Despite some high-profile pushback against hybrid work, with many companies eager to fully return their workforces to the office, hybrid work remains the preferred working style of a majority of knowledge workers worldwide. It is the work style for the majority of U.S. knowledge workers.
Although there are many benefits to a hybrid work environment, one drawback is that it can reduce social ties and connections between employees. Companies and employees at all levels recognize the importance of maintaining strong relationships with their teammates. However, we also need to support “weak ties,” those casual connections we feel with colleagues who are not part of our teams or immediate social circle.
Weak ties bring benefits to the workplace that are often underappreciated. To maximize those benefits, it’s vital to understand why weak ties matter, some risks that hybrid work presents, and what team leaders and organizations can do to overcome those risks.
Why Weak Ties Matter
In 1973, a paper by sociologist Mark Granovetter found that strong ties, although essential for trust and emotional support, are less effective in obtaining new information. Weak ties are what provide us with new ideas and new opportunities.
While weak ties are more likely to lead to a new job, it is how they drive creativity and innovation, through exposure to those new ideas, that matters most to companies.
Duke University sociologist Martin Ruef found that groups with networks made up of both strong and weak ties innovated at three times the rate of networks with only strong ties. The diverse perspectives we gain from interacting with colleagues from different functions, teams, or levels of seniority through weak ties expose us to new ideas, approaches, and knowledge.
Everyone benefits from this, as knowledge and information are shared across organizational boundaries and silos get broken. The organization can develop a culture of transparency, inclusivity, and new opportunities. Knock-on effects can include career development, friendships, and increased workplace satisfaction.
By encouraging employees to cultivate weak ties, organizations can create an environment that fosters creativity and unlocks untapped innovative potential.
How Hybrid Work Can Diminish Weak Ties
During the COVID-19 pandemic and the height of the work-from-home era, many employees reported a greater sense of connection to their workplace and colleagues. Employee engagement levels and feelings of belonging improved during the pandemic, as companies and team leaders made a more intentional effort to reach out to their teams and let them know they were not alone.
Strong ties improved during the pandemic. However, as 2021 research by MIT on 61,000 Microsoft employees found, this greater connection to our strong ties came at the expense of our weak ties. The MIT study concluded that lower levels of innovation and longer project completion times resulted from focusing more on strong ties, with a 25% decrease in time spent collaborating with weak ties. Our weak ties suffered, and with that, so did levels of innovation. We worked more strongly with our usual teammates, which led to fewer interactions with our weak ties.
With hybrid work, we should have more opportunities to meet with our weak ties and encounter them more frequently for those watercooler conversations and chance meetings that might lead to increased innovation in the workplace. But does this happen?
To ”justify” the in-office part of hybrid work, many teams rightly choose to prioritize that in-office time around the kind of work that is well-suited to being physically together, such as team-building, socializing, brainstorming, or ideating.
Structuring back-to-work days around the team is the right approach, but this overemphasis on strong ties can reduce the diversity of views and creativity that comes from weak ties.
How To Nurture Weak Ties
For hybrid work to effectively leverage the benefits of weak ties and boost innovation, we must be more intentional about structuring in-office days to focus on building and maintaining these connections. Here are five steps that individuals, team leaders, and organizations can take.
1. Make Time to Socialize with Weak Ties
Look at your go-to crowd for lunch, coffee break, or after-work get-togethers. Do they represent weak or strong ties? If weak ties are underrepresented, spend more time with them, rather than your usual lunch and coffee friends. Reach out to weak ties in your division or department, or from another group, especially if they represent different functions. If you work in sales, engage more with those weak ties in HR, for example. The more diverse, the greater the possibility of learning and innovation.
And don’t just limit this to people in the same company. Most of us can only maintain strong connections with between 150 and 300 people, so your LinkedIn network, which is likely a larger number than this, is mainly comprised of weak ties. Use LinkedIn to reach out and socialize with those weak ties.
2. Encourage and Enable Employees to Connect with Weak Ties
If you are a team leader, leave time in people’s schedules to meet with others outside your team on those days when everyone is in the office. Or, go one better and build “weak tie connection time” into the calendar. Make this a dedicated time when everyone arranges a catch-up or 30-minute call with someone outside the team. Have the team report back on what they learned so everyone can benefit from those weak tie meetups.
This eliminates the randomness of chance meetings or impromptu water cooler conversations, which are often used to justify returning to the office. Intentionally build time and opportunities for such encounters rather than leave them to chance.
3. Involve Weak Tie Connections In Brainstorming
When doing in-person brainstorming or ideation, invite people from outside the team who represent weak ties, especially those from a different department or who may otherwise bring new perspectives. They could represent the view of the customer or end-user, but they don’t need to be experts, as their fresh point of view triggers new ideas that matter. They can be briefed on the basics of the problem you are trying to solve.
Bringing in the perspective of weak ties, who may have different ideas that are not immediately apparent to team members working on the problem every day, can help surface assumptions that are not apparent to the team. It can prevent the team’s discussions from falling prey to groupthink.
4. Implement Mentorship and Buddy Programs for New Hires
One group of workers who often struggle with remote or hybrid work is new employees who need to integrate into the company culture and form connections. Look to mentorship and buddy programs to connect new hires with experienced colleagues outside their team or department. Matching new hires with such weak ties can not only help better integrate them into the organization but also expose them to new ideas and form new networks of weak ties that can evolve into valuable professional relationships. If you practice reverse mentoring, experienced senior employees can also benefit from the insights gained from new hires, with whom they would not typically interact.
5. Create More Cross-Functional Teams to Work on Projects
Cross-functional teams—those comprised of members from different departments and job functions—are inherently more creative and innovative due to the diverse perspectives they bring to problem-solving. They are also, by their nature, collections of individuals with weak ties to one another. I experienced this regularly in the project teams I led for over a decade at a multinational firm. The project teams, composed of global HR colleagues—my function—were quite creative, but those comprising colleagues from HR and other functions, such as sales, marketing, communications, and ESG, were far and away the most innovative and came up with the freshest ideas.
When building project teams, don’t just rely on the usual suspects. Reach out to other functions to recruit members and build project teams made up of weak ties. Such a team’s output will represent a more holistic view of the company, enhance problem-solving capabilities, and lead to new working relationships and connections that last beyond the project’s life.
With hybrid working style becoming the default for many of us, organizations must encourage employees to leverage the power of weak ties. By doing so, companies can better leverage the innovative potential of their workforce and position themselves for success in the era of hybrid work.
