Improving Communication within Online Public K-12 Education

Social Networks in Organizations

Hult International Business School

June 5, 2016

By: Dorothy Robertson

I have encountered extreme communication mishaps while working at my previous job as an executive assistant for an online public school. This online public school has locations in 27 states with some states having numerous locations. Under the parent company, there are three branches of the online education system and approximately 2,500 employees. It has a traditional corporate structure with the headquarters location on the east coast and local schools branching from California, Texas, Florida and numerous states in-between. The corporate hierarchy works for the headquarters (HQ) office but it does not work directly with the local level schools

HQ sends information to regional directors who then pass the information to the principals at the local schools. There are times when the principals ask individuals directly within HQ for data they need or questions which need to be answered. There are many different departments which need to be in constant contact with each school. At the location I previously worked for there always seemed to be staff who were unsure of information being passed down and what was required from them at the local school and HQ levels.

The purpose of my social network analysis will address the communication barriers to help improve efficiency of the organization. In addition, there will be ability to see if there is a direct relationship between high performing schools and the people which they are communicating with.

Fortunately, due to the nature of the school, the data which is required will be easy to collect. This corporation works with big data and is always analyzing student and employee performance. There is an annual survey which is distributed each year regarding employee satisfaction. All of the company employees complete this survey and the completion rate varies at each branch from 80%-100%.

Currently these surveys only address employee satisfaction with human resources, teams and leaders. It would be fairly simple to add the following questions:

1. Have you communicated with XXX department at HQ?
1. How frequently do you communicate with “Person X” within the XXX department at HQ?
2. Do you feel that your communications with individuals at HQ lead to your success within the organization?
2. Have you communicated with any individuals at other schools (not at your local level)?
1. How frequently do you communicate with “Person X”?
2. Do you feel that your communications with individuals at other schools lead to your overall success within the organization?
3. How frequently do you communicate with XXX at your local level?
1. Do you feel that your communications with individuals at your local school level lead to your overall success within the organization?

The frequency questions will be asked based off the school year with the following meanings:

0: Never

1: Occasionally

2: Frequently

This is a simple scale that will make it easier to interpret the data on all three levels. It is also difficult to remember who you have communicated with 9 months ago, so this scale would be the most logical due to human error. The communications will be defined as “consulting with other individuals via phone, email, Lync-messenger and in-person to further your success within the organization.”

In addition to the survey, there can be an analysis of how many emails and messages sent through Lync. The Lync data would be extremely difficult to analyze because employees do not always consult with others about work related information. This is also true for the emails which is why I proposed the above survey.

I do see a potential problem of completion levels of the survey decreasing by adding on additional questions. It can potentially be very time consuming for those who consult within many different locations.

Once the data has been received about the communication within other department the other attributes will be added. The attributes that if feel will be interested to analyze are as follows: of location, job position, gender, age, time with company and satisfaction level with boss/team/company are all addressed on the satisfaction survey and will be added to the attributes list.

The next step will be to analyze the different attributes based on the frequency of communications at the different levels. It will be very interesting to look at the E-I Index for all of the levels to see if some departments are more homophily or heterophily. According to the National Center for Education Statistics 75% of k-12 teachers are female (Fast). It will also be helpful to see how the communications between similar departments at the local and HQ levels interact with each other and other departments. We will be able to analyze if the more successful schools have a number close to 0, meaning they would communicate freely within and outside their departments.

I would then look at a clique analysis. This would be important to see who are the key communicators within each location and their relationships outside of their departments. I would like to further look into their roles within the company. I would hope to find that the local school leaders would have more cliques than the local level teachers.

I would also like to look within NETDRAW to see the nodes based on their cliques. This way I can start to see the subgroups and see the big picture of the organization. I predict that we would find there are more cliques within each school level than cliques between schools and HQ. Within HQ we will start to be able to see how departments are communicating within and outside of the organization. It will be interesting to see if there are some individuals who are biased and only pass information to certain people or if they are assigned to specific people and they keep only the assigned relationship or if they take initiative and discuss issues with individuals outside their responsibilities. This is an important step to see how communication is happening and where we can start to improve the overall success of the schools.

The degree measures will also be very important. This can be an interesting analysis for each job position and how they communicate with each other. It would also be interesting to see if the school who have been opened longer have more in-degree connections from local schools and more out-degree to HQ. The out-degree to HQ would be an interesting thing to look at because the longer the school has been open the more ability they have had to establish stronger connections within HQ.

This study will be a great way to see if there needs to be a different system in place to the organizational success. While I only mentioned a few factors, these were the factors that I would find to be the most interesting. I would like to do a complete analysis on all of the other social network measures to see other potential issues.

In conclusion, I personally feel that an in-depth analysis of this organization will be beneficial for all parties. In can help eliminate inefficiencies and create a better sense of community within the national organization. This can help lead to a higher retention rate, less confusion and the ability to work more efficiently. This is as project that could be completed successfully and the research could be applied to other large public online schools.

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Works Cited:

"Fast Facts." Fast Facts. US Department of Education, n.d. Web. 05 June 2016.