'Entanglement' -- A new dynamic metric to measure team flow

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'entanglement,' a new metric based on social network synchronization to predict team performance, employee turnover, and customer satisfaction through analysis of communication patterns.

Contribution

It presents a novel dynamic metric for measuring team and individual synchronization in communication networks, validated across multiple real-world case studies.

Findings

Entanglement predicts team performance and learning behavior.

Lack of entanglement correlates with employee turnover.

Entanglement relates to customer satisfaction scores.

Abstract

We introduce "entanglement", a novel metric to measure how synchronized communication between team members is. This measure calculates the Euclidean distance among team members' social network metrics timeseries. We validate the metric with four case studies. The first case study uses entanglement of 11 medical innovation teams to predict team performance and learning behavior. The second case looks at the e-mail communication of 113 senior executives of an international services firm, predicting employee turnover through lack of entanglement of an employee. The third case analyzes the individual employee performance of 81 managers. The fourth case study predicts performance of 13 customer-dedicated teams at a big international company by comparing entanglement in the e-mail interactions with satisfaction of their customers measured through Net Promoter Score (NPS). While we can only speculate about what is causing the entanglement effect, we find that it is a new and versatile indicator for the analysis of employees' communication, analyzing the hitherto underused temporal dimension of online social networks which could be used as a powerful predictor of employee and team performance, employee turnover, and customer satisfaction.