Bridges of innovation: weak ties in the workplace
In our transition back to fully in-person classes, there seems to be improvements in the quality and quantity of our social interactions. Sitting in lecture, we are able to build new connections with classmates instead of staring at screens with hundreds of unfamiliar names. Gathering together in a meeting room, we are able to devise detailed project plans on a whiteboard instead of sending countless back and forth messages. Beyond the classroom, the differences between working in-person and remotely within the workplace has also been explored.
In a study of email patterns during the pandemic, MIT researchers examined the impact of remote work on social connections by analyzing their staff email network. Their main finding was the reduction of weak ties after the shift to working remotely, specifically between different research units. They noticed a steep drop of 38% in weak ties at the beginning of the pandemic and around 5100 new weak ties lost in the following year and a half. However, this decline in weak ties was not permanent as their studies note that, with the gradual return to office, the number of weak ties has also rebounded and is modeled to be able to recover completely.
In this study, weak ties are defined as “any connection between two people who had no mutual contact in the email network.” Our class discussions present these ties as local bridges and their importance lies in allowing for the movement of new information. This perfectly aligns with the study’s evaluation of these weak ties as critical to innovation, which makes sense as the culmination of multiple disciplines is often the formula for breakthroughs. In alignment with this, Mark Granovetter is quoted in the article: “Individuals with many weak ties are, by my arguments, best placed to diffuse such a difficult innovation.”
As an extension of this article, we can also evaluate the formation of triadic closures, specifically framing it under the terms of proximity as the study mentions it as a key reason for the decline in weak ties. In our discussion of triadic closures we listed three primary reasons for their occurrence: opportunity, incentive, and similarity. In the case of working remotely, it seems that while the reasons of incentive and similarity are more or less the same, the opportunity axis declines quite significantly. The lack of physical proximity during the pandemic and resorting to communicating online reduces the opportunity for people to meet and form triadic closures. Another thing to note is that, with the passage of time, the networks of individuals also became more stagnant and homogenous according to the study, which is interesting since we’ve discussed this as reason for the forming of ties, but the preservation of ties is presented to be attributed to similarity as well here.
All in all, we see that weak ties are essential in the workplace especially for the fostering of new ideas, but their formation and maintenance was largely hindered by working remotely. While not everything is back to pre-Covid times, moving back in person, we now have the opportunity and the proximity to build valuable ties and expand not only our network but our knowledge.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/2022/remote-work-may-innovation-0901