By Chantrelle Nielsen, David Niu & Si Meng
Companies are always looking for ways to assess the potential of their employees. One approach is to understand how they collaborate with and influence others within the organization.
TINYpulse—a software provider that helps companies measure workplace sentiment—partnered with Microsoft Workplace Analytics to examine the relationship between employee feedback, collaboration and performance. TINYpulse provided Microsoft with a tool called Cheers for Peers, with which employees can send “cheers” to each other to recognize good work. TINYpulse tracked how many cheers were sent and received per employee at their company over a six-month period.
Microsoft analyzed how the number of cheers sent and received within TINYpulse correlated with “network centrality” in the e-mail and meeting network over the same period. Network centrality is an index that measures employees with higher influence based on the number of connections that they and their connections have—like Google’s PageRank algorithm, but for people.
The people who received the most praise from colleagues acted as communication hubs for the entire organization and were central to work getting done. It’s not surprising that as people collaborated more with colleagues, they were singled out more often.
In the second stage of the research, TINYpulse provided Microsoft with a list of the top-performing employees with high leadership potential. This list was matched with behavioral data regarding each employee’s e-mail and calendar use, and then aggregated.
For the go-to-market segment, representing employees in sales and marketing, we found that top performers spent an average of 25 hours using their e-mail and calendars each week, nearly 14 hours a week involved in internal collaboration and about 12 hours a week focused on external collaboration—numbers similar to those of low performers.
But high performers spent nearly four hours more per week collaborating internally, and they had larger internal networks (an average of 27 connections, compared with 20 for low performers).
High-potential individuals also spent 34 percent more time with product and engineering groups than the team average. This is particularly important in the software-as-service business, which requires tight collaboration between those who build the product and those who interact with users.
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Chantrelle Nielsen directs research and strategy for Microsoft Workplace Analytics. Si Meng is a research program manager at Microsoft Workplace Analytics. David Niu is the CEO of TINYpulse.