How ONA and Leadership Development Can Support Businesses in a Recession
By | Francisco Marin | David Green | www.myhrfuture.com
Since I entered the field ten years ago, organisational network analysis (ONA) has consistently been one of the most common topics discussed at conferences, with people analytics professionals, and at peer meetings for member companies of the Insight222 People Analytics Program.
For much of that time, ONA seemed to be ‘more talk than action’, with many practitioners I spoke to giving priority to ONA as an analytical technique they wanted to deploy rather than as a tool that could potentially give unique insights on a business problem they were trying to solve. Research we’ve undertaken at Insight222 allied to a rising number of case studies in publications like Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review strongly points to that trend being reversed.
Examples include:
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How General Mills and Uber used ONA to study collaboration, productivity and wellbeing
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How Microsoft studied the upsides and downsides of employee connectedness
Of the companies surveyed about their technology adoption as part of Insight222’s People Analytics Trends 2022 study , we found that 48% are using collaboration analytics and ONA technologies – an increase from 39% in 2021 (see Figure 1.). Moreover, an additional 35% of survey respondents are considering investing in at least one collaboration analytics and ONA technology tool.
Separate Insight222 research found that people analytics teams are using ONA and collaboration analytics for a variety of use cases, including to understand ‘real’ organisational networks, the impact of remote and hybrid working, intra- and inter-team collaboration and inclusion, and organisations are increasingly using ONA as part of their employee listening ecosystem.