Intentionality Trumps Proximity: Focusing on Connectivity in a Mostly Remote/Hybrid World of Work

With opinions aplenty and data severely lacking, we won’t fully understand the efficacy of remote work and the the impact on productivity, innovation, and culture for some time.???

But there is research suggesting remote work works just fine, and that when it comes to collaboration in a mostly hybrid world of work, intentionality far outweighs proximity in importance. Our research at i4cp early on showed that high-performance organizations (HPOs) did not see lower productivity, less innovation, or weakened cultures from the shift to remote work.?Many primarily remote companies found pathways to success before the pandemic, and in a post-pandemic world more and more companies are learning how to do this as well.

In trying to make sense of this with my Connected Commons colleagues, we have hypothesized based on data from multiple i4cp and Connected Commons studies that in fact, HPOs have avoided the potential downsides of remote work by managing collaboration and workforce connectivity more intentionally and systematically than their low performing peers.?An even smaller subset of the market has gone so far as to make workforce connectivity central and explicit in talent strategy.

I was inspired last week by one such example when listening to GitLab's Chief People Officer?Wendy Barnes at the?i4cp 2023 Next Practices Now Conference. Gitlab is one of the largest all-remote companies and has been fully remote since it's inception. Intentionality about connectivity is woven through their culture and values as detailed here.

The Importance of Network Diversity

Connected Commons’ research over 30 years and across over 300 companies has shown that when it comes to professional networks, quality is far more important than quantity.?

Compared to their peers, high performing individuals tend to have more structurally diverse networks that span functions, tenure bands, professional levels, and geography as well as gender, race, ethnicity, and other more traditional measures of diversity.?The research is incredibly consistent in showing a link between structurally diverse networks and many positive personal and organization outcomes (i.e., performance, innovation, retention, culture, engagement, and even personal well-being.)

Within the social network science research community, there is also this idea of bridging vs. bonding ties.?Bridging ties are the connections we have with people outside of our immediate teams, and are the lifeblood of the structurally diverse networks we know are so important.?Initially, the massive shift to remote work in most organizations led to a marked decrease in bridging ties, as we leaned into the “bonding ties” within our teams and other immediate circles.

Some of my colleagues are concerned about the long-term impact of the loss of these cross-functional, cross-geography, cross-team ties, given their role in organizational agility and innovation.?My colleague and friend Michael Arena for example, proposes that leaders employ an adaptive hybrid model of work that leverages proximity at the right times, proactively convening people in the office for specific parts of the innovation cycle/process. ?This is sound guidance for managers thinking about when to gather in person and for what purpose, but as a mostly remote employee of a geographically distributed HR thinktank, I can’t help but think the bigger opportunity for organizations lies in proactively managing connectivity in a virtual context.?There are many ways this can take shape, but here are a few examples of simple, practical approaches organizations and leaders can take.

Three Ways Companies Can Take Action

1.????Promote Individual Intentionality:? Convening groups for social events (i.e. throwing a party) is not enough if you want to help people build productive and sustainable networks – it just leaves too much to chance.?First and foremost, we need to empower employees to be more intentional about their collaborative networks by sharing information with them.?

In one of HBR’s top 10 must-read articles of the year, How to Succeed Quickly in a New Role, my colleagues share six very practical ways employees new to role can go about strategically building their connectivity, to decrease their time to productivity, increase the likelihood they’ll succeed in the long term, and avoid common de-railing “network traps”.?The practices are based on extensive ongoing research we’ve conducted on what we call “fast-movers” – people that are able to replicate the connectivity of a high performer exceptionally fast.

Similarly, my friend, and founder of the Connected Commons, Rob Cross, has written extensively on the topic of collaboration overload.?Given the universality of the overload experience in the workforce, this is another easy onramp to these ideas.

Exposing people to this important research via articles or presentations is a start, and if you really want to empower your employees to take charge of their networks, you can provide them with access to personal network assessments or the social agility studios we’ve developed so they can compare their network and collaborative practices to those of the high performers we’ve studied.?

