Visualization & Analysis of Employee Interactions: A study of Inter-Departmental Communication Effectiveness at Hansa Cequity

Abstract

In any Knowledge Organization, measuring the collaboration and communication effectiveness between and within different departments is extremely important. Hansa Cequity is a Marketing Analytics Consulting firm having more than 200 employees across 6 key departments. Almost every project that is taken up requires collaboration from almost all the divisions. Hence identifying the bottlenecks in information flow is a need of the hour. In this paper, we have attempted to analyze the interactions between employees across different departments at Hansa Cequity. The connections between the employees were visualized in the form of Ego-Networks. Network Centrality measures like Weighted Degree, Betweenness, Closeness and Modularity were used to understand key influencers, employees who enable communication flow across teams and employees who are isolated from the rest of the network. The teams which had high bonding relative to others were found out using Community detection technique. Based on the centrality measures, employees were classified into similar groups. The demographic variables of these groups were then overlapped with their centrality measures to identify the key factors that drive their observed behaviour, performance at work and group formation. Centrality measures were also computed at a department level to understand whether all the departments have good interaction. This work has helped in identifying the key communication gaps and cross-departmental information flow barriers within Hansa Cequity. Based on the findings, several initiatives have been taken up by the Human Resources team to improve cross-functional collaboration.