The Complete Organizational Network Analysis Handbook_APR2014 #SocialNetworkAnalysis

The Complete ONA Handbook
for HR Leaders
www.seeyournetwork.com

Introduction > Chapter 1: Why ONA > Chapter 2: How It’ll help > Chapter 3: ONA Roll-Out > Chapter 4: ONA ROI > Conclusion >
Introduction
Chapter 1: Human Capital Challenges that ONA Addresses
Chapter 2: How ONA Helps You Improve Organizational Performance
Chapter 3: How to Plan for an ONA Roll-out
Chapter 4: Measuring ONA ROI
Conclusion
2 www.seeyournetwork.com

What is ONA?
ONA is much more than a buzzy acronym
that’s been tossed around the Human
Capital and Organizational Development
world for the past few years.
A kind of Human Capital Analysis, O-N-A
stands for “Organizational Network Analysis.”
ONA is a tool for analyzing the informal
networks that exist within an organization
(see Figure 1). If an organizational chart
provides the theory of how work gets done,
the informal network provides the real-world
practice; it illustrates how people work
together to solve problems and make
decisions in the real world.
INTRODUCTION
For example, from the organizational chart on the left in Figure 1, we might
conclude that Stern serves in a relatively unimportant position in the
organization. The network on the right, however, paints a very different picture.
It shows that Stern is, in fact, a critical player in the organization. He plays a
central role in facilitating communication across all three teams.
Figure 1: Formal and Informal Structure

The introduction of web-based tools like SYNAPP makes the power of ONA easy to use
and actionable for senior executives and Human Resource leaders to address some of
today’s most pressing Human Capital challenges.
INTRODUCTION
Is it time for your company to look into ONA?
The contents of this ebook will help you determine that. Over the next
four chapters, we will examine the following topics:
• Signs your business needs ONA
• How ONA can improve your organization’s performance
• Things to consider for an ONA roll-out
• How to maximize the ROI of an ONA investment
First up, the 5 signs your business needs ONA.

You base your workforce planning, leadership development
and performance and talent retention programs on the best
data available, which typically comes from HRIS tools. These
systems capture information related to the formal structure –
title, tenure, training and performance history, band, etc.
As organizations flatten, matrix teams take over, peer
collaboration systems gain popularity and strategic
partnerships and outsourcing increase, the distance between
the formal org. chart and the way people actually get work
done is widening. Basing your organization’s strategic Human
Capital initiatives solely on formal org. chart data hides critical
opportunities and perils. The advent of ONA provides a new
perspective on your people and teams, and arms you with a
new set of actionable data and insight to inform your strategy.
Here are some signs it’s time to consider adding ONA to gain
visibility into your company’s informal network:
1. You’ve seen the reports - half of all employees are actively
looking for other jobs – you’d like to know which half.
CHAPTER 1: Human Capital Challenges that ONA Addresses
2. You need to significantly improve your leadership pipeline
and you’re not sure you trust the performance management
system, especially when it comes to millennials. You need
another way to identify emerging leaders.
3. Successfully implementing major change and other
strategic initiatives requires both senior level stakeholder
engagement as well as enlisting effective champions
throughout the company. How do you identify the best
champions, or change advocates, especially in organizations
going through transition?
4. Diversity has moved beyond a check box to a recognized
source of competitive advantage. You are proud of your
diversity hiring and promotion track record and now you need
to gauge inclusiveness.
5. Skills like cross-functional collaboration, team-building and
innovation are critical to leadership effectiveness and they are
very hard to assess with current tools. You want to reward
people that exhibit 21st Century leadership skills and target
development programs where they are most needed.

1. Spot rising stars earlier to fill your leadership pipeline.
ONA will pinpoint the most influential people in your organization. Some of the names will validate your previous promotion
decisions; others may well be your next superstar.
In a recent deployment of SYNAPP with a 300-person department of a Fortune 500 technology company, SYNAPP identified
the sixteen employees who carried the most weight with their peers – call them the top 5% Mover and Shakers. And out of
these sixteen, a full 4, or 25%, were at the lowest band on their team.

