Short answer: To calculate the ROI of organizational network analysis (ONA), add up the yearly dollar value of the changes your company made because of what ONA showed, subtract the yearly cost of the program, and divide the result by that cost. In the 1,000-employee example below, first-year ROI is about 140% in a conservative case and about 655% in a base case. Those figures come from assumptions listed in this guide, not from customer results, so replace them with your own numbers.
Finance teams ask one question about network analysis: will it pay for itself? It is a fair question, and it is harder to answer than it looks. ONA shows how work and information move between people. It does not save money by itself. The savings come from what leaders do after they see the data, such as changing a meeting habit, giving backup to a person the team leans on too much, or helping a new hire meet the right people sooner.
That is why this guide does not promise one ROI figure. It gives you a formula, a list of costs to count, the benefits that are worth measuring, and a worked example for a 1,000-person company with every assumption shown. You can also download the ONA ROI calculator spreadsheet and put in your own numbers.
One note on fairness. Worklytics sells ONA software, so we have a stake in this topic. To keep the guide useful, the example uses public list prices, the benefit numbers are placeholders you should replace, and a later section covers the limits of the method.
Organizational network analysis is a method for studying how people in a company communicate and work together. Instead of relying on the org chart, it looks at real connections: who meets with whom, who messages whom, and who depends on whom. Researcher Rob Cross describes it as a way to measure and graph connections and patterns of collaboration between people within and across organizations.
The data comes from two places. Active ONA asks people directly, usually in a survey, who they go to for advice or trust. Passive ONA uses metadata from tools people already use, such as calendars, email, and chat. Worklytics uses the second approach: it connects to more than 25 work tools, uses metadata and not message content, and reports results at the team level. You can see how the two approaches compare in the best ONA tools guide.
Common results include how many people someone works closely with, how much time teams spend collaborating within their own group versus with other groups, who sits at the center of information flow, and how many collaborators have recently left. For more on the data behind these maps, see going beyond email in ONA.
Three things make the calculation tricky.
What the research does offer is evidence about where the opportunity sits. Rob Cross reports that in a typical network, 3% to 5% of people account for 20% to 35% of the collaborations that add value. In a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant wrote that the time managers and employees spend collaborating has ballooned by 50% or more over two decades. Cross also says better-managed networks can recover 18% to 24% of wasted collaborative effort. That last figure is the author's own estimate and the page does not say how it was measured, so treat it as context about the size of the opportunity, not as an input for your budget.
The math is the same as for any investment. Three numbers do most of the work:
For example, a program that costs $178,000 and produces $445,000 in benefits has an ROI of 150%, because ($445,000 minus $178,000) divided by $178,000 equals 1.5. The hard part is not the division. It is deciding what counts as a cost, what counts as a benefit, and how much of a benefit you can honestly credit to ONA. The next steps cover each.
List every cost, including the ones that do not appear on an invoice.
CostWhat it includesHow to estimate itSoftwareSubscription or licence fees.Get quotes. Worklytics publishes prices on its pricing page: Business starts at $2,500 per month for up to 200 users, then $10 per extra user per month. Enterprise is custom.Setup and reviewConnecting data sources, IT and security review, legal and privacy review, and works council talks where they apply.Hours of each team involved, multiplied by their hourly cost.Time to act on findingsManagers running team conversations, changing meeting rules, coaching, and adjusting onboarding.Managers involved, multiplied by hours per year, multiplied by hourly cost. This cost is easy to forget.Training and communicationTelling employees what is measured, why, and how it will be used.Hours to plan and deliver, plus any materials.Survey time (survey-based ONA only)Employee time to answer network surveys each round.Respondents, multiplied by minutes per survey, multiplied by rounds per year, multiplied by hourly cost.
Survey-based ONA often costs less in software but more in employee time, and it can capture things metadata cannot, such as who people trust or turn to for advice. Passive ONA usually has higher software costs, runs continuously, and cannot see conversations that happen in person or outside the connected tools. Many organizations combine both. The choice changes the cost line, not the formula.
If you are not ready to commit, you can start small. The Worklytics free plan covers up to 100 users with calendar data only and 30 days of history, and the free ONA tool lets you see a sample analysis first.
Choose two or three benefits where you can measure a before and after. These three can be turned into dollars with data most companies already have.
