Maintain your weak ties from the home office too!
About a year ago, the pandemic meant you suddenly found yourself working from home. Via Teams or Zoom you stayed in touch with your immediate colleagues. Ideal for getting work done and checking in with colleagues whenever you need to, you would think.
But what happened in practice? Your calendar fills up with meetings booked back to back, each handled as efficiently as possible. As a result there is barely any time to work something out, let alone to reflect. And the most striking thing of all: the only people you really speak to are the small group of immediate colleagues you happen to be running a project with.
Loose contacts
On an average day we speak to somewhere between 11 and 16 loose contacts (Sandstrom, 2020). Think of that one colleague at the coffee machine, or an acquaintance you bump into on the train to work and have a quick chat with. Working from home has all but made these contacts disappear. That has an impact on our sense of happiness and belonging (Sandstrom, 2020). But you also miss out on information, both personally and professionally relevant.
Why do those loose contacts matter so much?
Those loose contacts may well be more important than you would think at first glance. In 1973 the renowned sociologist Mark Granovetter published research emphasising the importance of so-called ‘weak ties’. Where our ‘strong ties’ connect us with often overlapping groups or networks, weak ties connect us with a larger and more diverse group of people.
At work this means that, through weak ties, you also come into contact with people who think differently and who challenge you to look at problems in another way. They also give you the chance to pick up new ideas, discover things and apply them in your own work.
Because we no longer have those loose contacts, we miss the chance to stumble upon a clever idea, to find a solution to a problem, or simply to hear that one piece of news from a colleague, that she is getting married! These are the very things that, according to Sandstrom’s research, matter for our sense of happiness and connection.
A note on ‘weak ties’: the term weak ties turns out to be remarkably hard to translate into Dutch. On the one hand ‘ties’ refers to contacts or connections. On the other, ‘weak’ sits somewhere between loose and feeble. Neither quite captures it, which is why this blog keeps the original term ‘weak ties’.
Is a bell starting to ring?
Who is that one colleague you used to run into at the coffee machine, but may not actually have spoken to in a year?
Working online from home brings many benefits, but it has its pitfalls too, and this is one of them. Happily, there is something you can do about it: read the tips below. Start small and close to home, within your team or department. But above all, do not forget to look further afield, across your organisation or beyond, and seize the opportunities to learn from and with one another! And if you do cautiously head back to the office, use the time you have to wait for your computer to update to strike up a conversation with the colleagues further down the building.
Tips
- Be active on (professional) social networks. Log in to LinkedIn or your internal network platform a little more often. Make sure you do not just ‘consume’, but actively leave a comment or post something yourself.
- Run projects together with other colleagues. Work out which colleagues in your team you have less contact with. Who are the weak ties in your team? Then arrange to collaborate with them on a project too.
- An online coffee moment. Another way to reconnect with the weak ties in your team is to organise the occasional online coffee moment. Better still: call someone up out of the blue just to ask how they are.
- Be a little less efficient now and then. During your daily stand-up or a one-to-one, take a moment to talk about something other than work (or Covid).
- Start an online community with colleagues in a similar role. Where your social network can be one big sandpit, it helps to stay in touch within a smaller setting as a community. Set up a Teams page for colleagues in a comparable role.
Literature
- Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, Volume 78, Issue 6.
- Sandstrom, G., Whillans, A. (2020). Why You Miss Those Casual Friends So Much. Harvard Business Review.
This blog first appeared on tulser.nl.