2. Unwanted staff turnover hurts, with costs estimated to reach 150% of
salary. Identify staff at risk of leaving and intervene before it’s too late.
Employees who are productively engaged with multiple colleagues, enjoy a strong working
relationship with their immediate manager and who are plugged into the company’s
support network are much less likely to look for work elsewhere.
ONA provides a powerful lens to understand which employees may present a retention risk.
Based on an analysis of network measures, ONA identifies the employees within your
organization at greater risk for leaving.
3. Move mountains by finding and tapping into your company’s hidden
influencers
ONA is a vital way to identify and select change advocates. By x-raying the organization to
understand the patterns of communication, network analysis pinpoints the "go to" people in
the organization. Often, the identified change advocates are different than the ones leaders
would have nominated. This is not surprising since leaders employ a top-down perspective
while network analysis goes directly to the source, asking employees who they turn to for
advice and guidance.

4. Fast-forward innovation through inclusion
ONA does not replace, but rather complements, your
existing Human Capital Analytics. Based on existing data,
you know how well you’ve performed against your diversity
objectives. What’s harder to know, though, is how engaged
your minority employees are. ONA will answer this and
provide you with actionable insight to ensure that your
company takes full advantage of the new ways of thinking
and new ideas that a truly engaged and diverse workforce
brings.
5. Assess for the skills of tomorrow and build
leaders to get you there
ONA will not only help individual leaders assess how well
they are networked for cross-team collaboration, innovation
and execution, it will also show you which teams are best set
up to perform against KPIs like discovery of new ideas,
engagement and empowerment (See Figure 2).
Armed with this new perspective, you can replicate success
and target development programs where needed most.
Figure 2: Compare Team Effectiveness on KPIs like
Discovery, Execution and Engagement

While each situation is unique,
your ONA roll-out will consist
of at least the following four
steps:
1. Set-up
2. Survey
3. Report Delivery
4. (Optional) Workshop
From start to finish, you will
want to budget at least one
month for your ONA roll-out.
The set-up phase is critical for project success and can be broken into
the three parts – Scoping; Data Collection and Configuration; Initial
Communications.
1. Scoping: this is where you define the program objectives and
make decisions about who you will involve in the roll-out.
2. Data collection and system configuration: Once you’ve
determined the scope of the project, the next step is to bring in
the relevant personnel data. The system will be set up to ensure
privacy and with the appropriate permissions.
3. Initial communication: Once the system is ready to go, you’ll want
to communicate to the participating teams, and to the team
leaders first, a little bit about the program – what it is, why you’re
doing it, what they can expect next, and, of course, what’s in it for
them!
1. Set-up

A short, ten to twelve question web-based survey captures the necessary data to produce the
ONA reports. The network nature of ONA requires a high response rate – north of 80%. And
since there is an inverse correlation between survey length and response rate, it is important to
stick to the core questions and refrain from adding “nice to haves.”
Survey questions include:
• Who do you go to most frequently for help getting work done?
• Who do you involve when making important decisions?
• Who increases your energy and enthusiasm at work?
In order to achieve the needed response rate, you may wish to send automated messages from
the ONA system to non-respondents. Alternatively, these can be sent from leadership. Best
practice suggests keeping the survey open for at least two weeks.
Once the survey is closed, the ONA system runs the survey responses through a series of
algorithms to map your organization’s instrumental networks - that is, networks comprised of the
people most involved in making decision and solving problems, and affective networks - networks
comprised of the people most central to the organization's support and energy systems.
2. Survey

