Visualizing Internal Mobility with Sankey Charts and Diagrams

Illustration of a person analyzing data using Sankey charts and other visual tools to understand internal mobility trends.

Visualizing Internal Mobility with Sankey Charts and Diagrams

Internal mobility has become a critical component of modern talent strategy. It assists organizations in optimizing their workforce, retaining top performers, and ensuring that key roles are filled with the right people.

In our last post, we covered what internal mobility is and the top 6 reasons to implement it into your workforce strategy. Today, we dive deeper into how you can visualize internal mobility data with Sankey charts and diagrams in Crunchr.

These powerful tools provide a detailed view of talent flow within an organization, such as employee transitions between roles, career professions, or relocations. Let’s get into it.

The Power of Data Visualization: An Introduction to Sankey Diagrams

Sankey diagrams are highly effective for visualizing employee movement because they illustrate flows between categories—departments, locations, job grades, or business units. The width of the lines in a Sankey chart reflects the volume of movement, giving HR professionals an intuitive way to spot trends and anomalies at a glance.

Understanding how employees move through the organization is critical for HR professionals who oversee internal mobility. Sankey diagrams help track transitions across various dimensions—functions, regions, business units, or even salary grades—while allowing us to filter and even dig deeper into specific data points.

For example, take a look at the visualization below, which shows how employees move between different functional areas in an organization over a specific time period. ⬇️

Sankey diagram depicting transitions from the Operations department to other functional areas, including Aviation, Customer Services, and Engineering, between October 2023 and September 2024
This Sankey diagram visually represents over 1,000 employee movements, making it easier to understand where talent is flowing—and where it’s not.

Crunchr’s Mobility Chart: Switching Between Visualizations

One of the unique features of Crunchr’s platform is the flexibility of its mobility chart. In Crunchr, you can switch between the visually impactful Sankey diagram and a more detailed table view with the click of a button.

This feature provides multiple ways to analyze movement patterns quickly and effectively. Whether you prefer the broad overview provided by the diagram or the granular detail shown in a table, this flexibility is crucial for managing internal mobility data.

A quick switch to the table can help spot patterns or anomalies in the data, and then a return to the Sankey diagram can visualize these trends.

Five Key Use Cases for Sankey Diagrams in Crunchr

Here are five specific use cases demonstrating how HR professionals can confidently utilize Crunchr’s Sankey diagrams to unlock valuable insights into internal mobility:

1 – Spotting Anomalies in Mobility Data

One of the most powerful features of Sankey charts is their ability to highlight anomalies. For instance, if an employee is promoted from grade 5 to grade 15—a jump akin to going from an associate to senior vice president—this is probably something worth investigating.

Tracking movement across grades, functions, or regions can identify irregularities in promotions, salary grades, or relocations. For example, the diagram could reveal a low-performance individual moving between continents, prompting you to question the costs and reasoning behind this decision.

Matrix view in Crunchr showing employee movements by position grade, including hires and internal transitions across grades, for spotting anomalies in workforce data from November 2023 to October 2024
The matrix view in Crunchr allows you to toggle between the Sankey Chart and a more detailed table to easily spot anomalies.

2 – Doing More with Less: Filling Tomorrow’s Roles with Internal Talent

These days, external hiring is often limited, meaning organizations often look inward to fill critical roles. Even in companies without formalized skills data, Crunchr’s Sankey diagrams can reveal internal trends indicating whether talent is already transitioning into roles crucial for future growth.

To put this into perspective, let’s say you notice that a significant number of employees have already moved from sales to marketing or from finance to HR. You might have a robust internal talent pool that could fill upcoming vacancies. By clicking on a specific flow within the diagram, you can see who made these transitions and reach out to them for insight into their career trajectory.

Watch the video below to see this process in action. 🎥

This insight helps HR teams build internal pipelines, reducing the reliance on external hiring.

3 -Tracking Leadership Development: The “3×3×3 Rule”

Sankey diagrams also provide HR teams with an easy way to track employees’ leadership potential.

By visualizing how top performers move across different roles, departments, or regions, you can assess whether someone excels only in one area or shows versatility across various domains.

The “3×3×3 Rule” is an excellent model of this: a leader who thrives across three functions, three regions, or three business units demonstrates leadership potential that transcends specific job types. For instance, an employee might excel in sales, but how do they perform in finance or operations? They may be a star in Europe, but how do they adapt when working in South America, where management styles and market dynamics differ?

Sankey diagrams help track this development and can reveal patterns of success that might not otherwise be visible through traditional reporting methods like Excel or PowerPoint.

4 – Identifying Talent Providers vs. Talent Consumers

Some leaders or departments are known for being “talent providers,” consistently developing and producing top-tier employees who move on to take larger roles elsewhere in the organization. Others, however, may be “talent consumers,” benefiting from this movement but not contributing to talent development within their own teams.

Crunchr’s Sankey diagrams make it easy to visualize these flows, helping HR teams identify which leaders or departments are investing in talent development and which are simply absorbing top talent. By examining these trends, you can create more balanced talent pipelines and ensure that leadership actively supports internal mobility.

5 – Providing Career Advice to Employees

Finally, Crunchr’s Sankey diagrams are invaluable tools for HR business partners when providing career advice to employees.

For instance, if a flight attendant in grade 10 wants to transition to a new role within the company but doesn’t want to fly anymore, HR can use the Sankey diagram to visualize past career moves and suggest viable options. By filtering for specific transitions, HR can guide employees based on actual historical data, helping them navigate potential career paths.

Sankey diagram in Crunchr showing over 2,900 employee movements across global regions between October 2023 and September 2024
This visualization highlights over 2,900 employee movements between regions, providing a clear overview of global mobility patterns

How Crunchr’s Sankey Diagrams Work: Step-by-Step Guide

Crunchr’s Sankey diagram generator is built for HR professionals looking to visualize and easily explore internal mobility trends. Here’s how it works:

  1. Import your data from HRIS systems directly into Crunchr, ensuring real-time accuracy.
  2. Select the categories you want to track, such as departments, locations, or job grades.
  3. Customize the view by adjusting flow thickness and color to reflect the movement volume across different categories.
  4. Drill down into specific flows by hovering over lines to view details, such as the number of employees moving from one department to another.
  5. Switch between table and diagram views to suit the analysis needs of your team or leadership.
  6. Export or share the data for easy collaboration with other stakeholders.

How Do Crunchr Sankey Diagrams Help Visualize Internal Mobility?

The Sankey diagrams in Crunchr stand out for their HR-specific focus and ease of use:

  • Tailored for HR professionals: Crunchr’s Sankey diagram generator is specifically designed to manage the complexity of workforce data. It integrates seamlessly with HRIS systems and allows HR leaders to filter and customize the visualizations based on their organization’s unique needs.
  • Flexible visualization options: With the ability to toggle between a detailed table view and the interactive Sankey diagram, Crunchr gives you the flexibility to analyze data from multiple angles.
  • Integrated insights: Crunchr’s Sankey diagrams are part of a larger analytics suite that provides a 360-degree view of workforce data, making it easier for HR teams to turn visual insights into action.

Using Sankey Diagrams to Improve Internal Mobility Strategies

Crunchr’s Sankey diagrams offer more than data visualization—they provide deeper insights into talent movement within your organization.

Whether you’re spotting anomalies, tracking leadership development, or providing clear career paths for employees, Crunchr’s Sankey diagrams offer the transparency and flexibility HR teams need to make informed decisions.

Ready to see how Crunchr can help you visualize internal mobility? 💬 Chat with us today. And if you missed the first post in our internal mobility series, check it out here to learn more about the foundations of internal mobility.