YSR Project Overview
Contents
Scope
Access to TrustSphere’s datasets will allow the team to build a system from scratch using previously unused raw data to better understand turnover and attrition rules.
The minimum research points we would like to address:
- Understand the number of relationships an employee will have at different periods of time in his or her working life
- Measure the speed of growth at which employee relationships grow in a company
- Correlations between the sizes of internal and external relationships employees have
- Through social network analysis, calculate the likelihood of an employee in an informal group leaving a company upon the exit of another closely tied employee
- Identification of metrics that can help predict the likelihood of an employee leaving
It is important to note that the scope of this project is fluid and can be furthered to address additional questions TrustSphere might have regarding the dataset.
Motivation and Objectives
In addition to our initial scope of research, we increased our scope to encompass the following: a) New Employee immersion: Onboarding, also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders. Effective onboarding allows an employee to better integrate into a company thereby transforming them into an asset faster. A key metric to understand organizational immersion is the number of internal relationships the employee has made at different points of time. By benchmarking the average speed of internal relationship growth, a company can assess the effectiveness of their onboarding programs on particular employees. b) Influencer identification for adoption of new enterprise level initiatives: with the launch of new enterprise level initiatives, one of the key concerns that arises is employee level adoption of these strategic changes3. Identifying key influencers in an organization and enrolling them as champions for enterprise level change is one way to increase adoption. Through SNA, these nodes of activity can easily be discovered. c) Contextual employee performance levels: The number-one predictive element of an individual’s success in an organization is the number, the quality, and the depth of social capital—the personal relationships among those that they do business with. By creating metrics (through insights gained from SNA), a geographic and department-level system average can be created to understand employees that are underperforming or overperforming. d) Levels of collaboration: Organisations that encourage employee productivity through collaboration across networks rather than simple individual task completion will require to actively monitor collaboration silos in an organization.
Data
The dataset given to us was pulled from the outlook (mail server used at TrustSphere) database. The data basically is an exchange of emails. The dataset consists of 890,000 email exchanges and 13 variables out of which we found the following 8 to be relevant:
- Date: includes the date and time of a particular email being sent
- Originator: identifies the originator of an email thread
- Direction: indicates the direction of the email sent
- Domain Group: identifies the company to which an email address belongs to
- Inbound Count: number of emails being received from a particular address
- Outbound Count: number of emails being sent to a particular address
- Size: the size of email in bytes
- MsgID: unique identifier of a particular email thread
Review of Previous Work
Methodology
References
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/power_to_the_new_people_analyticsa
