The Benefits of Building Weak Ties At Work
This article takes on an interesting approach as to why it could actually be more beneficial to build weak ties rather than strong ties in the workplace. Oftentimes, we overlook the importance of weak ties and focus more on strong ties because the idea of having a valuable relationship over just another acquaintance is more appealing and favorable to humans naturally. However, when thinking about how weak ties affect the work environment, we’re actually able to notice the creation of more ideas, increased productivity, and access to more information, which ultimately results in employees efficiently getting work done.
While reading this article, I immediately thought of my internship this past summer and the many roadblocks I encountered along the way, which could have been handled more efficiently had I formed more weak ties with other employees instead of focusing on forming strong ties with the people on my team. Because I worked at a bank, it was given that there would be many security measures and protocols due to the sensitive information circulating the company. As a result, some of the many roadblocks I experienced were things like getting access to certain applications/databases, having a dev. environment set up, etc. Reflecting back on these issues, I often had to set up meetings or hop on calls with employees outside of my team to communicate the problems I was experiencing because only certain teams had the ability and power to offer solutions. Tying this back to the role of weak ties in a work environment, the experience I just explained is proof that having weak ties with other employees, or in my case other people from a variety of teams, could be extremely beneficial and allow for increased productivity instead of spending time on roadblocks that could be solved quickly and less painfully.
Relating this resource with what we covered in class, we can compare this article to the section outlining the strength of weak ties. Specifically, in class we were told about a study that involved asking participants, “How did you get your job?” The answer, unsurprisingly, was through personal contact. However, what was surprising was that the personal contact was more often through an “acquaintance” (weak tie) rather than a “close friend” (strong tie). Illustrating this idea in a social network, we can reason that if a person A has strong ties to a group of people, then they would most likely be exposed to similar things. However, if person A were to form a local bridge with person B, which would be classified as a weak tie, then A could potentially be exposed to different information and opinions that otherwise would not have necessarily been possible if that weak tie hadn’t been formed. Applying this idea back to the resource, we are able to see similarities in that access to more information and ideas in the workplace also proves to be beneficial in that a more productive work environment is the result, which is possible through increased weak ties.