Organisational network analysis (ONA) maps who actually works with, advises and relies on whom, drawn from short employee surveys or from collaboration metadata such as email and meeting records. Where the organisational structure shows who reports to whom, ONA shows how information and decisions really move.

Where the idea comes from

The method goes back to the psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, whose 1934 book Who Shall Survive? asked group members whom they preferred to work or live with and drew the answers as “sociograms”, dots for people and lines for ties. Rob Cross and Andrew Parker brought it into management with The Hidden Power of Social Networks (2004), arguing that org charts miss the informal networks that drive or block performance.

What an ONA shows

A typical survey asks four or five questions, such as “Whom do you go to for technical advice?” or “Who do you need information from to do your job?”. The resulting map tends to surface a few recurring patterns:

• Central connectors: people half the unit depends on. Often not managers. If one of them resigns, work slows in ways no attrition report predicts.
• Bottlenecks: a senior engineer who must approve everything, overloaded and slowing the team.
• Brokers: the few people linking two groups, for instance the only person in a Bengaluru GCC who talks regularly with the US product team.
• Isolated people: remote or recently joined staff with almost no ties, worth a check-in.

A common use is after a merger or reorganisation: if the two former teams still have no ties six months later, integration has not happened, whatever the chart says. Matrix setups with dotted-line reporting are another good candidate, because formal lines say little about real dependence.

Privacy limits

Survey-based ONA asks people about named colleagues, so explain the purpose, who sees individual-level maps, and that results will not be used in appraisals. Metadata ONA (analysing who emails or meets whom) needs no survey but is more intrusive, and much harder to justify. Under the DPDP Act, the notice and lawful-ground duties take effect on 13 May 2027; whether passive collaboration mapping fits the employment “legitimate use” ground is untested, so take advice and prefer aggregated, opt-in designs.

Frequently asked questions

Can ONA be used to rate individual performance?

It should not be. Being central reflects role and location as much as contribution, and once people know the map affects ratings they start gaming who they name.

How many people do you need?

It works for a team of 30 and for a business unit of several thousand, but survey response matters: with a low response rate, missing people look isolated when they are not.

What do we do with the connectors we find?

Protect and use them: reduce their approval load, include them in change communication, and check their retention risk; some firms use the map to inform succession planning for roles that look minor on paper.

For span and layer checks that ONA does not cover, use the span of control calculator alongside the network map.