ONA systems differ in terms of the way reports are packaged and distributed. SYNAPP, the
Philosophy IB ONA tool, applies business logic about how people, teams and organizations
work and then presents two types of reports:
1. Organization reports for leaders compare teams across the following KPIs – Idea
Discovery, Execution, Engagement, Positivity and Empowerment. The Organization
report also identifies employees whose networks’ position them as key influencers,
indicating they could make effective change advocates and or emerging leaders. It
also reveals employees who may be at risk of leaving the company due to low
engagement and other metrics.
2. Individual reports visualize the network of connections for each employee and provide
specific, custom recommendations to strengthen each employee’s network to better
support KPIs like collaboration, idea discovery, change agency and support.
Things to consider during the report distribution step include timing – do you want leaders
to receive their own individual reports and the organization reports before their teams? In
many cases, this is desirable so that team and senior leaders can both strategize how to
take advantage of the insights the Organization Report provides and so that they can
become familiar with the Individual Report – this will make sure they are able to facilitate
their teams’ use of the individual reports.
3. Report Distribution

It may make sense to host a facilitated workshop with leaders
and/or employees to put the ONA insights into action.
Leadership workshops can focus attention on opportunities to
engage ONA-identified change advocates across the company
in key initiatives; discuss ways to increase collaboration
between teams where the ONA roll-out identified limited
interaction is occurring; go over engagement strategies to re-
enlist pockets of talent that ONA identifies as at risk of leaving.
Employee and teams facilitation should focus on helping
people use their Individual Reports as part of a professional
networking action plan (see Figure 3). These facilitated
sessions can either be done in person or via online meetings,
and will help employees:
• Think about how well their professional network supports
them in their current position and for their career
aspirations
4. ONA Facilitated Workshops (Optional)
• Consider what they can do to strengthen their network in
order to boost their ability to collaborate, discover new
ideas and influence others
• Build an action plan to reach out to specific people to
strategically build their network to support their career
goals
Figure 3: Part of a Networking Next Steps Activity Handout

4. ONA Facilitated Workshops (Optional)
Some clients choose to re-run ONA after they have
implemented their action plans. For instance, one leading
pharmaceutical client learned through ONA that two teams
that needed to work together to effectively bring products to
market were failing to collaborate in practice. The leaders of
the departments worked well together, but their respective
teams were not forming the connections at the working level.
Based on the ONA reports, HR and the department heads
implemented several cross-department teams to develop
specific innovation proposals that the company would pursue.
When the client re-ran ONA six months later, it showed a
100% increase in cross-functional collaboration.

Your business case for ONA will depend on your specific use case. Some common ones include: Does your company
have a mandate to increase the number and success rate of new products? Are you looking for a way to reduce
unwanted turnover? Do you need to identify hidden movers and shakers across the company?
We will highlight here some ways to measure ONA ROI for these three use cases.
1. Increase the number and success rate of new products through online open innovation
community
After rolling out a new online collaboration system for employees to team up on new ideas, a client was dissatisfied with
the uptake of the new system. Only a fraction of the employees were actively using it, and the improvement in quantity
and quality of ideas coming out of the system was not meeting targets.
In addition, because of the low engagement with the tool, ideas coming out were not complete, requiring more time by
line of business managers that inherited the ideas.
The client recognized that in order to turn the situation around, they needed much greater engagement by employees.
To achieve this, they knew they needed to find the “go to” people across their diverse business communities –the
people others turn to for help solving problems and for energy and enthusiasm about work. They needed to find the
Champions.

With a distributed workforce numbering in the tens of thousands, at first the task seemed akin to finding the
proverbial needle in the haystack. Then they heard about ONA.
To build the case for executives, we partnered with the internal communication team to define the value flow shown
in Figure 4.
Several open innovation case studies provide the data on what a thriving community can do. Look at P&G’s Connect
and Develop and one sees a 100% increase in the success rate of new product ideas. Other communities designed
to provide peer-to-peer collaboration and support report deflection rates of 25-75 percent – that is, between one
and three quarters of the questions that normally would be answered by an FTE are resolved in the community.
Embedded Champions that speak the language of their network, and command its respect, provide the critical spark
to engage employees. The client anticipates that, once Champions are engaged, the innovation community will
produce ideas that require less work to be implemented and deliver more bottom line impact, combining to deliver
an estimated 300% ROI on the ONA engagement.
Figure 4: Finding and Enlisting Champions Sets Online Community on Course for Success
Identify and Enlist
Hidden Champions
Broad Organization
Adoption of
Innovation Platform
Cost Reduction and
Improved Hit Rate
Produce 300%
Expected ROI

