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Despite some high-profile pushback against hybrid work, with many companies eager to fully return their workforces to the office, hybrid work remains the preferred working style of a majority of knowledge workers worldwide. It is the work style for the majority of U.S. knowledge workers. Although there are many benefits to a hybrid work environment, one drawback is that it can reduce social ties and connections between employees. Companies and employees at all levels recognize the importance of maintaining strong relationships with their teammates. However, we also need to support weak ties, those casual connections we feel with colleagues who are not part of our teams or immediate social circle. Weak ties bring benefits to the workplace that are often underappreciated. To maximize those benefits, its vital to understand why weak ties matter, some risks that hybrid work presents, and what team leaders and organizations can do to overcome those risks. Why Weak Ties Matter In 1973, a paper by sociologist Mark Granovetter found that strong ties, although essential for trust and emotional support, are less effective in obtaining new information. Weak ties are what provide us with new ideas and new opportunities. While weak ties are more likely to lead to a new job, it is how they drive creativity and innovation, through exposure to those new ideas, that matters most to companies. Duke University sociologist Martin Ruef found that groups with networks made up of both strong and weak ties innovated at three times the rate of networks with only strong ties. The diverse perspectives we gain from interacting with colleagues from different functions, teams, or levels of seniority through weak ties expose us to new ideas, approaches, and knowledge. Everyone benefits from this, as knowledge and information are shared across organizational boundaries and silos get broken. The organization can develop a culture of transparency, inclusivity, and new opportunities. Knock-on effects can include career development, friendships, and increased workplace satisfaction. By encouraging employees to cultivate weak ties, organizations can create an environment that fosters creativity and unlocks untapped innovative potential. How Hybrid Work Can Diminish Weak Ties During the COVID-19 pandemic and the height of the work-from-home era, many employees reported a greater sense of connection to their workplace and colleagues. Employee engagement levels and feelings of belonging improved during the pandemic, as companies and team leaders made a more intentional effort to reach out to their teams and let them know they were not alone. Strong ties improved during the pandemic. However, as 2021 research by MIT on 61,000 Microsoft employees found, this greater connection to our strong ties came at the expense of our weak ties. The MIT study concluded that lower levels of innovation and longer project completion times resulted from focusing more on strong ties, with a 25% decrease in time spent collaborating with weak ties. Our weak ties suffered, and with that, so did levels of innovation. We worked more strongly with our usual teammates, which led to fewer interactions with our weak ties. With hybrid work, we should have more opportunities to meet with our weak ties and encounter them more frequently for those watercooler conversations and chance meetings that might lead to increased innovation in the workplace. But does this happen? To justify the in-office part of hybrid work, many teams rightly choose to prioritize that in-office time around the kind of work that is well-suited to being physically together, such as team-building, socializing, brainstorming, or ideating. Structuring back-to-work days around the team is the right approach, but this overemphasis on strong ties can reduce the diversity of views and creativity that comes from weak ties. How To Nurture Weak Ties For hybrid work to effectively leverage the benefits of weak ties and boost innovation, we must be more intentional about structuring in-office days to focus on building and maintaining these connections. Here are five steps that individuals, team leaders, and organizations can take. 1. Make Time to Socialize with Weak TiesLook at your go-to crowd for lunch, coffee break, or after-work get-togethers. Do they represent weak or strong ties? If weak ties are underrepresented, spend more time with them, rather than your usual lunch and coffee friends. Reach out to weak ties in your division or department, or from another group, especially if they represent different functions. If you work in sales, engage more with those weak ties in HR, for example. The more diverse, the greater the possibility of learning and innovation. And dont just limit this to people in the same company. Most of us can only maintain strong connections with between 150 and 300 people, so your LinkedIn network, which is likely a larger number than this, is mainly comprised of weak ties. Use LinkedIn to reach out and socialize with those weak ties. 2. Encourage and Enable Employees to Connect with Weak Ties If you are a team leader, leave time in peoples schedules to meet with others outside your team on those days when everyone is in the office. Or, go one better and build weak tie connection time into the calendar. Make this a dedicated time when everyone arranges a catch-up or 30-minute call with someone outside the team. Have the team report back on what they learned so everyone can benefit from those weak tie meetups. This eliminates the randomness of chance meetings or impromptu water cooler conversations, which are often used to justify returning to the office. Intentionally build time and opportunities for such encounters rather than leave them to chance. 