The assessments generate individualized recommendations and action plans employees can own and manage on their own, and the studios enable a more comprehensive, asynchronous or semi-synchronous development experience for interested participants by combining video tutorials with self-assessment to facilitate autonomous and personalized development.?

2.????Develop Leader Intentionality:? One i4cp study revealed that leaders at high-performance organizations are 8x more likely to help their people build productive networks. Leaders can do this by focusing on employee connectivity in the context of performance management and considering how an employee’s network might be helping or hindering their success, and by brokering direct connections between and across teams to create more cross-functional bridging ties.?Leaders can read about the research, but can also be taught how to do this more effectively, and supported by existing HRBP or OD staff.?

?Another way leaders, especially leaders of leaders, can facilitate the development of bridging ties across teams, is to leverage alternative meeting structures.?The conventional structures for meetings (i.e. presentations, status reports, brainstorms, managed/open discussions) won’t enrich the network in the way that so called “Liberating Structures” can. ?

Accessible to the public at no cost, Liberating Structures?are a selection of 33 alternative ways of facilitating meetings and conversations, curated by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless.?While some of these structures are known and used by organizational development professionals and professional facilitators, very few leaders have ever heard of them.?They can be easily adopted for virtual settings, and companies can leverage existing leadership development practitioners to teach leaders to use these structures and be more thoughtful about connectivity without spending a dime.

I should add here that leaders don’t have to be defined in the traditional way in terms of role-based authority.?In fact one of the most strategic ways to develop leader intentionality is exemplified by global pharma giant Roche.?

Roche has a vision to disrupt the healthcare ecosystem, in part by becoming a more agile, networked organization.?After conducting an organizational network analysis with over 18,000 employees across 80+ countries, they identified 800 influencers in the network and invited them to take our Connected Leaders virtual course.?This was not to help them become more effective but instead to bring the research-based practices they’d already adopted into conscious awareness so they could teach others. ?

Senior Global Network Catalyst Hemerson Paes in Basel, describes in this interview how they then went about forming their Collaborative Network Capability community of mentors globally. This work is also detailed in "Enabling Effective Collaboration Across Boundaries".

3.????Take System Level Actions:? Beyond promoting and driving intentionality at the individual and leader levels, there are many ways organizations can be more systematic about managing workforce connectivity:

• Conduct an Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) to receive an x-ray into the collaborative patterns and networks at play, enabling organization leaders to be very targeted in supporting individuals and leaders.?Silos between departments can be identified and resolved by strategic engagement of the siloed teams, intervening to develop the connectivity between groups that is lacking.?
• Formalize the use of the social capital lens in performance management by building discussions about individual networks directly into the process and train managers accordingly.?
• Employ technology platforms like collaboration.ai to prioritize network development in event and large meeting design.?
• Facilitate random connections via platforms like Spark Collaboration that enable employees to opt in to random coffee chats.?The platform allows for some structure to those meetings (focusing on specific questions to ask each other, etc.)
• Based on several years of working with organizations interested in these ideas, perhaps the single most important action an organization can take to be more systematic about employee connectivity, is to explicitly call it out in talent/HR strategy.?Workday for example, has several pillars to their talent strategy, and “Connections” is one of them.?This informs and drives the design of myriad people practices, and provides an overarching rationale for adopting any/all of the above actions.?It costs nothing to embed this idea in your strategy – it’s all about conscious intent, and bringing connectivity from the background to the foreground.

These are just a handful of ideas and examples of how companies can more intentionally manage employee connectivity and professional networks versus leaving it to chance.?For additional perspective, i4cp member Kelly Piccone at Independent Health insightfully outlined a number of really practical ways they’ve been more intentional about “The Many Facets of Connection”.?

And to the strategy point above, they did call out “intentional connection” as a new cultural norm, hosting a "Connection Week" to put the spotlight on the value and importance of connection in the organization.

If you are interested in learning more, and elevating workforce connectivity in your strategy and agenda, that is a big part of our work at i4cp and Connected Commons.?As Kelly did in her article, please share in the comments below ways you are seeing intentionality trump proximity in your own organizations!