Synopses & Reviews
Discover Hidden Social Patterns Within Your Company--and Supercharge Both Performance and Employee Satisfaction
“…a watershed book in advancing the understanding of human dynamics.”
—Michael Arena, Head of Global Talent & Organization Capability, General Motors
“…Waber convincingly shatters orthodoxies of team and workplace design. A must-read.”
—Scott Anthony, Managing Partner, Innosight, and author of The Little Black Book of Innovation
“…[Waber] provides numerous examples to illustrate how social analytics could help transform business operating practices in the future. It’s a fascinating area of study.”
—Paul Mascarenas, Chief Technical Officer, Ford Motor Company
“Ben Waber follows a new trail of ‘digital breadcrumbs’ to see the world with fresh perspective...A fascinating read.”
—Sherry Turkle, Professor, MIT, and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More of Technology and Less from Each Other
We’ve always used data to help identify what workplace behaviors make people effective. But this data has always been subjective, biased, and limited in scale. Cutting-edge social sensor technologies open up a world of new possibilities, allowing you to identify hidden social patterns within your organization—and make subtle, unobtrusive adjustments that lead to large, measurable improvements.
People Analytics will help you discover how your people really work, collaborate, and innovate, so you can help them do it more successfully. It will help you uncover sources of creativity and expertise you never knew you had. And it can help you optimize everything from customer service and marketing to R&D and M&A.
MIT Media Lab innovator Ben Waber shows how new sensors and “big data” analytics can help you gain an unprecedented understanding of how your people work and actionable insights for building a more effective, productive, and positive organization.
Through cutting-edge examples, Waber demonstrates how you can use these technologies to optimize everything from call center performance to sick-day policies. Most remarkable of all, you’ll learn how to accurately measure (and effectively address) “subjective” success factors…from culture to creativity.
• Measure the informal interactions that are crucial to long-term success
• Recognize emerging problems before they derail teams, projects, or mergers
• Systematically improve the effectiveness of in-person and electronic communication
• Discover who your “internal experts” really are
• Identify surprising hidden sources of creativity and innovation
• Get fine-grained data for better nuts-and-bolts HR decision-making
• Enhance employee performance—and reduce employee stress at the same time
Synopsis
Discover powerful hidden social "levers" and networks within your company… then, use that knowledge to make slight "tweaks" that dramatically improve both business performance and employee fulfillment! In People Analytics, MIT Media Lab innovator Ben Waber shows how sensors and analytics can give you an unprecedented understanding of how your people work and collaborate, and actionable insights for building a more effective, productive, and positive organization. Through cutting-edge case studies, Waber shows how:
- Changing the way call center employees spent their breaks increased performance by 25% while significantly reducing stress
- Quantifying the failure of marketing and customer service to communicate led to a more cohesive and profitable organization
- Tweaking the balance of in-person and electronic communication can enhance the value of both
- Sensor data can help you discover who your internal experts really are
- Identifying employees involved in "creative" behaviors can help you promote innovation throughout your business
- Sensors and simulations can help you optimize your sick-day policies
- Measuring informal interactions can improve the chances that a merger, acquisition, or "mega-project" will succeed
Drawing on his cutting-edge work at MIT and Harvard, Waber addresses crucial issues ranging from technology to privacy, revealing what will be possible in a few years, and what you can achieve right now. In bringing the power of analytics to organizational development, he offers immense new opportunities to everyone with responsibility for workplace performance.
About the Author
Ben Waber (Boston, MA) is President/CEO of Sociometric Solutions, a management consultancy that uses social sensing technology to understand companies' internal communication patterns and design innovative transformation strategies. He is also a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where he received his PhD, and was previously Senior Researcher at Harvard Business School. His work has been featured in Wired, NPR, and The Economist, and he has given invited talks at Google, EMC, and Samsung. Waber's research won the 2008 Best Paper award at the ICIS conference, and was selected for the Harvard Business Review's List of Breakthrough Ideas for 2009.
Table of Contents
Preface xix Chapter 1 Sensible Organizations: Sensors, Big Data, and Quantifying the Unquantifiable 1
Telescopes, Microscopes, and “Socioscopes” 4
Unbiased? 6
Digital Breadcrumbs 7
“Socioscope” 8
Enter the Badge 14
Big Data = Big Brother? 17
Trust and Transparency 20
Chapter 2 Evolution, History, and Social Behavior: Our Wandering Road to the Modern Corporation 21
Back to the Future 22
In the Shadow of Man 22
You Say “Groups,” I Say “Organizations” 26
Individual < tribe="">< city-state ="">
Do as the Romans Do 30
Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution 31
New Information, New Communication 35
The Organization of Today 37
(In)formal Processes 39
Informally Important 48
The Social Network 50
Organizing the Path Ahead 55
Chapter 3 The Water Cooler Effect: Why a Friendly Chat Is the Most Important Part of the Work Day 57
Talk Your Ear Off 58
Cohesion versus Diversity 59
Blue-Collar versus White-Collar Water Coolers 70
Banking on Change 71
Peanut Butter Jelly Time 74
Break Value 77
Chapter 4 The Death of Distance? Measuring the Power of Proximity 89
So, Should I Stay at Home and Work in My Pajamas? 92
Co-Located Offices: The Gold Standard? 96
More Than a Tape Measure 100
Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder? 102
Long Table, Short Table 104
So, Where Should I Sit? 106
Chapter 5 I’m the Expert: Why Connections Are More Important Than Test Scores 109
The (Electric) General 114
The IT Firm Study 115
IT Firm Study Results 116
Expert Puzzle 117
Being an Expert Expert 118
Chapter 6 You Look Like the Creative Type: The Importance of a Diverse Network 123
Cartoon Wars 125
Lessons from South Park: The Roots of Creativity 130
Chapter 7 Tough It Out versus Stay at Home: Modeling Disease Spread Through Face-to-Face Conversations 137
Corporate Epidemiology 140
Chapter 8 Why We Waste $1,200,000,000,000 a Year: Mergers and Acquisitions, Corporate Culture, and Communication 151
I’ll Call, and Raise 152
Fixing the Problem 155
Chapter 9 Attach Bolt “A” to Plank “Q”: Matching Formal Dependencies with Informal Networks 161
Big Projects, Big Problems 164
Congruence, Distance, and Software 169
Don’t Fall into the Gap 171
Keeping in Contact 174
Chapter 10 The Future of Organizations: How People Analytics Will Transform Work 177
Badges, Badges Everywhere? 179
Moving Toward the People Analytics System 181
Augmented Social Reality 188
All Around the World 189
The Next Big Thing 192
Chapter 11 Where We Go from Here: Face-to-Face Interaction, New Collaboration Tools, and Going Back to the Future 193
Back to the Future 2 200
Endnotes 203
Index 207