Visualising Relationships at Work
Successful team dynamics are critical in building organisations, however many of our HR processes are built around the individual.
Organisation Network Analysis showing high and low performing teams (OWEN Analytics)
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We know that successful team dynamics is critical in building organisations, however many of our HR and people management processes are still designed around the individual.
We have embedded ‘institutionalised silos’ such as performance management, employee engagement, induction and training, that are all geared up to individual performance, but focus much less so on the impact on their team or organisation.
According to Deloitte, 88% of respondents of a global HR survey, believe building the organisation of the future is an important issue. This is sweet music to my ears, after years of fumbling around the employee engagement survey wilderness, we can start looking at the bigger picture and organisation structures, and ask questions like:
How does team cohesion impact performance?
Is there a relationship between team collaboration and attrition?
Does increased collaboration impact output?
Does a hierarchical structure impact retention?
Who are the most influential people in our organisation?
Can we see what good leadership looks like?
Can we detect bottlenecks in an organisation?
Which individual are at risk of leaving the organisation?
Can we detect ‘silos’ in our company? (the answer is always yes to that one!)
What is very surprising is how little analysis and research is done into how our teams operate. One way to gain a better understanding on these questions is Organisational Network Analysis (ONA). One method is for employees to complete quick pulse surveys which combine “ME” questions (My opinions count) and “WE” questions (I would like to appreciate the following individuals for helping me in my day-to-day work). Open feedback questions are also interspersed to understand sentiment and key issues.
The end result is a visual representation of your team dynamics — the example in the image above, is an ONA diagram from OWEN Analytics and was used to understand team dynamics in a pharmaceutical organisation.
In my article on the use of wearables and emerging technologies in the workplace, I highlighted that The Quantified Workplace will be introduced, but only at the speed of employee trust. Looking at relationship patterns might also give insights into understanding trust.
This type of approach throws up some interesting insights.
Research by Rob Cross, a leading researcher in ONA, found that highly connected people are among the least engaged in a company. So your most valued staff, those go-to people, are often hidden, underappreciated and sometimes over-worked.
Mark Bolino of the University of Oklahoma points to a hidden cost of collaboration. Some employees are such enthusiastic collaborators that they are asked to weigh in on every issue. But it does not take long for top collaborators to become bottlenecks: nothing happens until they have had their say — and they have their say on lots of subjects that are outside their competence.
In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees according to research by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam M.Grant, covered in their article in Harvard Business Review, “Collaborative Overload”.
If we go back to the questions on what causes collaboration, effective teams and higher productivity, then ONA can play a big part in helping us understand what is going on in our organisations.
Our people management practices are rapidly changing as we move to a world with collaborative teams working with different employment terms in different countries. ONA is a technique that people analysts can add to their tool-kit and help us to uncover the hidden dynamics of team effectiveness rather than the obsession with individual achievements.
By being able to visualise teams relationships we can begin to build a strong foundation for organisations of the future based on a deeper understanding of effective teams. I am looking forward to sharing more case-studies and success stories at PA World over the coming years.
(This was a guest article on the Tucana Blog)
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