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 Group NetSci 2007

Motivation Quantification of social systems Surveys –Subjective –Inaccurate Human observation –Subjective –Does not scale Electronic communication ( , 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 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, on bottom

Total Communication Ad campaign execution: Face-to-face communication on top, 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 communication (r = -0.55, p < 0.01)

General Findings Face-to-face ties had a moderate negative correlation with 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 < )

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 data is not representative of face-to- face interaction Total communication is an important predictor of perceived productivity and satisfaction

Thank You! Questions?