Expanding Networks & Improving Productivity
It has long been understood that social isolation at any stage of life can cause severe mental impacts (Coyle et al, 2012), but in a growing age of perceived and actualized expectations of communication and innovation, company employees are becoming less able to preform in monotonous and intellectually isolating environments. Michigan State University realized their findings this week on the benefits of purposely expanding and altering the networks of employees—confirming the long-held view that diversity in information produces better results.
To correlate these findings to network theory, a company can be perceived as a large collection of components, but unfortunately, these components are often not linked together directly, only through an upper-level manager/supervisor. For example, a marketing segment of a company might report their findings to the head of marketing, who may then report to the president of company; only after all of this has happened, would this information then lead down the food chain to the head of engineering, and then the engineering team, and finally, the product would be in production. The findings of this paper was that, moving workers who under preform in their component, often leads to great improvements of work quality.
This change can be correlated to the construction of local bridges with companies, and furthermore, the diversity of thought within components. When creating these bridges companies have the opportunity to create much longer and better connected social/work networks, which intern—as well as changing underperforming employees’ tasks and allowing then to follow new passions—gives underperforming employees a secondary obligation to the workplace, facilitating communication between vastly different components in a company.