Social Network Analysis for Internal Organization

Shalini Sharan (Not taking the second module)

Effective internal organization is vital to success and growth of a firm. Innovation, collaboration, and cross-fertilization are becoming increasingly essential for firms in their efforts to separate themselves in a highly competitive landscape. Employees are key to attaining the aforementioned goals.

In order to create such an atmosphere there has been a popular step by many industries to make “open spaces” in workplaces where interaction is facilitated through thoughtful interior designing. While such a shift is still debated by many I will look at an example of a workplace where this idea was implemented in order to discern any measurable changes. My focus of study will be my previous employer, a think-tank in DC, which implemented such a change a year ago. Since the think-tank has multiple programs spanning several regions and topic areas it was envisioned that a new office building should have open spaces where mixing of program offices would encourage cross-fertilization of ideas and inspire collaboration among programs.

Hypothesis: Smart designing of office spaces with open areas that facilitate interactions will create new ideas, promote more inter-program connections, and increase the overall creative output of the firm.

Data : My main tool of gathering data will be a simple survey. The employee attributes would be collected as 1) position: research assistant, research associate (junior staff) program fellow, program manager (senior staff) 2) the program to which they belong (region such as Europe, East Asia etc., or topic such as non-proliferation, trade etc.)

The survey will ask a few key questions: 1) How often they interacted with each employee on work related issues before the change (rarely, sometimes or frequently) 2) How often they interacted after the change on non work related issues (rarely, sometimes or frequently). I will repeat these questions for non-work related interaction as well.

In addition, I will use the floor plan from previous building and new building to add an attribute to each employee by the floor (number) they worked on. I will also create a database of reports and conferences in the last year and the reports and conferences after the change to add another layer of complex analysis. In my previous observations it was not uncommon for each floor to have a tight knit group and limited interaction with programs on other floors.

This data help me observe how clique-y the old setup was and if much has changed since the move to the new building. Network density before and after the change would offer insights on how well utilized the connections are due to the change. Some of the questions I will address through social networks analysis: Are the employees interacting more with other programs now that the floors have been shuffled or are they still maintaining their old relationships? Is the interaction largely work-related or not? Such patterns will help me discern if there was a strong sense of ‘familiarity’ that has been broken or now and if there is indeed a meaningful and substantive exchange of ideas related to work among new connections. It would also be interesting to study if junior staff have been able to increase interaction with senior staff, especially in other programs. A general increase in inter-program interaction will be useful. We may find that there is only an increase in non-work interaction but that may be step towards more professional collaboration. Subsequent studies can map the same data to see if that occurs.

Within the interactions before and after the reshuffling I will also identify the outliers, connectors, and boundary spanners of the organization. Sub grouping by programs will help me identify the leaders in each program and the connectors to other programs. Ego networks within programs will help identify the key staff members who should be interacting with other actors within different programs. The boundary spanners will be important to identify because they are actors who can create overall cohesion within the firm. Identifying these actors by their job category will help determine if the junior staff is more engaged than the senior staff. In degrees and out degrees will also identify how interactions are happening within programs in order to facilitate interaction between the “influencers” of each program.

Looking at the patterns of actual events and programs by simple graphs will help put these interactions in perspective and see if joint conferences, events and reports were conducted. This is, however, not a definitive set of analysis because not all meaningful interactions materialize in such a way.

Conclusions: Social Network Analysis will help me measure the true changes in the organization and behavior of employees after the shift of office space. It will help to assess if transforming the nature of a workplace leads to employees interaction, learning from peers and exchange of ideas for the betterment of the firm and the firm’s product offering.