Weak ties create bridges that allow new information to pass between groups, and they’re vital to a company’s success.
The shift to remote and hybrid work has strengthened many employees’ connections to their immediate team members. Daily video calls will do that. But weak social ties — those relationships with colleagues outside our close circle — have suffered.
Weak ties create bridges that allow new information to pass between groups, and they’re vital to a company’s culture and success. Fortunately, you already have the key to repairing the ties that have weakened over the last few years: the workplace.
A sense of community is one of our core needs as humans, and it’s a critical consideration when developing a cohesive and productive workforce.
Within our communities, we develop two types of social ties: strong and weak.
Based on the name alone, it’s easy to assume that strong ties are better and more important than weaker ones, but that isn’t the case. They’re both needed to establish a sense of community, and weak ties are in jeopardy as more companies move to hybrid and remote models.
Sociologist Mark S. Granovetter identified the importance of weak ties in his article “The Strength of Weak Ties.” He explains that weak ties, or micro-interactions, are tied to macro-level patterns and that their importance centers on the flow of novel information.
Translated to the workplace, this means that the weak ties between acquaintance-level colleagues create opportunities for new knowledge to pass between teams. Strong ties like those between team members can create echo chambers and silos that eliminate the novel information and fresh perspectives required for innovation and company growth.
The macro-level patterns that develop within a company that has an imbalance of strong and weak ties can take many forms. A lack of weak social relationships can:
A healthy balance of strong and weak social ties makes it easier to avoid those issues and focus more energy on business outcomes. Let’s look at an example:
A product development team is struggling to solve a user experience issue. Despite multiple brainstorming sessions, no one has any new ideas about how to fix it. One of the developers runs into a weak-tie colleague while getting coffee and mentions what a nightmare this UX issue is.
As they chat, the colleague provides several possible solutions that the product team hadn't thought of, and the developer brings those back to the team. It invigorates their efforts and creates a path to success.
In a company with underdeveloped weak ties, those two colleagues don’t interact beyond a friendly hello. The developer misses the opportunity to tap into a unique, external perspective that could have given the product team a turnkey solution.
Weak ties are based on infrequent social interactions, so it doesn’t take much to strengthen them. Incorporate some of the tips below into your workplace policies, and weak ties will begin improving almost immediately.
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