BenefitHow ONA helpsFormulaWhere the numbers come fromFewer resignationsShows teams where connections are thin or where people who work closely together are leaving, so managers can act early.Exits avoided x salary x replacement cost shareHR exit data. Gallup range for replacement cost.Less time lost to meetings and overloadShows which teams carry the heaviest meeting and collaboration load.Employees covered x hours recovered per week x working weeks x hourly cost x share that becomes outputCalendar and chat metadata, before and after.Faster onboardingShows how quickly new hires build a network of peers.New hires x weeks saved x weekly cost x share of a week's output lost while ramping upHR hire data. Collaborators by week for each new-hire group.
Replacing an employee is expensive. Gallup puts the cost at one-half to two times the employee's annual salary, depending on the role. Departures also tend to cluster. In a 2018 analysis of customer data, Worklytics found that direct peers of an employee who left were 2 to 3 times more likely to leave too. Network maps can show where those clusters are forming.
Count only the exits you can tie to an action. If your data flagged a team, a manager stepped in, and the people stayed, that counts. A drop in turnover you cannot connect to any action should not go in the benefit column. Manager support belongs here too. The post on manager effectiveness metrics explains what managers can track, including one-on-one frequency.
Some hidden productivity costs sit in the calendar. A person's day can be split into small pieces by meetings, email, and chat, leaving little time to think. ONA and calendar data show which teams and roles carry the heaviest load, and whether a few people are pulled into far more collaboration than others. Overload also shows up as long days and after-hours work, which the post on leading indicators of burnout covers.
To price this benefit, start from real hours, not a percentage taken from another company. Measure meeting hours per week before and after a change, multiply by the hourly cost of the people affected, and then apply a share that becomes useful work. Freed time does not turn fully into output, so be honest about that share. The meeting cost calculator and the post on how meeting insights reduce overload can help.
Worklytics tracks how quickly new hires build a network of peers as one sign of how well onboarding is going. The chart below comes from Worklytics customer data first published in April 2022. It shows the number of peers new hires had worked with by week in the company, before and after COVID. Reading the chart, new hires had roughly half as many peers by week 13 after COVID as before.
We did not find a public benchmark for how many weeks of ramp-up time ONA-guided onboarding saves. That is why the example uses a range of one to four weeks and why you should test it in a pilot, using peer counts by week for each new-hire group. See accelerating new hire onboarding with ONA.
These often matter most to leaders, but they are harder to turn into a single dollar figure. Include them as notes in your business case and add a dollar value only where you can prove one.
This step is where most ROI cases fall apart. A few habits keep the number honest:
The numbers below are placeholders for a made-up company. They are not results from any customer, and the benefit values are guesses you should replace. What matters is the method. You can rebuild this example in the ONA ROI calculator spreadsheet and change every input.
InputValueHow it is usedEmployees1,000Headcount in scopeAverage salary$96,000PlaceholderLoaded cost per employee$124,800Salary x 1.3 for benefits and overheadCost per working hour$60Loaded cost divided by 2,080 paid hoursCost per week$2,400Loaded cost divided by 52Working weeks per year46After holidays and time offVoluntary turnover14% (140 exits a year)PlaceholderNew hires per year150Placeholder
CostYear 1How we got itPlatform$126,000Worklytics Business plan list price: $2,500 + (800 extra users x $10) = $10,500 a month, times 12Setup, analysis, security and legal review$22,000One time. PlaceholderManager and analyst time to act on findings$30,000PlaceholderTotal, Year 1$178,000Later years cost $156,000 with no setup fee
ConservativeBaseOptimisticExits avoided3612Replacement cost as share of salary50%75%100%Value of fewer resignations$144,000$432,000$1,152,000Employees on teams that acted300500700Hours recovered per week, per person0.511.5Share that becomes useful work25%40%60%Value of time recovered$103,500$552,000$1,738,800Weeks of ramp-up saved per new hire124Value of faster onboarding (half a week's cost lost while ramping up)$180,000$360,000$720,000Total yearly benefits$427,500$1,344,000$3,610,800
ConservativeBaseOptimisticYear 1 cost$178,000$178,000$178,000Year 1 net benefit$249,500$1,166,000$3,432,800Year 1 ROI140%655%1,929%Payback (months)5.01.60.6
Read these results with care. The base case only works if managers act on the findings, if about half of the employees are on teams that change something, and if freed time turns into real output. If no team acts, the return is zero and the cost is still $178,000.
