Overcoming the Neighborhood Effect
Enhancing the Breadth and Depth of Hybrid Work
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Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have experienced a significant erosion in the social fabric of organizations. As highlighted in previous articles, our bridging connections immediately deteriorated nearly 30% during the first few months of remote work. These connections are critical in facilitating across-group exchanges and bringing in a breadth of new ideas and insights.
They are also essential to the scaling of new solutions and the diffusion of resources across organizations. Conversely, on the positive side, we initially experienced an increase in our bonding connections. These are the connections that reside within a given group and are not only critical to daily execution, but are also necessary to solve deeper, more complex challenges. Unfortunately, as remote work continued, these connections also deteriorated more than 25% from their peak.
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More recently, both bridging and bonding connections appear to have stabilized. Figure 1. demonstrates this erosion in one large technology organization, and while the magnitude of these changes may vary across organizations, this is the typical pattern we have seen across industries and institutions.
Figure 1. Erosion of Social Connections
Breadth and Depth of Hybrid Work
The effect of this erosion has been a fragmentation in organizational network structures. Many organizations have shifted from robust interaction networks that span across functions, departments and geographies, toward distinct clusters of activity focused on local needs. We have become socially disconnected neighborhoods that are more dependent on a limited set of local interactions, and are increasingly more detached from the broader organization.
Microsoft’s research supports the neighborhood effect, by highlighting that only 58% of hybrid workers say they have thriving relationships with their direct team. This number then decreases even more with bridge connections, where only 48% say they have thriving relationships outside of their team.
These bridge connections are essential in the creation of innovation and future growth. Sociologist Ron Burt says our bridge connections provide three specific competitive advantages to organizations. They provide us with wider access to diverse information, early access to new ideas, and they help us control the diffusion of these insights, each of which is vital to generating innovation. As bridge connections erode, we limit our breadth of work, placing future growth at risk.
On the other hand, a complex challenge, requires a more novel response. These problems require deep analysis and unfortunately, there is no clear right answer, nor is there a single straight line to a solution. Instead, discourse, debate, and experimentation are needed.
In fact, complex challenges require a much more iterative strategy, whereby a trial-and-error approach is employed to find a resolution. Effective solutions will therefore begin to emerge only from debate and experimentation, and will then need to be examined retrospectively. Without strong bonding connections, such depth of work is in jeopardy.
Compounding the social erosion challenge is the dissonance between leaders and employees. While 48% of employees say they want to spend more time connecting with others, only 30% of leaders believe that networking related activities drive business impact. The logical conclusion of this phenomenon then is that the majority of leaders seem to be choosing to focus on near-term execution-based activities over the longer-term challenges of innovation and complex problem solving.
All this speaks to the following dilemma. The neighborhood effect has limited our ability to work broadly and dive deeply in a hybrid context, and it has placed both innovation and complex problem solving at risk. Fortunately, if we look deeper, solutions to overcome this effect might already be in existence.
Positive Deviance for Neighborhood Effect
Positive deviance (PD) is based on the observation that within social systems, there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon practices result in better solutions than their peers. Indeed, when evaluating the neighborhood effect across organizations, we have discovered a few positive deviance cases. In just under 5% of the cases, we have found that select functions and departments have not only held off the erosion of connections to overcome the neighborhood effect, but have also increased connectivity. Figure 2. shows a highly connected network of 642 people working in a large solution’s function two years into the pandemic. Not only did the function maintain its bridging capacity, but it actually increased bonding density as well. Unlike the more typical illustration exemplified above, this solution’s function improved its overall connectivity by 6% from the beginning of the pandemic, while mostly working virtually.
Figure 2. Large Solutions Organization Two Years into Pandemic
As we evaluated this case, we quickly discovered that the primary difference in this organization were the 92 people (red nodes in the center) who had formal responsibilities for managing the integration of solution’s activities. More specifically, there were three teams made up of 48 program managers, 24 business development people, and 20 innovators. Combined, these three groups were able to help maintain, and even enhance, the social fabric of the solution’s function. As we dove deeper, we discovered similar patterns. More specifically, we identified at least four core patterns from these deviance cases that enhanced the capacity for the breadth and depth of hybrid work.
Build Formal Bridging Mechanisms
In the case above, the solution’s group was super intentional about building out and leveraging the formal bridging mechanisms. They built three functional groups dedicated to ensuring discovery and integration: The Innovation, Business Development, and Program Manager Teams.
The innovation team helped to ensure the ongoing flow of new ideas across the broader function, and even within a hybrid context, they connected with and challenged the sub-functional groups to think about future progress. The result was a set of active bridging relationships to facilitate the flow of both novel and diverse ideas. In addition, the business development and program manager teams were able to routinely combine and align existing assets into reconfigured solutions to quickly solve emerging customer issues.
In each of the positive deviance cases, groups were strategic in building out these types of formal bridging mechanisms. These groups established the formal structures and methods necessary to reinforce the collaborative practices across the organization to actively facilitate idea sharing, cross-group coordination and alignment. They also balanced short-term needs, such as resolving active customer issues with longer-term possibilities.
Engage Key Bridging People
A more informal approach is to connect with a few primary bridging people across the organization. Bridging people do not necessarily have the most connections, but they do provide the greatest access to information. By virtue of their relationships across groups, they have a strong feel for politics, social dynamics, and the resources and expertise across an organization. As a result, they are critical integrators when called upon and can be indispensable in facilitating idea generation and alignment. Indeed, if a team is connected to just a few bridge people, they can gain the competitive advantage.
Realignment of Collaborative Demands
Those that were successful in maintaining social connections also frequently realigned collaborative responsibilities within their teams. Our research with Connected Commons has found that in a typical network, 3% to 5% of individuals account for 20% to 35% of the value-added relationships. This holds true in a hybrid working environment. It is also true that on average we are working one hour longer each day. This increase has a disproportionate impact on the most collaborative individuals as they tend to be connected more broadly.
The most successful groups ensured that individuals did not become overloaded with collaborative demands. They leveraged various collaboration analysis techniques to review social burdens at the individual level and they then routinely distributed these demands in a more equitable manner.
READ: Hybrid Work: Getting Leaders to Stay Connected with Teams
Activate the Social Equity of Leaders
Generally speaking, leaders represent nearly 50% of an organization’s bridging connections. However, since working remotely, these leaders have lost nearly three times the number of bridge connections as that of an average employee, thus significantly contributing to the neighborhood effect.
Teams that have been successful in navigating the connection challenges have found ways to more fully leverage their leader’s existing social equity. It is easier to activate a dormant connection than it is to build new ones. In successful teams, leaders therefore played a critical role in helping to recreate connections that had gotten lost during remote work.
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The best leaders invested in relational development. At times they personally reconnected themselves to reestablish bridging connections. While at others, they leveraged their previous connections to enable others to engage. In the latter case, for example, if an employee had a need, they would send an invitation email to a dormant bridge connection with a request to connect with that employee, thus removing themselves from the interaction.
As new hybrid working models emerge, understanding the implications of the neighborhood effect will continue to be essential. Social fragmentation will challenge both the breadth and depth of work. As a result, it is imperative that we discover whatever we can from the few positive deviance cases that exist. The future of work depends on it.
