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As I dove into the world of remote + hybrid work statistics, I set out to find data to support my theory that innovation was going to suffer with the lack of in-person human connection. It’s one of those things that intuitively, you know it to be true. But when presenting to a company’s C-suite, I needed more than just my gut feeling to back me up.
Insert MIT. They conducted a study that analyzed the emails of nearly 3,000 MIT researchers and staff both pre and post pandemic. In late March 2020 they saw an abrupt decline in communication between different research units they classify as “weak ties”. What are weak ties? Those are the relationships at work in which you have limited interaction. They are probably in different departments, working on projects that you might never see. As opposed to strong ties, who you interact with regularly, such as people in your department or on your project team.
Over 18 months, MIT estimated a cumulative loss of more than 5,100 new weak ties.
So why does a decline in weak ties matter? The idea that weak ties are conducive to innovation comes from decades old research. The basic argument is that if you’re having the same types of conversations with the same types of people, you get more of the same. Talking to people outside of your circle sparks different conversations which result in new ideas. These serendipitous connections don’t happen working remotely, but they happen all the time when you’re in the office.
I recently read this Financial Times article that gives probably the best example of how serendipitous connections can foster innovation.
“Like many breakthroughs in scientific discovery, the one that spurred an artificial intelligence revolution came from a moment of serendipity.
In early 2017, two Google research scientists, Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, were in a hallway of the search giant’s Mountain View campus, discussing a new idea for how to improve machine translation, the AI technology behind Google Translate.”
The article goes on to say that during their hallway chat they were overheard by a veteran research scientist who helped build the “Did You Mean?” spellcheck function for Google Search, and he was eager to jump-in and help.
“…The idea formed organically as we worked and collaborated in the office. Google’s colorful open-plan working environment, complete with campus bicycles, proved fruitful. I recall Jakob [Uszkoreit] cycling up to my desk and scribbling a picture of a model on a whiteboard behind me and gathering the thoughts of everyone within earshot.”
What was the result of their collaboration in 2017? An architecture for processing language known as “transformer”, which underpins the most cutting-edge applications of AI in development. It’s embedded in Google Search and Translate, and powers the language model behind ChatGPT. I’d say that’s a pretty productive hallway stop and chat.
And what about those MIT weak ties? As researchers began returning to campus in July 2021, weak ties began to increase, and they created a model that predicted a complete return to work would result in a “complete recovery of weak ties”. Something for organizations to consider when they’re struggling with the idea of formalizing a return-to-work policy. While every business is unique and needs a workplace strategy that makes sense for them, I do think human connection sparks innovation and having agreements cross-departmentally on things like anchor-days in the office can make a huge positive impact and drive your business forward.
Need help formulating your workplace strategy? Contact Sarah
MIT News https://news.mit.edu/2022/remote-work-may-innovation-0901
Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/37bb01af-ee46-4483-982f-ef3921436a50