3. Involve Weak Tie Connections In Brainstorming When doing in-person brainstorming or ideation, invite people from outside the team who represent weak ties, especially those from a different department or who may otherwise bring new perspectives. They could represent the view of the customer or end-user, but they dont need to be experts, as their fresh point of view triggers new ideas that matter. They can be briefed on the basics of the problem you are trying to solve. Bringing in the perspective of weak ties, who may have different ideas that are not immediately apparent to team members working on the problem every day, can help surface assumptions that are not apparent to the team. It can prevent the teams discussions from falling prey to groupthink. 4. Implement Mentorship and Buddy Programs for New Hires One group of workers who often struggle with remote or hybrid work is new employees who need to integrate into the company culture and form connections. Look to mentorship and buddy programs to connect new hires with experienced colleagues outside their team or department. Matching new hires with such weak ties can not only help better integrate them into the organization but also expose them to new ideas and form new networks of weak ties that can evolve into valuable professional relationships. If you practice reverse mentoring, experienced senior employees can also benefit from the insights gained from new hires, with whom they would not typically interact. 5. Create More Cross-Functional Teams to Work on Projects Cross-functional teamsthose comprised of members from different departments and job functionsare inherently more creative and innovative due to the diverse perspectives they bring to problem-solving. They are also, by their nature, collections of individuals with weak ties to one another. I experienced this regularly in the project teams I led for over a decade at a multinational firm. The project teams, composed of global HR colleaguesmy functionwere quite creative, but those comprising colleagues from HR and other functions, such as sales, marketing, communications, and ESG, were far and away the most innovative and came up with the freshest ideas. When building project teams, dont just rely on the usual suspects. Reach out to other functions to recruit members and build project teams made up of weak ties. Such a teams output will represent a more holistic view of the company, enhance problem-solving capabilities, and lead to new working relationships and connections that last beyond the project’s life. With hybrid working style becoming the default for many of us, organizations must encourage employees to leverage the power of weak ties. By doing so, companies can better leverage the innovative potential of their workforce and position themselves for success in the era of hybrid work.
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E-Commerce
Hello again, and thanks for reading Fast Companys Plugged In. When you think about it, training AI to use the web might be the single most impactful way to expand its power. So much of what we do todayfrom buying products of all kinds to managing every aspect of our personal datawe do online. If a piece of software could handle that work at least as well as a human, it could be a far more essential assistant than any existing AI tool. Web savvy is key to the tech industrys current yen to make AI more agenticthat is, capable of performing multistep processes on our behalf with some degree of autonomy. A flurry of recent news reflects this trend. On July 9, for example, Perplexity launched Comet, a web browser with a built-in AI agent, available mostly to users of the companys $200/month plan. A week later, OpenAI began rolling out a new ChatGPT agent called . . . Agent. Microsoft is adding a Copilot mode to its Edge browser that it says will soon be able to perform tasks such as making reservations; Opera is previewing Opera Neon, its own browser with built-in agentic AI. Ive been playing with OpenAIs Agent, which showed up in my ChatGPT Plus account earlier this week. The companys blog post on the feature raises expectations by describing it as already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks. So far, however, my experiences with it have not provided any moments of awe and wonder. Instead, Ive been left wondering if the era of offloading all kinds of web work to an LLM is further off than I thought. Tech companies have already trained AI to do some astonishing things, such as achieve gold-medal-level performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad. But Agent often came off like a clueless internet newbie banging its head against a medium conspiring to foil it. In its own odd way, watching Agent at work is fascinating. When you give it a promptas with AI of all types, the more detail you provide, the betterit opens a web browser on a remote OpenAI computer. Then it displays the web pages its accessing right inside your chat and explains every step its taking in absurd detail, down to which buttons it chooses to click. Its like peering into the features brain, and underscores the infinite number of tiny, almost subconscious decisions we make when using the web. [Screenshot: Harry McCracken/ChatGPT] More often than not, though, Agents responses to my requests werent worth the wait. It took 13 minutes to rummage through Google Flights for San Francisco-New York flight options, and the list it gave me was missing the itinerary I probably would have chosen. When I asked it to compile a list of the necessary ingredients to bake authentic German lebkuchen, it combined ones from two different recipes without any apparent logic. I fed it the description for a job opening here at Fast Company and asked it to find candidates; it suggested some, but with out-of-date information on their current employers. After a certain point, I wondered whether the projects I was throwing Agents way were poor tests of its talents. So I tried several tasks ChatGPT suggests when you initiate an Agent session. Many of them, it whiffed. Agent could not log into my Wall Street Journal account to prepare a report on the sites coverage of rare earth materials, or verify my phone number to schedule an Uber pickup. While adding banana cream pie ingredients to an Instacart order, it plugged in a random delivery address and didnt seem to offer any way for me to correct it. A summary of Axioss recent articles on AI worked better, except it didnt