Excerpted from BusinessWeek, “Putting a Price on Social Connections”, by Stephen Baker, April 8, 2009
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Workers who have strong communication ties with their managers tend to bring in more money than those who steer clear of the boss, according to a new analysis of social networks in the workplace by IBM and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The research even assigns a dollar value to e-mail interaction with an employee’s managers. Among the group studied, several thousand consultants at IBM, those with strong links to a manager produced an average of $588 of revenue per month over the norm.
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The results represent an early attempt to understand the value of the broadening variety of personal connections afforded by the Web. Users of social media rack up LinkedIn contacts, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers by the hundreds, if not thousands. But figuring out how big a difference all those contacts make in a person’s life, financial or otherwise, is a far murkier matter.
That’s why leading tech companies are hiring economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to map and classify new types of friendships—and put a value on them.
For example, researchers found that the average e-mail contact was worth $948 in revenue. Using mathematical formulas to analyze the e-mail traffic, address books, and buddy lists of 2,600 IBM consultants over the course of a year, they compared the communication patterns with performance, as measured by billable hours.
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In another study, an IBM team analyzes company methods to introduce employees to colleagues they haven’t yet met. The idea is to create new connections within the global workforce and to encourage employees to share knowledge.
One key is to alert people to potential friends and allies at the company. Much the way companies like Netflix and Amazon study past Web-surfing patterns to recommend books and movies, Geyer and his team are digging for signs of shared interests and behaviors among their colleagues.
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Research into the networked behavior of employees promises insights about teamwork, innovation, and the transmission of knowledge and ideas within a given company.
The research is at an early stage. But as the economy struggles, more companies are sure to study the company we keep—and even attempt to calculate how much each friendship is worth.
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