Regardless of whether it’s true, the “degrees of separation” concept doesn’t just apply to actors. It also plays a significant role in measuring the health of corporate communication capabilities and businesses as a whole.
Tracking DoS will reveal the true structure of your business, its strongest forces, and any needed improvements.
Identifying Your True Structure
We like to think that our companies are structured like this:
But in reality, they look more like this:
Traditional hierarchies are unrealistic; people simply aren’t — and shouldn’t be — limited to communicating with just their direct supports or bosses. Employees should be able to easily communicate across all levels of your organization.
It’s more realistic to think of your company as a large, flat network with a few key people who are more centrally located than others.
Characterize your DoS as the average number of parties an employee needs to go through before eventually connecting with key players in your organization. How many people, on average, does their message travel through before reaching the ideal set of ears?
This measurement is a great proxy for how efficiently information is shared throughout your organization. Fewer degrees promise nimbler and more efficient communication. Think of it like a giant game of telephone: The more people a message has to pass through, the harder it is to keep everyone aligned.
Last year, my company analyzed more than a dozen colleges. We found that a high DoS correlated with elevated disagreement levels between faculty and staff, preventing these schools from adopting new tools and technologies that would drive better performance. Measuring institutional DoS allowed colleges to bridge communications gaps, enhance relationships between key groups, and greatly boost overall connectivity.
DoS is a solid way to examine relational analytics, and combining this insight with traditional HR analytics gives you “people analytics”: the most well-rounded snapshot of your company’s strengths and weaknesses.
Measure, Tweak, and Repeat
The benefits of DoS are deep and varied. It’s an easy structure to navigate — and an easy one to implement. Here’s how to successfully apply it to your business:
1. Connect your connectors. If your DoS is too high, it’s clear your company’s communication structure needs rewiring. Identify your best-connected employees — those who know everyone and everything — and connect them to each other. When they combine forces, information will flow seamlessly across your organization. Plus, recognizing your change agents will help accelerate employee buy-in when broad internal shifts occur.
Recently, my business helped a consumer packaged goods company connect its connectors, which drastically reduced the DoS in its research and development department. This lessened the company’s reliance on a handful of people preparing to retire while also allowing for the introduction of new products.
2. Track communication over time. Organizations eagerly measure long-term metrics (like year-to-year sales), but they neglect tracking important internal performance metrics (like communication). The long-term measurement of DoS offers insight into how well an organization is mobilizing and how effectively individuals are immersing themselves in its system.
My company recently took a big-picture look at our own DoS and realized we were far too siloed. As a result, we increased interaction between our developers and marketers. We altered our seating arrangements and created more time for collaboration across these groups. Today, regular operations are much less disjointed, and we’ve seen quicker responsiveness to customer demands.
3. Create a metric for reaction time. DoS allows for the creation of a “net promoter” agility score. This shows your organization’s capacity to handle any changing outside forces. The lower your score, the more resilient your company is to threats. Every executive needs metrics to demonstrate performance effectiveness, and this is a rare example of a number that accurately measures HR work.
4. Improve employee retention. My company is still conducting research in this area, but it appears employees working in high-DoS environments are more likely to quit. Workers who are furthest away from the action arguably feel less connected to the organization. Reducing DoS will increase employee engagement and instill a sense of belonging.
Low DoS benefits more than the financial health of your business; it also benefits the emotional health of your employees. You may only be six connections away from Kevin Bacon, but what really matters is how many degrees separate you from Pat in accounting and Mark in sales. The more connected your organization, the better it will perform.
Zachary Johnson is the CEO and co-founder of Syndio, an enterprise people analytics company based in Chicago. Syndio uses a network-based approach to help organizations measure the critical intangibles of employee success: innovation, collaboration, and trust. Armed with this data, Syndio’s customers find, mobilize, and deploy their best people to solve mission-critical challenges.
