In today's dynamic work environment, understanding the intricate web of relationships within an organization is crucial for enhancing productivity and collaboration.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) with Microsoft Viva Insights offers a powerful tool to visualize and analyze these relationships, providing valuable insights into how work gets done.

By leveraging Viva Insights, organizations can identify key knowledge holders, detect bottlenecks, and monitor changes in collaboration patterns, ultimately driving more effective decision-making and fostering a more connected workplace.

This guide will cover:

• An Introduction to Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)

• What is Microsoft Viva Insights?

• The Benefits of Using Viva Insights for ONA

• ONA Report Template Features

• Setting Up and Accessing a Change Management Query

Introduction to Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)

Organizations are social systems, where people interact regularly with others inside and outside their workgroups in a wide variety of formal and informal settings using a number of ways and means.

Through these interactions people learn, and change, make decisions, and take actions. Individual and group performance is heavily influenced by quality, quantity and frequency of these interactions and ultimately the strength of their list of contacts.

The relationships between people in an organization is often called and represented as a network; a contact network, social network or organizational network. These networks sit outside of and span across formal organizational hierarchies and are pivotal to how work is really done.

Starting in the 2000’s analyzing organizational social networks gained popularity as a knowledge management approach for determining important knowledge risks by identifying, for example:

• key people (experts, trusted individuals, key information holders) that are either at risk of leaving the organization or are not sharing what they know as expected,

• people that are isolated from others and disconnected from work and knowledge flows but shouldn’t be,

• people that are for some reason bottlenecks to work and knowledge flows, perhaps because they are overloaded with “asks” from their contact network,

• and people that should be “go to” individuals for certain topics but are not for some reason.

Organizational network analysis (ONA) can also be used to monitor changes to these characteristics over time, or before and after a focused change initiative or even before or after a reorganization.

Understanding the specifics of these risks are even more important in today’s dynamic and modern remote or hybrid work environments.

Conducting an ONA typically involves collecting data (through surveys and interviews) using specialized software to map the network and hiring experts to help analyze and interpret findings and provide advice for taking action. Despite the high value for the effort, organizations are often reluctant to conduct an ONA.

Enter Microsoft Viva Insights Analytics and the benefits of working digitally!

What is Microsoft Viva Insights?

It is well documented that Microsoft collects data about content stored in M365, activities that take place in M565 by users, groups, and applications, and information about people themselves (called organizational data).

Part of the Microsoft Viva suite, Viva Insights is a tool that combines activity data and organizational data to create insights and suggest improvements to how people work and collaborate for individuals at a personal level, and for leaders at a team or enterprise level.

Benefits of Using Viva Insights for ONA

With Microsoft Viva Insights, organizations can take advantage of the applications capability and available data to conduct ONA using the Viva Insights Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) Change Management report template. This is available in the Viva Insights Analyst Workbench.

What you can do with the ONA report template

With the Viva Insights ONA Change Management template, Analysts can:

• conduct before/after analysis on collaboration patterns to assess the impact of change

• look broadly at information flow patterns at group and subgroup levels

• explore data with network visualizations and matrix/chart visualizations

The report template provides summary level observations and recommendations focusing on changes in collaboration, insularity, and information intermediaries.

You can also do a deeper dive into specific groups or data to look more closely at specific groups and activities.

Setting Up and Accessing a Change Management Query

To create and access a change management query, you will need be assigned the role of Insights Analyst in Viva Insights.  Once that role has been assigned, setup a query In the Viva Insights Analyst Workbench by:

1. Select Create Analysis

2. Select Setup Analysis in the Change Management Template

3. Provide analysis name, time period, description.

4. Specify what portion of the employee population you want to analyze.

5. Select and customize specific attributes (filters) for how employees are grouped and to focus the analysis depending on the specific questions you are looking to address. These attributes are things a specific organization unit, group, hire date, geographic area, number of direct reports and so on.  There is even a node view where you can combine organization units for analysis if you are looking to compare before and after an organizational restructuring.

Once you are finished, select Save and Finish at the top right of the screen.  This brings you back to the main query setup page where you can add, view, edit or remove attributes.

6. When you’re ready to run the query select Run at the top right of the screen.

7. To View the query results:

• Go to the Analysis results page and when the analysis is ready, a green checkmark appears under the Status column.

• Select the Network icon under View that corresponds to your query name. This will launch the Summary View.

• You can also download your results as a .csv file by selecting the CSV icon under the Export data column.

Conclusion

When combined the right business questions and knowledge of the organization’s context and situation, Viva Insights ONA Change Management template and capabilities bring powerful analytical capabilities to identify knowledge risks and manage the impacts of changes in your organization.

If you’d like help using Viva Insights Analytics for organizational network analysis, or for exploring any other aspects of your organization’s productivity, health resiliency and culture, contact Gravity Union, and be sure to follow the Gravity Union Blog for more insights on M365 and change management.

References

Clark, C. (1552). Social systems theory for management practitioners: Organizations as network of decisions. CQ Net - Management Skills for Everyone! https://www.ckju.net/en/blog/social-systems-theory-management-practitioners-organizations-network-decisions/32189

In-Depth: What a Social Systems Perspective Teaches us About Change. (n.d.). Scrum.Org. Retrieved August 21, 2024, from https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/depth-what-social-systems-perspective-teaches-us-about-change

Garfield, S. (2018, June 29). Social Network Analysis: SNA, ONA, VNA. Medium. https://stangarfield.medium.com/social-network-analysis-sna-ona-vna-4df5547a0a7f

HR World. (2023, February 2). ONA Analysis: The unbeatable power of organizational networks. HR World. https://hrworld.org/ona-analysis-the-unbeatable-power-of-organizational-networks/

Derr, A. (2024, March 19). How to Conduct an Organizational Network Analysis: Step-by-Step Guide. Visible Network Labs. https://visiblenetworklabs.com/2024/03/19/how-to-conduct-an-organizational-network-analysis/

(31) Organizational Network Analysis The Basics. (n.d.). Linkedin.Com. Retrieved August 21, 2024, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/organizational-network-analysis-basics-hassan-alan-megahy/

Martinez, M. R. (2024, May 22). Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) as Leadership Tools. Medium. https://medium.com/@martin.richard.martinez/organizational-network-analysis-ona-and-social-network-analysis-sna-as-leadership-tools-29280bded090

Improve productivity with Microsoft Viva Insights. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/insights.

Pamelaar. Workplace Analytics service description - Service Descriptions. Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/workplace-analytics-service-description. Published April 25, 2023.

Zachminers. Create change management queries. Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/analyst/change-management-queries. Published July 26, 2024.