include anything from the past two weeks. (Agent was often confused about the current date, informing me at various points that it was July 15 or July 16 when it was actually July 30.) Because Agent discloses what its doing so thoroughly, its possible to hazard some guesses about why the results arent better. First of all, it was frequently bogged down by what it concluded were errors on its part or website malfunctionsIt seems the previous click didnt work as expectedthough it wasnt always clear whether anything had in fact gone wrong. Secondly, the internet as we know it is designed for the convenience of humans, not to facilitate AI agents. Indeed, many sites (including, ahem, FastCompany.com) block automated browsing of the sort Agent performs. In my experience, this blocking was a persistent obstacle to Agent, which kept encountering Are you human? tests. Unfazed, it tried increasingly ambitious work-arounds, such as translating a Fast Company story that had been translated into Spanish back into English. But that turned theoretically simple projects into slogs, almost always with diminishing returns. Lastly, theres the question of privacy and security. Agent is designed to let you type login information for your accounts into its remote browser, though it didnt always work for me. Many folks might be disinclined to even try it, given that it involves handing your passwords over and trusting OpenAI to use them responsibly. In the interest of researching this newsletter, I signed into my Gmail account and asked Agent to compile a few reports on the messages therein. Correctly identifying it as a sensitive situation, Agent insisted I monitor its work and paused it whenever I tabbed awaynegating any time I might have saved by not performing the job myself. Access to the users personal data is essential to Agent realizing even a fraction of its potential, since the better it knows us, the moe sophisticated its help can get. For example, I try to book an aisle seat when flying alone but grab myself a middle seat if my wife is along for the flighta habit a truly clever AI might be able to divine from my travel history without me explicitly stating it. But OpenAI hasnt yet given the feature anything resembling an uncanny ability to understand such needs and desires. For now, Agent often turned out to be a slower way to achieve a goal than existing web tools that are mature and predictable. I was heartened when I asked Agent to find the lowest price on a particular Casio music keyboard: It found it on eBay and added it to my shopping cart. Except that a Google search returned the same eBay listing as its first link. And clicking the Add to cart button oneself does not exactly amount to heavy lifting. The thing is, we already have tools designed to give software, such as an agent, efficient access to other software. Theyre called APIs, and instead of expecting an app to puzzle its way through browsing the web, typing into forms, and clicking forms, they let it transmit requests and retrieve results as streams of raw data. APIs only support processes that the host software has chosen to make available rather than the theoretically open-ended capabilities of an agent. But they do it quickly, easily, and without requiring the user’s attention. Agent does support an existing API-based ChatGPT feature called Connectors, but this, too, was flaky in my experiments. When I issued a Gmail-related request, it didnt point out that there was a Gmail connector but I hadnt installed it. Instead, it had me log into my account and supervise its browsing. Another time, I tried a task involving OneDrive and Agent suggested, fuzzily, that there might be a relevant connector. (There is.) Im not discounting the possibility that Agent, or someone elses agentic web-browsing AI, will get radically better in manifestly obvious ways. Some degree of improvement is inevitable. Yet the tool, in its current state, is another reminder of how far the industrys lofty proclamations have raced ahead of actual progress. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Metas Mark Zuckerberg, and others have lately said that their goal is superintelligenceAI thats better than humans at everything. Using a web browser hardly ranks among the worlds most intellectually taxing activities. But until AI masters it, superintelligence will be a talking point, not a reality. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company How Google is working with Hollywood to bring AI to filmmakingMira Lane, who runs Google’s Envisioning Studio, talks about how artists are embracing tools like Google’s Flow for preproduction, previsualization, and prototyping. Read More Exclusive: Reality Defender expands deepfake detection access to independent developersThe cybersecurity company has launched a public API and a free tier that allows up to 50 detections per month. Read More ‘The overall vibe was total chaos’: Tesla Diner goes viral for long waits and mixed reviewsElon Musk’s retro-futuristic restaurant is blowing up online as TikTokers share their experiences.Read More The Trump administration might overhaul the U.S. patent systemThe Commerce Department is considering charging patent holders between 1% and 5% of their overall patent value. Read More Software nearly ate the world. Now builders and designers are taking it backWhat’s behind the New Industrials movementand why it matters Read More Starbucks was a pioneer of the mobile-first shop. Now its getting rid of themStarbucks is sunsetting its mobile-order and pick-up-only store format as part of a strategy to elevate its café experience. Read More
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E-Commerce
