Remote work naturally leads to more communication with people you collaborate with regularly. There are less opportunities for chance encounters—the proverbial water cooler conversations. However, these weak ties are important for innovation—work informed by a diverse set of perspectives is more creative.
Read When Chance Encounters at the Water Cooler Are Most Useful.
Read the paper The Strength of Weak Ties.
Links to this note
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Removal of a Weak Tie Does More Damage to Diffusion Than a Strong Tie
The removal of the average weak tie does more damage than the removal of the average strong tie when it comes to diffusion of information in a social network. Often the shortest and only connection between different nodes in social network are weak ties.
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Remote Teams Need to Be More Deliberate About Everything
When the primary means of collaboration is asynchronous (as is the case of remote work), the rules and norms of a remote team need to be more deliberate. Social time for the team to bond and have impromptu conversations need to be scheduled since they don’t happen spontaneously with people in the same office (e.g. tea time). Chance encounters need to be intentional (e.g. random coffee chat pairing). Even working hours and setting norms for when people work can be necessary.
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Firm-Wide Remote Work Caused Microsoft Employees to Spend Less Time With Weak Ties
A study that analyzed anonymized employee-level (email, calendar, etc.) found that the sudden shift from the office to remote work resulted in a silo’ing effect—employees spent more time with strong ties and less time with weak ties from December 2019 to June 2020.
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Remote Teams Are Less Likely to Integrate Knowledge of Their Members
A recent analysis of 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications found that distributed teams are less likely to have a breakthrough discovery than their on-site counterparts. They found that collaboration for remote teams was more likely to happen at later stages where technical tasks are more discreet rather than earlier during the ideation stage. The authors believe that this means remote teams fail to benefit from the shared knowledge of the team and therefore have less new, disruptive ideas.
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Working in Person Matters at the Beginning of a Project
A study of a global manufacturing firm found that scientists and engineers who often walked by one another in the office were significantly more likely to end up collaborating at the beginning of projects.