Some research by IBM and Virginia Tech was released recently on how engagement travels through networks over time. Basically it's a bit like the common cold...if the people around you are healthy and happy, you will be too. This isn't the first finding like this but this IBM study used some clever semantic-language analytics to track employees' engagement (based on word choice) when interacting on organizational social and communications platforms, and how this changed over time based on proximity and emotional expression.

It’s no surprise that direct peers have the strongest influence on engagement but what was intriguing was that engagement and disengagement tend to move in different directions over time. The study coined the term engagement ‘contagion’ to track this spread.

While engagement ‘contagion’ was more powerful laterally among people at the same organisational level, disengagement ‘contagion’ was stronger on the vertical managerial chain.

This raises some big questions about the ways we intervene to resolve disengagement plus the long term impact on leaders and colleagues. Plus the contagion mapping also showed disengagement had a bigger overall impact in the network over time than engagement suggesting that the old retail adage of “A happy customer tells 3 people; an unhappy one tells 10” may have a powerful parallel to the Employee Experience.

The last few years have seen many examples of using existing work and activity data from non-HR sources to bring powerful new people-insights to teams and companies. Rather than complex predictive models, methods like these shows you no longer have to wait for a complaint or resignation to identify where people are unhappy and why.

Leading companies are already taking up these new tools to make a better healthier workplace, seeing the potential for cheap, real-time, fully-integrated engagement and relationship analytics in the hands of each team and leader.

How ready is your team to explore this transparent new workplace?