2. Reduce unwanted staff turnover
Retention and engagement rose to the second most urgent trend in Bersin by Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2014. Other
research shows that, on average, half of all employees today are actively looking for other jobs. The question on the minds of leaders
of course is “which half?!?” ONA provides a uniquely targeted and actionable way to head unwanted attrition off at the pass.
SYNAPP, from Philosophy IB, offers leaders a rare view to the people who may be at greatest risk of leaving your organization. It does
this by examining employees’ degree of connectedness to colleagues overall, how well connected they are to their immediate
supervisor and how well connected they are to the company’s support network. Based on this, SYNAPP can predict with high accuracy
the employees most likely to leave. How do we know, you ask? Because we ran SYNAPP internally at Philosophy IB and 4 of the 5
employees identified as at risk of leaving did indeed leave the organization within 8 months.
Calculations of the cost of unwanted attrition range from 50 to 150% of the individual’s annual salary. If we split the difference and say
it costs 75% and we further assume we’re talking about a mid-level manager making $170,000, then losing this single person would cost
$127,500.
And while your ONA program costs will vary depending on the vendor and technology you select, the cost for SYNAPP is simply $150
times the number of employees participating.
With these assumptions, we can create a simple ROI calculator that yields the following break-even: If ONA helps you re-enlist a single
at-risk employee who would have otherwise left, saving you $127,500, you break even at a SYNAPP employee participation level of 850
employees (850 employees X $150 = $127,500). Reminding ourselves that, on average, 50% of employees are disengaged and actively
seeking employments elsewhere (equating to 425 employees in our example), we are confident that this use case alone will pay for any
SYNAPP deployment many times over.

3. Identify hidden movers and shakers across the company
Perhaps the most common ONA use case for HR leaders, finding hidden
influencers, or change advocates, is one of the key functions that line and
senior leaders turn to HR for help with. Advances in web technology now
make the implementation of ONA much faster, simpler and more cost-
effective, which means HR can support more of these requests with much
shorter turnaround time than in the past.
Take a typical major initiative – say consolidating multiple legacy systems and
processes onto a new procurement system. Research shows that, should you
endeavor to undertake this initiative without a robust change management
program, the average ROI will be 35%. In contrast, wrap the initiative in a
well-planned and executed change program – complete with leadership
alignment, stakeholder analysis, gap analysis and employee engagement that
leverages influencers – and the ROI soars to 143%.
ONA pinpoints the most strategically placed influencers for you to enlist in
your project. This won’t ensure the success of the rest of your change effort,
but without these key advocates on your side, the initiative is at much greater
risk of hitting landmines that slow implementation and increase cost.

CONCLUSION: Is Now the Right Time to Tap into ONA?
ONA has been around for several years and in the past few, as big data and Internet
applications have become more prevalent, it has even turned into a buzzy catchphrase.
The important thing for HR leaders to recognize is that ONA can help solve some of the most
strategic challenges companies face today. Organizations seeking to fend off unwanted
attrition, engage their diverse workforce for improved innovation, better their returns on
initiatives that require employees to change the way they work or ground their leadership
development programs in an assessment of key skills like cross-functional collaboration should
consider adding ONA to their Human Capital Analytic toolkit.
Huston, L., & Sakkab, N. (2006). Connect and Develop: Inside Proctor Gamble’s New Model for Innovation. Harvard Business Review,
March, 1-9
Kling, B. (2012). Lithys 2012: Autodesk – Best Community ROI. Lithium http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/lithys--customer/Lithys-2012-
Autodesk-Best-Community-ROI/idip/41930
Relative Urgency of Human Capital Trends, Global Human Capital Trends 2014
http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Services/consulting/human-capital/human-capital-trends/relative-urgency%20/index.htm
We will happily provide a copy of our SYNAPP Attrition ROI calculator to anyone interested – simply send an email to
info@seeyournetwork.com
“Change Management That Pays,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2002.

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