Imagine if Congress had a clear-eyed guide to the technological upheavals shaping our lives. A team of in-house experts who could have flagged the risks of generative AI before ChatGPT went public, raised alarms about deepfakes before they flooded social media, and assessed the vulnerabilities in U.S. infrastructure before ransomware shut down pipelines. For a time, Congress had exactly that, in the form of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). But lawmakers shuttered it 30 years ago, and were still feeling its absence today. Created in 1972, the Office of Technology Assessment gave Congress something it almost never has: a reliable way to understand the science and technologies reshaping the world. The offices reports didnt tell lawmakers what to do. Instead, they laid out the risks and the benefits (so cleanly that members on opposite sides of an issue could wave the same report to make their case). The OTA was overseen by a 12member board, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with equal representation from the House and the Senate. In just over two decades, it produced over 750 studies, on everything from Alzheimers to automation. It was an impartial repository of interdisciplinary experts who would proactively assist Congress in understanding emerging technology, says University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, and to do so at a time early enough in its life cycle that it had not become full of special interests that had not grown around it, like barnacles. But not everyone was pleased with OTAs body of work. In 1980, Washington Times reporter Donald Lambro published Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes, arguing that the agency often focused on issues championed by Senator Ted Kennedy and other liberals. In his view, OTAs studies were duplicative, frequently shoddy, not altogether objective, and often ignored. (Lambros criticisms were, ironically enough, arguably quite partisan: True, OTA sometimes revisited issues already studied by other agencies, but a 1977 Government Accountability Office (GAO) review noted that OTA’s output made “significant contributions in areas of concern to Congress.”) That sentiment carried into the Reagan era. OTAs sharply critical assessments of President Ronald Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Pitched at the height of the Cold War as a revolutionary system of space and groundbased weapons capable of intercepting Soviet missiles in flight, SDI struck supporters as a technological moonshot. OTAs assessment was a splash of cold water: the office warned that the programs staggering cost and ambitious scope offered little assurance it could actually shield the nation from a Soviet attack. Those findings triggered intense political backlash, including from the Heritage Foundation, which in 1984 accused OTA of letting politics override objectivity, claiming that at least one division had prioritized discrediting SDI over providing balanced analysis. The report also argued that flaws in the study and the release of sensitive information were unlikely to be the result of simple mistakes or misunderstanding, concluding: The evidence that some OTA staffers oppose the Administrations Strategic Defense Initiative seems clear and compelling. (Several subsequent independent reviews echoed OTAs assessment of SDI.) The controversy continued when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used the SDI dispute to condemn the agency outright. OTA has been obsessed with proving that President Reagans strategic defense initiative is both wrongheaded and dangerous, Helms said in 1988. The political pressure only intensified as the partisan tides shifted. During the 1994 midterm elections, Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich vowed that if Republicans took control of Congress, the Office of Technology Assessment would be on the chopping block. Once his party indeed did sweep into power, Gingrich (now ascended into the role of House Speaker) made good on that promise: In 1995, with a staff of about 140 and an annual budget of roughly $21 million (a rounding error in terms of congressional budgets, Calo says), OTA was quickly defunded, effectively shuttering the office. The move drew swift criticism even from within Gingrichs own party. New York congressman Amo Houghton, for example, lamented, We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology. Shuttering OTA solved a partisan problem in 1995, but it left Congress flying blind on science and technology, a gap it has never truly closed. There have been a number of attempts to resurrect OTA, but none have succeeded. House Democrats have floated funding proposals, including a 20192020 effort to allocate $6million to restart the office but these measures died in the Senate. In the meantime, Congress has tried to fill the OTA-sized hole with alternatives like the Government Accountability Offices Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) unit. But while this setup offers some basic technical support, critics argue it lacks OTAs mission-driven focus and deep multidisciplinary expertise, and thus produces far fewer insights than its bureaucratic forebear. They do not have anything like the capacity that the OTA had, says the University of Washington’s Calo. The stakes of that void are becoming increasingly clear. Take, as an example, large language models: An office like OTA could have assessed the risks, outlined guardrails, and prepared Congress before the tools reached the public. Without that kind of early guidance, lawmakers are left reacting after the fact, often leaning on industry lobbyists or outside experts. In the absence of OTA, theres, regrettably, been quite a bit of soft capture by the tech sector, says Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former Justice Department scienceand technology advisor. And its easy to make the oh, you silly Congress, if only you understood the technology, you’d realize the error of your ways type argument when Congress lacks the technology expertise to respond.” Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at Harvard University, argues that the most damning consequence wasnt just the loss of OTA itselfit was what the closure signaled about Congress. It was an early example of ideology trying to shut down facts, he says. And what were left with, he argues, is a tech policy landscape that is shaped largely by lobbyists. Which is not good, he adds, because it comes with an agenda.
Category:
E-Commerce
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