We are always being praised by our clients on how we make sure they succeed with change and collaboration.

For us it is critical that a client gets actionable insights. It is not enough to understand the informal networks inside a company’s workforce alone. There is a high chance that this will then result in a nice-to-have insight. What we need to do is:

to engage the right people identified in these networks for the right tasks

That’s why we at Innovisor look beyond Organizational Network Analysis.

In this article, I give you a little glimpse of why Innovisor is the preferred partner to help clients with their change and collaboration initiatives.

Let me introduce you to one of our happy clients: North Bank Inc.

North Bank Inc. is a bank with 2,000 employees. The company grew strongly as an online bank. As a result, their IT organization makes up a huge part of the bank. And this is their challenge to keep their market position. How can the bank bring the insights from its customers to its developers so that the bank can invigorate new financial products and services?

North Bank Inc. therefore came to Innovisor. They asked us to make the influence networks and collaborative relationships in the informal organization transparent. This would then help to engage the right people across the organization to create these new products and services as well as the right people across the organization to drive successful change from the bottom and up.

When you know these right people, the next question is:

what are the right tasks for them to succeed in changing?

Actionable workforce insights that made North Bank Inc. successful

It is not enough to simply measure connectivity powered by Organizational Network Analysis. The insights into your informal networks and how your workforce is connected can only benefit you when you engage the right people in the right tasks. This will help you to turn these workforce insights into actionable workforce insights.

One of the methods that lead to actionable workforce insights is a key driver analysis. A key driver analysis guides you to target the areas where the right people can make the biggest impact. It looks for which variables impacts your critical success factor. For example, if the most critical success factor for North Bank Inc. is to work as ONE, you want to know what the drivers are behind this success factor. Is it about the tools available for people to work as ONE? Or the accessibility of customer insights to North Bank Inc. as a whole? A key driver analysis will tell you what driver is most important. This helps you what driver you need to prioritize to change successfully.

Your next steps

So,

• Organizational Network Analysis is the the data-centric, quantitative approach to understanding informal networks and identifying the right people
• Key driver analysis is a data-centric, quantitative approach to understand what the right tasks are to accelerate the success of your organizational initiatives

By combining the two as a minimum, you will get deeper evidence-based insights into your workforce. This type of evidence will help you to avoid falling into common pitfalls, such as working with the people you actually know beforehand but who may not have the influence, or focusing on questions that scored the lowest and therefore gets your attention as a key activity for the right people to work on.

This is of course not the whole story. As I mentioned earlier in the article, this is just “a little glimpse” of how you can accelerate the success of your organizational initiatives.