• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, September 2, 2022

Experts have been buzzing about remote work and the increasing use of freelancers for creative tasks.

Neither trend is new: marketing departments have long hired offsite freelance copywriters to create email campaigns, to name only one example. 

Perhaps they should rethink that and make everyone, freelancers included, work in the office. Remote workers fail to form the sorts of ties that foster creativity, according a new study from MIT.   

With the shift to remote work, the study shows, “email communications between different research units fell off, leading to a decrease in what researchers call the ‘weak ties’ that undergird the exchange of new ideas that tend to foster innovation.” 

Weak ties? It sounds counterintuitive. But those are the diffuse connections that drive more animated debate. 

For 18 months starting in December 2019, MIT researchers collaborated with colleagues at Texas A&M University, Italian National Research Council, Technical University of Denmark, and Oxford University, to analyze an anonymized email network comprising 2,834 MIT research staff, faculty, and postdoctoral researchers.

The study defines weak ties as “any connection between two people who had no mutual contact in the email network. In other words, two people, A and B, formed a weak tie if there was no third person C that both of them also contacted.”  

In contrast, strong ties are “the type of communication that tends to expose us to the same ideas repeatedly, increased. Over the course of the lockdown, the researchers found that ;ego networks,’ referring to an individual's unique web of connections, became more stagnant, with contacts becoming more similar each week.” 

In other words, businesses should get people back into the office, pronto. 

“Our research shows that co-location is a crucial factor to foster weak ties,” states Paolo Santi, researcher at MIT’s Senseable City Lab and at the Italian National Research Council.  

Santi continues, “Our data showed that weak ties evaporated at MIT starting on March 23, 2020, with a 38 percent drop. Over the next 18 months, the drop translated into an estimated cumulative loss of more than 5,100 new weak ties.”

In theory, this is the exact opposite of what an email marketer would need when targeting those units. You want to reach the top two or three people with buying authority or influence, not everyone in the company.  

But the study suggests that getting the campaign produced may be better done onsite. 

For 18 months starting in December 2019, MIT researchers collaborated with colleagues at Texas A&M University, Italian National Research Council, Technical University of Denmark, and Oxford University, to analyze an anonymized email network comprising 2,834 MIT research staff, faculty, and postdoctoral researchers.

At the very least, a firm can cite the study if it is sued by workers who don’t want to return to the office.