Regardless of some high-profile pushback towards hybrid work, with many firms keen to completely return their workforces to the workplace, hybrid work stays the popular working fashion of a majority of information employees worldwide. It’s the work fashion for almost all of U.S. information employees.
Though there are numerous advantages to a hybrid work surroundings, one disadvantage is that it will probably scale back social ties and connections between workers. Firms and workers in any respect ranges acknowledge the significance of sustaining sturdy relationships with their teammates. Nonetheless, we additionally have to assist “weak ties,” these informal connections we really feel with colleagues who are usually not a part of our groups or quick social circle.
Weak ties convey advantages to the office which might be usually underappreciated. To maximise these advantages, it’s important to know 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 sturdy ties, though important for belief and emotional assist, 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, by publicity to these new concepts, that issues most to firms.
Duke College sociologist Martin Ruef discovered that teams with networks made up of each sturdy and weak ties innovated at 3 times the speed of networks with solely sturdy ties. The various views we achieve from interacting with colleagues from totally different features, groups, or ranges of seniority by weak ties expose us to new concepts, approaches, and information.
Everybody advantages from this, as information and data 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 workers to domesticate weak ties, organizations can create an surroundings that fosters creativity and unlocks untapped revolutionary potential.
How Hybrid Work Can Diminish Weak Ties
Through the COVID-19 pandemic and the peak of the work-from-home period, many workers reported a better sense of connection to their office and colleagues. Worker engagement ranges and emotions of belonging improved through 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 through the pandemic. Nonetheless, as 2021 analysis by MIT on 61,000 Microsoft workers discovered, this better connection to our sturdy ties got here on the expense of our weak ties. The MIT research concluded that decrease ranges of innovation and longer venture completion instances resulted from focusing extra on sturdy 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 ceaselessly 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 type of work that’s well-suited to being bodily collectively, akin to team-building, socializing, brainstorming, or ideating.
Structuring back-to-work days across the staff is the appropriate method, however this overemphasis on sturdy ties can scale back the variety 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 increase innovation, we should be extra intentional about structuring in-office days to deal with constructing and sustaining these connections. Listed below 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 symbolize weak or sturdy ties? If weak ties are underrepresented, spend extra time with them, quite than your common lunch and occasional mates. Attain out to weak ties in your division or division, or from one other group, particularly in the event that they symbolize totally different features. Should you work in gross sales, have interaction extra with these weak ties in HR, for instance. The extra various, the better the opportunity of studying and innovation.
And don’t simply restrict this to folks in the identical firm. Most of us can solely keep sturdy connections with between 150 and 300 folks, so your LinkedIn community, which is probably going a bigger quantity than this, is principally comprised of weak ties. Use LinkedIn to achieve out and socialize with these weak ties.
2. Encourage and Allow Workers to Join with Weak Ties
If you’re a staff chief, go away 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 probability conferences 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 go away them to probability.
3. Contain Weak Tie Connections In Brainstorming
When doing in-person brainstorming or ideation, invite folks from exterior the staff who symbolize weak ties, particularly these from a distinct division or who might in any other case convey new views. They might symbolize the view of the shopper or end-user, however they don’t have to be specialists, as their recent standpoint triggers new concepts that matter. They are often briefed on the fundamentals of the issue you are attempting to resolve.
Bringing within the perspective of weak ties, who might have totally different concepts that aren’t instantly obvious to staff members engaged on the issue on daily basis, can assist floor assumptions that aren’t obvious to the staff. It may well forestall the staff’s discussions from falling prey to groupthink.
4. Implement Mentorship and Buddy Packages for New Hires
One personnel who usually battle with distant or hybrid work is new workers who have to combine into the corporate tradition and kind connections. Look to mentorship and buddy applications to attach new hires with skilled colleagues exterior their staff or division. Matching new hires with such weak ties can’t solely assist higher combine them into the group but in addition expose them to new concepts and kind new networks of weak ties that may evolve into useful skilled relationships. Should you apply reverse mentoring, skilled senior workers may also profit from the insights gained from new hires, with whom they’d 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 features—are inherently extra inventive and revolutionary as a result of various views they bring about 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 venture groups I led for over a decade at a multinational agency. The venture groups, composed of world HR colleagues—my operate—had been fairly inventive, however these comprising colleagues from HR and different features, akin to gross sales, advertising and marketing, communications, and ESG, had been far and away essentially the most revolutionary and got here up with the freshest concepts.
When constructing venture groups, don’t simply depend on the standard suspects. Attain out to different features to recruit members and construct venture groups made up of weak ties. Such a staff’s output will symbolize a extra holistic view of the corporate, improve problem-solving capabilities, and result in new working relationships and connections that final past the venture’s life.
With hybrid working fashion turning into the default for many people, organizations should encourage workers to leverage the facility of weak ties. By doing so, firms can higher leverage the revolutionary potential of their workforce and place themselves for fulfillment within the period of hybrid work.
