Unlock the hidden insights in your organization
Look past the boxes and lines of traditional org charts and see how your organization actually works.
Product
Passive Organizational Network Analysis Integrations
Access the data you already have. Polinode includes built-in integrations with your favorite tools so you can start analyzing passive ONA data immediately
What is passive ONA?
Passive organizational network analysis utilizes the digital communication data that organizations naturally produce to understand and analyze the informal networks of that organization. It enables you to understand how employees and teams are really working together in near real-time. The most common data sources are email, calendar data and enterprise social networks (such as Teams and Slack).
What are the advantages of Polinode's passive Organizational Network Analysis approach?
We make it easy for you to connect to the tools you already use and to turn that data into valuable insights quickly. We do this in a very flexible way that is highly privacy conscious.
Connect to your favorite passive data tools
In just a few minutes, you can easily connect with all the major work productivity tools.
Your privacy is our priority
Your data is always private. We only access metadata and never access, read or store the content of any of your messages.
Your data, automatically refreshed
Once connected, your data is automatically refreshed every 24 hours so you can be confident you are always using the latest information.
No coding required - get ONA insights faster
Skip the line for IT resources and support. With our built-in integrations, integrating with your key systems is as easy as a few clicks.
How does Passive ONA compare to Active ONA - advantages and disadvantages?
Passive ONA offers two clear benefits:
Saves employee time
There’s no need for employee input, making it easier to implement.
Real-time data
Insights are refreshed frequently, unlike Active ONA’s typical yearly cadence.
That said, Passive ONA lacks the detailed relationship insights that Active ONA provides, such as understanding mentorship or advice networks.
Increasingly the gold standard in ONA is actually to combine both Active ONA and Passive ONA. In that way you can benefit from the advantages of both - the nuanced data that you can obtain from Active ONA and the higher frequency and high coverage that you get from a Passive ONA. It's for this reason that Polinode has offered both Active and Passive ONA software and services for the last five years.
Increasingly the gold standard in ONA is actually to combine both Active ONA and Passive ONA. In that way you can benefit from the advantages of both - the nuanced data that you can obtain from Active ONA and the higher frequency and high coverage that you get from a Passive ONA. It's for this reason that Polinode has offered both Active and Passive ONA software and services for the last five years.
What use cases are best suited to passive ONA?
We provide passive ONA solutions to People Analytics teams, team leaders and consultants around the world for a variety of use cases, including:
Improving collaboration within the organization
With passive data you can easily detect the informal communities within a company / division / team and understand the internal and external collaboration patterns. This data can then be used to drive positive change and improvements (as well as to monitor future changes).
Identifying influencers / finding change agents
The gold standard to identify influencers in an organization, particularly cultural influencers, is to run an Active ONA. However, that is not always possible, and passive data can still allow you to identify informal influencers and ensure that your change agents / identified influencers provide good coverage over the whole organization / division / team.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
How do the networks of diverse talent differ? Are there differences by gender and/or ethnicity in terms of connection and exposure to more senior people in the organization? Passive data has a lot of insight to give in the DE&I space.
Preventing burnout and collaborative overload
Individual and team well-being has become an important focus for many organizations. Passive data allows you to "keep a finger on the pulse" of the organization and to identify well-being related issues earlier than would otherwise be possible. This kind of passive listening is particularly powerful when combined with measures of centrality / influence in the network as the two are often related - highly central and influential employees are also often those individuals that are placed under the most load.
What is the difference between Passive ONA and Work Patterns Analysis?
People often ask how Passive ONA differs from the analysis done by tools like Microsoft’s Viva Insights. Here are the key distinctions:
Passive ONA
Focuses on networks and network analysis. It leverages communication data to map an organization’s network and calculates network measures such as density and centrality to improve how teams work together.
Work Patterns Analysis
Uses the same passive data but looks at work habits and behavioral patterns. It seeks answers to questions such as:
- What teams are working outside of standard hours?
- Are there blocks of focus time for engineers?
- How often are one-on-one meetings with managers happening?
While Passive ONA focuses on understanding networks, Work Patterns Analysis focuses on work behaviors and patterns. The good news is that Polinode allows you to perform both types of analysis. You can export passive data message by message to an s3 bucket for further analysis, including for work patterns analysis.
How can I get started with passive ONA?
You will need a Polinode organization account to get started with passive ONA. Because of the nature of passive ONA, it's not possible to use an individual Polinode account. The first step is therefore to reach out to us to request a demo - we can then show you how our passive data integrations work and talk through all the details with you.
Making the invisible visible.
