Regardless of some high-profile pushback in opposition to hybrid work, with many firms keen to totally return their workforces to the workplace, hybrid work stays the preferred working style of a majority of knowledge workers worldwide. It’s the work type for the majority of U.S. knowledge workers.
Though there are various advantages to a hybrid work atmosphere, one disadvantage is that it might scale back social ties and connections between staff. Firms and staff in any respect ranges acknowledge the significance of sustaining robust relationships with their teammates. Nevertheless, we additionally must help “weak ties,” these informal connections we really feel with colleagues who are usually not a part of our groups or instant social circle.
Weak ties deliver advantages to the office which can be typically underappreciated. To maximise these advantages, it’s important to grasp why weak ties matter, some dangers that hybrid work presents, and what staff leaders and organizations can do to beat these dangers.
Why Weak Ties Matter
In 1973, a paper by sociologist Mark Granovetter discovered that robust ties, though important for belief and emotional help, are much less efficient in acquiring new data. Weak ties are what present us with new concepts and new alternatives.
Whereas weak ties usually tend to result in a brand new job, it’s how they drive creativity and innovation, via publicity to these new concepts, that issues most to firms.
Duke College sociologist Martin Ruef discovered that teams with networks made up of both strong and weak ties innovated at three times the rate of networks with only strong ties. The various views we achieve from interacting with colleagues from totally different capabilities, groups, or ranges of seniority via weak ties expose us to new concepts, approaches, and data.
Everybody advantages from this, as data and knowledge are shared throughout organizational boundaries and silos get damaged. The group can develop a tradition of transparency, inclusivity, and new alternatives. Knock-on results can embrace profession improvement, friendships, and elevated office satisfaction.
By encouraging staff to domesticate weak ties, organizations can create an atmosphere that fosters creativity and unlocks untapped progressive potential.
How Hybrid Work Can Diminish Weak Ties
Through the COVID-19 pandemic and the peak of the work-from-home period, many employees reported a greater sense of connection to their office and colleagues. Worker engagement ranges and emotions of belonging improved throughout the pandemic, as firms and staff leaders made a extra intentional effort to achieve out to their groups and allow them to know they weren’t alone.
Sturdy ties improved throughout the pandemic. Nevertheless, as 2021 research by MIT on 61,000 Microsoft employees discovered, this better connection to our robust ties got here on the expense of our weak ties. The MIT examine concluded that decrease ranges of innovation and longer challenge completion occasions resulted from focusing extra on robust ties, with a 25% lower in time spent collaborating with weak ties. Our weak ties suffered, and with that, so did ranges of innovation. We labored extra strongly with our common teammates, which led to fewer interactions with our weak ties.
With hybrid work, we should always have extra alternatives to fulfill with our weak ties and encounter them extra incessantly for these watercooler conversations and probability conferences that may result in elevated innovation within the office. However does this occur?
To ”justify” the in-office a part of hybrid work, many groups rightly select to prioritize that in-office time across the sort of work that’s well-suited to being bodily collectively, corresponding to team-building, socializing, brainstorming, or ideating.
Structuring back-to-work days across the staff is the correct method, however this overemphasis on robust ties can scale back the range of views and creativity that comes from weak ties.
How To Nurture Weak Ties
For hybrid work to successfully leverage the advantages of weak ties and enhance innovation, we have to be extra intentional about structuring in-office days to give attention to constructing and sustaining these connections. Listed here are 5 steps that people, staff leaders, and organizations can take.
1. Make Time to Socialize with Weak Ties
Take a look at your go-to crowd for lunch, espresso break, or after-work get-togethers. Do they signify weak or robust ties? If weak ties are underrepresented, spend extra time with them, quite than your common lunch and occasional buddies. Attain out to weak ties in your division or division, or from one other group, particularly in the event that they signify totally different capabilities. If you happen to work in gross sales, interact extra with these weak ties in HR, for instance. The extra numerous, the better the potential of studying and innovation.
And don’t simply restrict this to folks in the identical firm. Most of us can solely maintain strong connections with between 150 and 300 people, so your LinkedIn community, which is probably going a bigger quantity than this, is especially comprised of weak ties. Use LinkedIn to achieve out and socialize with these weak ties.
2. Encourage and Allow Staff to Join with Weak Ties
In case you are a staff chief, depart time in folks’s schedules to fulfill with others exterior your staff on these days when everyone seems to be within the workplace. Or, go one higher and construct “weak tie connection time” into the calendar. Make this a devoted time when everybody arranges a catch-up or 30-minute name with somebody exterior the staff. Have the staff report again on what they discovered so everybody can profit from these weak tie meetups.
This eliminates the randomness of chance meetings or impromptu water cooler conversations, which are sometimes used to justify returning to the workplace. Deliberately construct time and alternatives for such encounters quite than depart them to probability.
3. Contain Weak Tie Connections In Brainstorming
When doing in-person brainstorming or ideation, invite folks from exterior the staff who signify weak ties, particularly these from a unique division or who could in any other case deliver new views. They might signify the view of the client or end-user, however they don’t have to be specialists, as their recent perspective triggers new concepts that matter. They are often briefed on the fundamentals of the issue you are attempting to unravel.
Bringing within the perspective of weak ties, who could have totally different concepts that aren’t instantly obvious to staff members engaged on the issue daily, will help floor assumptions that aren’t obvious to the staff. It could possibly prevent the team’s discussions from falling prey to groupthink.
4. Implement Mentorship and Buddy Applications for New Hires
One body of workers who typically battle with distant or hybrid work is new staff who must combine into the corporate tradition and kind connections. Look to mentorship and buddy programs to attach new hires with skilled colleagues exterior their staff or division. Matching new hires with such weak ties cannot solely assist higher combine them into the group but additionally expose them to new concepts and kind new networks of weak ties that may evolve into useful skilled relationships. If you happen to apply reverse mentoring, skilled senior staff may also profit from the insights gained from new hires, with whom they might not usually work together.
5. Create Extra Cross-Useful Groups to Work on Initiatives
Cross-functional groups—these comprised of members from totally different departments and job capabilities—are inherently extra artistic and progressive as a result of numerous views they carry to problem-solving. They’re additionally, by their nature, collections of people with weak ties to at least one one other. I skilled this often within the challenge groups I led for over a decade at a multinational agency. The challenge groups, composed of world HR colleagues—my perform—had been fairly artistic, however those comprising colleagues from HR and other functions, corresponding to gross sales, marketing, communications, and ESG, had been far and away probably the most progressive and got here up with the freshest concepts.
When constructing challenge groups, don’t simply depend on the same old suspects. Attain out to different capabilities to recruit members and construct challenge groups made up of weak ties. Such a staff’s output will signify a extra holistic view of the corporate, improve problem-solving capabilities, and result in new working relationships and connections that final past the challenge’s life.
With hybrid working type turning into the default for many people, organizations should encourage staff to leverage the facility of weak ties. By doing so, firms can higher leverage the progressive potential of their workforce and place themselves for achievement within the period of hybrid work.
