analysis helps identify the main influencers in your organization - those who are highly engaged, share knowledge across teams, and drive productivity. On the flip side, it gives you the ability to pinpoint those on the outskirts, the staff members who work in silos and are relatively isolated.

Scaling up, your ONA gives you a bird’s eye view of the different departments and teams, immediately identifying close-knit clusters, and the connections between those clusters. 

ONA is particularly helpful in today’s working environment, where many are choosing to work remotely, or on a hybrid schedule. Keeping track of how these disparate digital departments are communicating is crucial for maintaining performance and mitigating any productivity loss that might arise from being offsite.

The benefits of implementing ONA

Effectively leveraging your networks can transform your entire organization. These ties between your employees and your teams are crucial to their performance. Sharing ideas and skills, brainstorming, passing along information, getting feedback - these high-traffic highways are where the magic happens.

With ONA managers can:

• Identify influencers and collaborators who team members rely on to disseminate information and skills
• See where more collaboration is needed to fill knowledge gaps
• Avoid employee burnout or quiet quitting by identifying and assisting disengaged OR overwhelmed staff
• Enable data-driven decision-making that will improve your organization’s performance long-term
• Create more pathways for knowledge-sharing, making workflows more efficient
• Better understand and structure remote teams

Implementing ONA - Introducing the Social Network

In most companies, chat tools are where your employees are connecting - especially in the era of remote working when use of digital messaging platforms has soared. As the single greatest indicator of employee engagement, chat platforms are a natural fit for ONA.

Prodoscore’s recently released ONA software, the Social Network, reveals how your employees are collaborating based on their chat interactions. By mining this treasure trove of data, the platform gives managers everything they need to discover the influencers, collaborators, and inbetweeners in their organization. 

This level of analysis also provides managers with a collaboration score, based on network density (the number of connections within a network) and network transitivity (how likely your employees are to cluster and work together).

The resulting collaboration score is a handy daily metric that helps companies gauge their progress overall, seeing whether collaboration is improving over time, staying stagnant, or dropping off. 

With this information at your fingertips, you can make timely adjustments to the way your staff work, share, and communicate - finding efficiencies that produce measurable benefits. To uncover your team’s Social Network or schedule a demonstration, contact the Prodoscore team today.