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SONAR 

measuring Collaboration, Engagement and Inclusion

12 to 18 weeks sprint

Deeper dive into the unseen levers of performance 

Today most of the workforce is remote and CHRO’s are beginning to say that “many of our employees may work from home”, “we may not need the office space we thought we needed”. Many of us know ‘it’s not going to go back to the old ways of working’. Infact the estimation is that an additional 20-30% of the workforce will be in a permanent remote working pattern hereon and optional for the others. 

While companies get comfortable with remote working, the www.covidhrpulse.com highlights new issues that are emerging:

  • Productivity and work life balance is a key issue 

  • Well being is being tested. "I am tired" say many and is being caused by cognitive overload of working at home -physical space, kids, pets, laundry etc.

  • People want more two way communication with their leaders and teams; they want more open conversations with the line managers 

  • Human connection remains a critical need 


So, today how well do you know the answers to these critical questions? 

  1. Are managers more connected to or less connected to their teams?

  2. Are people collaborating more or less, and does this vary by location? 

  3. Is there a higher or lower engagement level? 

  4. Are people working longer hours or less hours? Is there a risk of burnout? 

  5. Are levels of inclusion at where you want them to be? 


What if you can regularly obtain a visual, data driven map of these intangible drivers of performance? 

There is a Solution - Organization Network Analysis 

With Organization Network Analysis (ONA), such organizational MRI’s are made possible. 


What is ONA?

ONA is a structured way to visualize how communications, information, and decisions flow through an organization. It helps you visualize and measure levels of collaboration and engagement too. There are two kinds of ONA’s - active and passive. Active ONA - mapping informal relationships between employees through an online survey, which captures different types of informal interactions. Passive ONA - uses the ‘digital exhaust’ of your enterprise systems to organize and present a visualization of the reality of work getting done, collaboration and inclusion. 

Our Sonar Solution (Collaboration, Engagement, Inclusion)


What will happen?

  • The ‘digital exhaust’ of your enterprise will be used to organize and present a visualization of the reality of work getting done and collaboration. 

  • This passive data gathering process requires no surveys, no online forms or questionnaires. 

  • The data already exists in the form of IM, email, slack etc. Without ever looking at content, digital interactions will be analyzed across the organization. 

  • Using statistical analysis, behavioral scoring and data science, this ONA distinguishes between mere connections and actual relationships by measuring the frequency, strength and the way in which communication takes place across multiple types of employee networks.  


Passive ONA enables organizations to consistently measure collaboration networks based on the real-time activity within the organization. Understand how collaborative individual employees are and then visualize how teams collaborate internally, with other parts of the organization and with external organizations (eg. clients). Our solution helps organizations create collaboration benchmarks and see the progression of their collaboration efforts at regular intervals.

Insights for action include:

  1. Identify managers with high and low levels of engagement with teams: co-relate this with team performance, utilize data for coaching and improving manager effectiveness 

  2. Identify teams with high and low internal collaboration density: measure against any internal benchmarks,  team performance metrics and for coaching 

  3. Levels of inter-team collaboration, especially where it is critical for service delivery : utilize insights for improving inter-team or department collaboration across geographies 

  4. Measure inclusion: compare with internal or external benchmarks or utilize the baseline data to set benchmarks and for corporate reporting; utilized for D&I metrics, initiative planning, reporting  

  5. Identification of burnout risk  


This data can be benchmarked at role, team or department level to identify where collaboration is strong, or where silos exist. By continually evaluating the collaboration levels of employees, we can see the change in collaboration levels in real time. The data can also be used for establishing metrics for the future and regress against other important performance and engagement metrics.  


Data Privacy:

  • No analysis of content 

  • Fully GDPR compliant 

  • Ethical use of data 

Additional Use Cases:


Identifying hidden influencers - using a data driven approach to identify influencers reduces potential bias and finds key people who have stronger and broader networks who are best placed to impact organizational change 


Identifying hidden collaborators  - ONA can help you identify the ‘hidden stars’ in your organization, the go-to people for information. This data can be used for talent management programs, for recognizing those who would otherwise not show-up on your radar, for identifying the collaborators who can be mentors. 


Identify burnout: are people working longer hours or less hours? Is there a risk of burnout?  Think of this as people who are experiencing ‘collaborative overload’.

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