The occasions you have for organisational restructuring within a business are as varied as life itself. What is left after any reorganization is the same old short comings, however. This is because a business's organigramme says nothing about the actual social and organisational integration among the employees of that business and certainly nothing about the distribution of power within the company. This management training article discusses the types of informal company networks that exist and how such information can be used by managers to improve cooperation and team work.

There are informal relational networks completely separate from the company's organigramme, which company personnel operate between themselves irrespective of division, department or branch, in an effort to perform their separate tasks better, faster and with less (inter-departmental) friction. Studies show that managers are only vaguely aware of the existence of these relational networks and are therefore not in a position to use them to their advantage.

There are three types of informal business networks:

Advisory networks: These are for mutual expert advice and support.

Liaison networks: These bring company employees together to exchange data and support each other in crisis situations.

Communication networks: Company employees regularly exchange views on what they do, without going into too much depth.

An understanding of these networks makes it easier for managers and staff to work as effectively as possible - improving effectiveness being a key area of all management training. A temporarily active project team is clearly more likely to succeed if managers can also take into account the informal aspects of interpersonal relations amongst their employees.

The best way to encourage the informal networks within your department out into the open is to carry out a network analysis:

Ask your personnel to fill in a questionnaire. The questions that are in the questionnaire are aimed at three network types: who is speaking to whom about their work, who is helping whom or who is getting help from whom, who is advising whom or who is receiving advice from whom?

Balancing out the answers. Both sides must tally. If A admits that he is talking to B, but B does not say the same about A, the statement is not conclusive and cannot therefore be used in your analysis.

Process the information and sketch out the networks in your mind's eye. When looking at the pictures of the informal networks in your mind's eye, a few particular things will hit you. These may not be good or bad signs, but just a few indications for you. Here are two examples:

Communicative isolation/closed group. Members of an organisational unit speak only to each other and have hardly any or no contact with people outside that unit. They form an island, thereby taking the risk of alienating themselves from the rest of the company. On the other hand, they work closely together without friction.

Communication hole. The members of an organisational unit communicate predominantly with people outside the unit, but rarely with those inside. Thereby, team spirit is reduced to a bare minimum. A lack of co-operation of this magnitude is often the result of a serious problem and leads to the formation of factions.

What advantages can you gain from carrying out a study like this?

External advantages: You can assess your observations from the customer's point of view. This way you will be able to detect the staff who, completely independently of their official place within the company hierarchy, act as a 'brake' and those who act as a 'lubricant' in client relations.

Internal advantages: You may be able to discover something about the level of co-operation between the various departments, such as the internal and external sales departments or between sales and production.

It is easier to assess the results of a personnel reshuffle. If you take away the "central person" of an informal advisory network because you want to put his specialist knowledge to use in a particular working group, in some instances the performance of a previously completely unobtrusive group may collapse.

Beware of a trap! A member of staff who apparently has poor communication skills, but who takes care of important customers on his own as a result of his experience of the company as a whole, is irreplaceable - even if their networking skills seem rather thin on the ground.

One of the common themes on management training courses is to improve communication. Your network analysis will provide valuable data to help you decide on appropriate actions to improve communication and information flow.

Richard Stone is a Director for Spearhead Training Limited that runs management training programmes aimed at improving business performance.