While these kinds of designed interactions may at first feel less organic than bumping into someone in the hallway, they have far greater potential to generate progress and are also less likely to result in the groupthink that occurs when chance encounters are largely limited to overlapping social circles. Many companies are also taking advantage of applications like Donut or Gatheround, tools that help distributed teams connect, bond and build ties across the organization. For example, Harvard Business School professor Raj Choudhury has demonstrated the power of virtual watercoolers-structured get togethers among senior leaders and interns-in increasing job performance and retention. What does work? Bringing intention to interaction and proactively structuring connections across levels, functions, geographies, and teams-often with the help of digital tools. In fact, offices have become less conducive to these kinds of relationships over time: one study found that the shift to open-floor-plan offices has resulted in a 70% decrease in face-to-face interactions. If the goal is to strengthen “weak ties” at work, just bringing people back to offices isn’t the answer. Second, high turnover combined with loading the work on remaining employees is a likely culprit for why workers have spent less time investing in these relationships over the last two years: it’s the workload, not location. But before jumping to conclusions, consider the broader context: first, the pandemic itself understandably impacted where people put their time and energy-on things like family needs and self-care, not the quarterly coffee chat with a colleague from another department. But as Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein notes, “there’s almost no data whatsoever” that chance meetings in the office hallway or breakroom generate greater creativity and innovation.įor about one-third of people in our research, weak ties have atrophied during the pandemic.
There have been serious concerns raised about the loss of “ weak ties” at work during the pandemic, and the creative sparks that they theoretically generate, often rooted in antiquated studies. Academic researchers including Stanford’s Brian Lowery have suggested this is because flexibility provides the opportunity to step back from the constant code-switching and microaggressions of full-time office work. What’s more, over the last two years of flexible work, the data show that sense of belonging has risen considerably for underrepresented groups-especially Black and Hispanic/Latino workers-while remaining relatively flat for their white colleagues.
However, our Future Forum Pulse, a quarterly survey of over 10,000 desk workers, shows that sense of belonging is now higher for hybrid-and fully remote-workers than for those working full-time in the office. When executives describe their desire to bring people back to the office, they usually mean getting back to pre-pandemic standards and rituals-often telling me that their goal is reigniting a “sense of belonging” at work to stem the tide of attrition. Corporate culture is typically defined by the attitudes and values that shape the behavior of an organization.
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