Leveraging an enterprise social network for employee behavior modeling and forecasting

The article evaluates the capabilities of an Enterprise Social Network to monitor and predict employee behaviors using an Enterprise social network. In recent years, Enterprise Social Networks, such as Microsoft’s Yammer have become popular in the United States industry. As a rule, they are used as a platform for facilitating employee collaboration. The functionality of Enterprise Social Networks, however, supports their other, much broader, uses as drivers of change in organizational effectiveness. These uses include: • Collecting and analyzing data on employee sentiment and behaviors. Establishing employee sentiment and behavior baselines • Setting organizational effectiveness goals • Creating organizational effectiveness metrics and setting targets • Systematically monitoring organizational effectiveness goals against the targets and identifying gaps • Creating and managing various programs for improving organizational effectiveness • Supporting and sustaining organizations and groups, such as change networks • Simulating desired behaviors in a controlled environment to establish, reinforce, and sustain the behaviors • Modeling employee behaviors and sentiment • Gauging short-term and long-term changes and trends in employee behaviors and sentiment over time to evaluate success of individual programs and organizational effectiveness in general • Forecasting a change in employee behaviors and sentiment • Reporting progress against set targets These capabilities allow for successfully leveraging an Enterprise Social Network as a platform for the forecasting and modeling of employee behaviors. Target audiences for this article include Senior Leadership, members of the Project Management Organizations (PMO), Organizational Change Management Organizations (OCMO), the training teams, and organizational development consultants.