Case Studies
Healthways: Achieving Better Health Through Social Influence
Healthways, the leading well-being company, wanted to increase the engagement of the people of Manhattan Beach, California, with its Vitality City wellness program. Healthways therefore worked with Activate Networks to identify and understand the strong social ties of the residents and to map the social network of the city. Based on this analysis, Healthways was able to identify a few thousand highly-influential local residents and to improve Healthways' engagement strategy by focusing initial efforts on local influencers and by leveraging the power of existing patterns of social influence to promote healthy behaviors.
Halliburton: Improving Communication Across Global Operations
In the exploration and production division of energy giant Halliburton, the stakes are high for effective communication and open collaboration. The division oversees operations on oil platforms around the world, each of which incurs fixed costs of more than $500,000 per day. Productivity, quality, and innovation depend on the ability of these platforms to transfer best practices, exchange knowledge, and make shared decisions efficiently.
Lower-than-expected customer satisfaction and quality ratings, however, were raising questions among senior managers about communication across the far-flung sites. An Organizational Network Analysis of multiple platforms provided stunning visual confirmation of the managers’ concerns: The results of the analysis, based on employee surveys, showed not one dense web of interpersonal connections but many isolated clusters. Ties among the sites were sparse, which indicated limited information flow, and the non-U.S. platforms communicated with a U.S. site through only three individuals.
The division took immediate steps to build stronger ties across the platforms, such as creating mixed project teams, rotating people with lots of connections to other platforms, and implementing an electronic expertise locator. A network analysis of the same platforms nine months later revealed a 25% increase in connections.
Substantial performance improvements followed: 24% reduction in customer dissatisfaction, 66% reduction in the cost of poor quality, 22% increase in new-product revenue, and 10% improvement in operational productivity.
Masterfoods: Strengthening Connectivity During a Restructuring
For R&D employees at Masterfoods USA—a company known for such iconic brands as M&Ms, Snickers, and Uncle Ben’s—news of a major restructuring hit hard. The R&D function was proud of being a cohesive group of 300 geographically dispersed professionals, but the change would break up the centralized function and move employees to the company’s business units. The goal was to position resources and expertise closer to the market, but R&D worried that its culture of idea sharing and best-practice exchange—which had been the company’s innovation engine—would not survive.
Through a network analysis survey administered to all R&D employees, managers gained crucial insights. As they expected, the pre-restructuring network diagram looked like a dense fur ball—overall connectivity was very high. But there were some surprises. For example, 12 people accounted for a majority of the connections. If those people left, managers realized, the R&D network would suffer. Moreover, only 3% of possible connections existed between those who worked on snack food and those who worked on main-meal food. This certainly represented lost opportunities for synergy. Finally, the R&D scientists had few ties to outside experts, who could keep them up to date on developments in food science.
As a result of this network analysis, R&D managers planned to improve processes so that the highly connected individuals would not become overloaded, to strengthen internal expertise networks so that people would regularly connect with colleagues in the same research field, and to find ways to collaborate with outside experts. The managers also decided to conduct periodic network analyses to monitor how well R&D was maintaining its cohesiveness in the wake of the restructuring.