Organizational Engineering using Sociometric Badges

Benjamin N. Waber, Daniel Olguín Olguín, Taemie Kim, Akshay Mohan, Koji Ara, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland

MIT Media Laboratory – Human Dynamics GroupNetSci 2007

Motivation

Quantification of social systems• Surveys

– Subjective– Inaccurate

• Human observation– Subjective– Does not scale

• Electronic communication (E-Mail, IM, etc.)– Incomplete– Representative of face-to-face interaction?

Sociometric Badge

Sociometric Badge (Olguín et al., 2007)– Multiple sensing capabilities– Communication capability– Bluetooth enabled

Experiment

• Deployed the Sociometric Badge for one month in a German bank’s marketing division– 22 employees– Interesting physical layout

• Obtained e-mail records from a concurrent study (Oster, 2007)

• Subjective performance and satisfaction survey administered daily

Total Communication

Ad campaign planning: Face-to-face communication on top, email on bottom

Total Communication

Ad campaign execution: Face-to-face communication on top, email on bottom

Total Communication

Full Month Visualization

Results: Total Communication

• Total communication highly negatively correlated with job and interaction satisfaction (r = -0.48, -0.53, p < 0.05)

• Betweeness was negatively correlated with interaction satisfaction (r = -0.49, p < 0.05)

• Inter-status communication was also negatively correlated with interaction satisfaction (r = -0.64, p < 0.005)

• Proximity was highly negatively correlated with e-mail communication (r = -0.55, p < 0.01)

General Findings

• Face-to-face ties had a moderate negative correlation with e-mail ties(r = -0.19, p < 0.05)

• Individual inter-status availability ties and e-mail ties were highly positively correlated when both were present (r = 0.64, p < 0.0001)

Future Work

• Analyze data at finer level of detail to identify mirroring and turn taking behaviors

• Implement a social network optimization framework that operates on this data

• Create individual feedback tools (Kim et al., 2007)

• Perform additional experiments– Data Server Configuration firm– Student group exercises at Harvard (with

Katz and Lazer)

Conclusions

• The Sociometric badge is a powerful and efficient data collection platform

• E-Mail data is not representative of face-to-face interaction

• Total communication is an important predictor of perceived productivity and satisfaction

Thank You!

Questions?