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Measuring the Intangible How the National Braille Press Evaluated Culture, Collaboration, Morale, Impact of Restructuring and More

There are many ways to evaluate culture, collaboration, employee morale, team performance, and the impact of restructuring. But it’s difficult to measure all five at once without over-stressing the organization. The National Braille Press successfully used organization network analysis to evaluate its progress and identify simple but effective improvement actions.

The National Braille Press (www.nbp.org) is a Boston-based, nonprofit, braille publishing house. Founded in 1927, its mission is to promote the literacy of blind children. By printing over 15 million pages each year, NBP is a world leader in braille publishing.

After 31 years on the job, Bill Raeder decided to retire in 2007 as the Executive Director of NBP. He left a strong organization, but one that was used to his style, process, and preferences. His successor, Brian MacDonald, sought to update and professionalize the organization.

MacDonald discovered some surprises upon taking on his new position. One member of his leadership team, a long-term employee, has assumed responsibilities that exceeded her skill set. Beloved in the organization, she had stayed on despite several significant snafus.

Another surprise was the degree of insularity in the organization: people stuck to their functional areas and rarely collaborated with other functions. As a result, the organization failed to capitalize on several promising opportunities.

MacDonald took decisive and radical action. He encouraged the underperforming executive to leave the company. He lost a few solid employees who refused to stay after her dismissal. He restructured the organization, redefined departments, and instituted a team-based structure. In what was, perhaps, his most counter-cultural move, he promoted a low-profile director onto his leadership team.

The changes seemed to be working, but MacDonald didn’t want any more surprises. He wanted an

objective, reliable way to measure the impact of the changes he had instituted.

There are many ways to evaluate culture, collaboration, employee morale, team performance, and the impact of restructuring. It’s difficult to measure all five at once without over-stressing the organization. MacDonald turned to organization network analysis.

A Simple Technique for Complex Measurement

Underneath the organization charts and process maps is a hidden web of relationships that people use to improve processes, solve problems, and complete work. All employees are connected through relationship networks. Network quality, shape, and strength affect how well organizations share knowledge, collaborate, learn, improve, and implement.

These relationships collectively function as an organizational circulatory system. When the circulatory system isn’t healthy, companies lose opportunities and experience performance problems. By assessing the organization network, MacDonald would be able to gauge the health of NBP; measure culture, collaboration, morale, performance, and impact of restructuring; and see if his changes had been effective.

In addition, the organization network analysis (ONA) identifies three key positions—called critical connectors—discovered by Dr. Karen Stephenson as a result of over 30 years of research into the dynamics and behavior of organizational networks (see Stephenson, 1998). The critical connectors consist of:

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