Blog assignment; Improving employee satisfaction in organization.

  I’ve been worked for one of subsidiary of LG for about 10 years. My company is in manufacturing industry and has very hierarchical culture so employee’s satisfaction in their job and their organization was quite low. From five years ago, My company has tried to improve employee satisfaction though a change agent program.

  The change agents was selected by each team leader among his or her team members and then they received short training course about role of agent and small amount of budget for activities. They had to report to HR department periodically and company checked employees’ satisfaction twice in a year.

  However, this change agent program has not worked well for various reasons. So, if I had enough resources, time, and access to information, I would use ‘Social Network Analysis’ to implement the change agent program properly.

1. Problem/Challenge

  (1) Problems

  - Many of agents were chosen among new employees who have much time to do this extra work.

  - They just followed instruction from HR without any analysis about their team’s organization like social network.

  - They just made some outdoor activity such as cocktail party with all team employees for the periodical reporting.

  (2) Challenges

  - How can the change agent improve their team member’s satisfaction effectively?

  - Who is the best candidate for the change agent?

2. Overall questions SNA would address

 To solve these challenges, I want to apply SNA to figure out;

  - How is our team member connected each other? (Centralized, decentralized or distributed?)

  - Who is the key man in our team?

  - How many sub groups do we have?

  - Who is the most and potential influencer in each group?

  - Who is the connector or bridge among groups?

  - Who are the boundary spanners?

  - Who is the bottleneck?

  - Who are isolated from groups? (Outliers)

3. Data I need

  I want to know how our teams’ social network looks like and how they are connected each other through some questions as below.

  (1) Hierarchy, age, gender, main job, hometown, school, married, how many years in this team and company? 

  (2) How often you have communicated to this team member for information or advice on work-related topics in the past three months? (Response Scale: 0= I Do Not Know This Person, 1= Never, 5 = very often)

  (3) How often you have socialized with this team member? (Response Scale: 0= I Do Not Know This Person, 1= Never, 5 = very often)

  I could easily get the information No. (1) if I could access HR information. How ever, it would be little hard to get information (2) and (3). We have to implement survey all employees and keep this secret from other uses otherwise employees would not answer truly.

4. The SNA will help diagnosing social network in each organizations and implementing change agent program.

  - I can figure out which network shape and type each team has and who the most key man or influencers are in each team there by I can figure out who the best person for the change agents are.

  - I can also figure out who the connecters or boundary spanners and try to make them our assistants.

  - I will realize who are bottleneck or isolated from groups so that our change agents will take care of them more than others.
  - In addition, I can compare each team’s density and average distance thereby I can allocate time and budget on the worst teams.

by Moontae Hwang