Streamlining M&A Integration Effectiveness with Organisational Network Analytics
Source | medium.com | Togy Jose
Over 70% of M&As fail. With companies spending over 2 trillion dollars on M&A every year, this failure rate is a massive call-to-action. One of the key elements to making M&As work is to improve the effectiveness of the integration between the two workforces.
Organizational Network Analytics (ONA) enables leaders to create a Social Graph of the company and leverage that to identify who is “central” to the org and which are the informal communities driving the zeitgeist. This means ONA is ideally positioned to help leaders visualize and analyze the quality of collaboration throughout the integration journey.
The visuals used in this article are a representative sample of an M&A journey across 3 key stages i.e. Pre Merger, Merger, and Post-Merger (for convenience, these graphs only include interactions between leaders — ideally we should analyze the Social Graph of interactions across all levels). Each node represents an individual, each link is a relationship between individuals, node size represents how central the individual is to the group and node color represents which entity he/she belongs to.
It is important to look at the integration journey from these three perspectives since ONA is leveraged differently at each stage. Before we get into specifics of how ONA can help — let’s first understand the two ways to create an organization’s Social Graph.
- Active ONA — This is a survey-based approach where participants are asked specific questions like “Who do you reach out to for expert advice?” or “Who do reach out for mentorship?”. The responses to these questions are highly contextual but limited in volume since the response rate for voluntary surveys is notoriously low and repeating surveys too often can lead to survey fatigue.