The better question is break-even. Using the base case inputs, the program covers its first-year cost if it helps avoid about 2.5 resignations, which is about 1.8% of the 140 exits in a year. Or, if you count no retention benefit at all, it covers its cost if each of the 500 people on teams that act recovers about 19 minutes a week. Those claims are far easier to test than a large ROI percentage.
Decide what you will measure before you start, then check it monthly. The table below shows metrics tied to each benefit and the name of each Worklytics metric in its public data dictionary. Pair them with numbers from your own HR and project systems, such as voluntary exits, time to fill, and cycle time for cross-team projects.
What to watchTied toWorklytics metric namePeople each person works closely with (2 or more hours a week)Onboarding, isolationcollaborators:strong_count_distinctDistinct collaborators over 4 or 12 weeksOnboardingcollaborators:count_distinct_4wk, collaborators:count_distinct_12wkShare of recent collaborators who left in the last 26 weeksRetention riskcollaborator_turnover_26wk_ratioHours in meetings per weekTime recoveredcalendar:events:hours:meetingsFocus time in blocks of 2 or more hours without meetings, email, or chatTime recoveredworklytics:hours:in:focus:blocks:v3_5:flowOne-on-one meetings with a managerManager support, retentioncalendar:manager1on1:countHours worked outside the established working hoursOverloadworklytics:weekdays:avg:timespan:hours:outside:workdayHow much information flows through a personKey-person riskgraph:betweenness:centrality:score
Report results the same way you built the forecast: use the same formula, replace each guess with a measured number, and show the conservative case next to the measured one. Review at 90 days and again at 12 months.
AudienceWhat they care aboutWhat to showFinanceCost, payback, and risk.Full cost, the conservative case, and the break-even point.HRRetention, onboarding, manager support, and employee trust.Exit clusters, new-hire peer counts, one-on-one data, and the privacy plan.Operations and business leadersTime, speed, and delivery.Meeting load, focus time, and cycle time for cross-team work.Legal, IT, and securityData use, access, and compliance.Which data sources are connected, what is and is not collected, and who sees results.
If employees see the program as monitoring, they may distrust the managers who use it, which works against every benefit above. Worklytics says it uses metadata and not message content, anonymizes or pseudonymizes data before analysis, and reports results at the team level. Whatever tool you choose, tell employees what is measured, why, and who sees the results. Laws differ by country and state. In the EU, GDPR expects a lawful reason and openness, and some countries require works council involvement. This is general information, not legal advice, so check with your legal team. For more, see 5 better alternatives to employee monitoring and key compliance laws for remote employee monitoring.
There is no reliable public benchmark. We searched for an independent study that reports a typical ROI for ONA programs and did not find one. Judge the case by your own inputs and by its break-even point. In the example in this guide, the program covers its first-year cost if it helps avoid about 2.5 resignations, which is a much easier claim to test than a percentage.
It depends on the vendor and the method. Worklytics publishes its prices: the Business plan starts at $2,500 per month for up to 200 users, plus $10 per extra user per month, and Enterprise pricing is custom. A free plan covers up to 100 users with calendar data only and 30 days of history. Survey-based ONA often costs less in software but more in employee time, because people have to answer the survey each round. Check current prices on the pricing page and ask other vendors for quotes.
Changes to meetings and workload can show up in a quarter. Retention and onboarding take longer, because you need enough resignations and new hires to compare. Plan for a baseline of four to eight weeks, then review at 90 days and again at 12 months using the same formula.
Yes, as a forecast. Use the calculator with conservative inputs and check the break-even point. Then run a small pilot on a few teams and replace the guesses with measured numbers. The Worklytics free plan and free ONA tool can support a small test.
Track the ones tied to the benefits you chose: voluntary exits and time to fill from HR data, meeting hours and focus time from calendar data, collaborators by week for new hires, and one-on-one frequency for manager support. Compare them with a baseline and, if you can, with teams that did not act on the findings.
It depends on the vendor. Worklytics says it analyzes metadata, such as who met or messaged whom and when, and not the content of messages. It anonymizes or pseudonymizes the data and reports results at the team level. Ask every vendor the same question, and tell employees what is measured before you start.
Start small. Download the ONA ROI calculator spreadsheet, run it with conservative inputs, and look at the break-even point first. If the case holds, pick two or three teams for a pilot and measure a baseline before you change anything.
If you want to see what a network analysis looks like on your own data, you can try the free ONA tool or read about Worklytics ONA software. Worklytics reads collaboration metadata. It does not tell you how good anyone's work is and it does not read message content, so pair it with your HR and project data when you build your business case.
