Change Ambassadors

Your context

  • A large-scale internal change programme
  • Small number of dedicated change management resources
  • Plan to use volunteer change ambassadors

Your challenges

  • To determine the likely reach of volunteer change ambassadors
  • To identify and fill any gaps in coverage

How Oxzeon's technology helps

  • Using your pre-existing data, we map employee relationships within the target employee population, combining networks of email, instant messaging, and meetings
  • Within each department (and other segmentations), we calculate the percentage of employees within one, two, or more degrees of separation from a change ambassador
  • In parallel, we identify employees at key points in the networks - the 'connectors'
  • For coverage gaps, we suggest new change ambassadors and model their reach

Your outcomes

  • Awareness of gaps in volunteer change ambassador coverage
  • Identification of key connectors and candidate change ambassadors
  • A map of the target employee population's communication network
  • Connectivity metrics for departments (and other segmentations)
  • A simple mechanism for checking and refining coverage over time

Sample illustrations

Read on to see some sample illustrations of our work in this area:

A graph visualisation of an organisation; edges denote communication relationships, node colour and size denotes degree of separation from a change ambassador

Change ambassador1 degree (of separation)2 degrees

Communication relationship

Fig. 1: In this visualisation of an organisation, employees (the nodes) are connected by communication relationships (the edges), which may be any combination of email, instant messaging, and meetings. Node colour denotes whether an employee is a change ambassador, or within one or two degrees of separation from a change ambassador.

Ambassador1 degree2 degrees3+ degrees
D01025750
D02050500
D03011890
D04457390
D05869230
D06441550
D0708920
D08033670
D09019810
D10050500
D11032680
Fig. 2: This table shows, for each department, the percentage of employees that are change ambassadors, or within one, two or more degrees of separation from a change ambassador. The organisation is not large, and the network of relationships is reasonably dense. However, with just five volunteer change ambassadors drawn from three departments, the '1 degree' coverage rates are of concern.
A graph visualisation of an organisation; edges denote communication relationships, node colour and size denotes betweenness centrality scores

High score ('betweenness centrality')Medium scoreLow score

Communication relationship

Fig. 3. One approach to identifying additional change ambassadors is to look for 'connectors' - employees that occupy key positions in the network. In this visualisation, the larger, whiter nodes represent employees that more frequently connect others in this network (identified using a 'centrality' measure). Whilst some high-scoring employees will be senior leaders, this approach can still yield a useful shortlist of candidates, and their likely reach can be modelled.