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Experts say the offensive is not a decisive breakthrough, but demonstrates how Ukraine’s expanding use of robotic systems is reshaping frontline warfare.

Experts say the offensive is not a decisive breakthrough, but demonstrates how Ukraine’s expanding use of robotic systems is reshaping frontline warfare.

Experts say the offensive is not a decisive breakthrough, but demonstrates how Ukraine’s expanding use of robotic systems is reshaping frontline warfare.

Experts say the offensive is not a decisive breakthrough, but demonstrates how Ukraine’s expanding use of robotic systems is reshaping frontline warfare.

For happiness at work, there are few things better than a work bestie or friendly colleagues. But sometimes the best connections for getting the next job and advancing your career are actually the people you know less well and interact with less frequently.

Think of your contacts in concentric circles with you at the center. In the inner circles are people you know best: family, friends, and coworkers. In the circles that are farther from you are people known as weak ties. They are people you recognize and are friendly with, but you interact with them infrequently and your relationship is of limited emotional depth.

A comprehensive study of more than 20 million people over five years published in Science found that when people had more weak ties in their networks, they had greater career mobility. They applied for more jobs and were more likely to change jobs. And the study found that loose connections weren’t just related to mobility; they were the cause of it.

The people who aren’t part of your nearest circles have access to information that you and your close contacts don’t. They may know more about a certain job market or have a perspective on what it takes to get a certain role. And they know people they can introduce you to as well. This kind of information is critical for finding your next opportunity.

When you cultivate relationships with those who are more on the periphery of your network, you’re more likely to enjoy higher compensation, receive positive performance evaluations, and get more promotions. You’re also more likely to be exposed to different ways of thinking, generate better ideas, and be seen as more valuable, according to a study in the American Journal of Sociology.

So how do you establish and maintain weak ties?

1. Interact with new people

First, you can expand your number of weak ties by seeking out interactions with people you don’t know or don’t know well. Chat with the person who’s standing in line with you in the cafeteria at work or invite someone new to join you and your friend for lunch. Introduce yourself to the new person who is participating in your meeting and linger after the session to get to know them. You can also connect with people in your social media networks who are one or two degrees away from your first-tier contacts.

According to studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, when you have more frequent interactions with others and interact with both strong and weak ties, you increase your feelings of happiness, belonging, and well-being.

2. BE CURIOUS

When you’re getting to know someone, listen to their perspective and ask questions. People who are farther away from your inner circle will have different experiences and diverse vantage points. They may see things differently because they’re from a different generation or have different life experience or professional background. They can provide you with new ideas or help you connect dots in creative ways.

3. RECONNECT WITH DORMANT CONNECTIONS

You can also enhance the positive effects of weak ties by reconnecting with people you might have lost touch with. These types of weak ties are known as dormant connections. Examples would be a colleague who moved to a different company, or a friend who has moved away.

If you rekindle a relationship with someone you used to know well, you’re likely to benefit from trust and shared perspective, and you’re also likely to get information from them more quickly and efficiently compared with newer contacts. And the information you get may be unique or unexpected, giving you new ideas or especially helpful intel about opportunities, according to a study in Organization Science.

With a dormant connection, you get the benefits of having had a trusting relationship in the past and of their now more distant point of view, which provides fresh information.

4. STAY IN TOUCH

Overall, you’ll want to stay in touch with weak ties. You won’t connect with them regularly, but you might check in occasionally through social media or a quick text or email. You can let them know you’re thinking about them or acknowledge something you may have seen online that reminded you of them.

Reach out when they get a promotion or change jobs. Or send a note if you run into a mutual connection. These kinds of low-demand interactions are easy for you and require little of them. But they keep you on their radar screen.

Most importantly, keep your network evergreen. When you need help from your weak ties, it’s too late to begin cultivating them. Instead, it’s more effective to be proactive in staying in touch so your network is robust and expansive when you need it most. Build relationships with your work bestie, and value your connections that aren’t BFFs but are best for your career mobility.

Imagine leaving work early to collect your children, then logging back on after they are asleep. At 10 p.m., you send a few emails. You don’t expect anyone to answer until tomorrow, but your colleagues don’t necessarily know that.

Conventional wisdom says the solution is simple: Don’t send email after hours. But if you don’t, you’ll be behind because you left work early. On the other hand, you’re now creating the expectation that your team also works around the clock. The rule designed to protect flexible working also means everyone works all the time.

Why controlling email hours no longer works

Despite the proliferation of digital technologies, with artificial intelligence promising to make our working lives even more efficient, professionals are still struggling to stay on top of their inbox. Over the last decade or so, academics, practitioners, and policymakers have strongly encouraged maintaining robust email boundaries.

However, the reality of modern work is that it is not completely separable from home, our homes are not completely separable from our offices, and our online activity is often not clearly work-related or private. Flexible work makes uniform temporal boundaries problematic because protecting one person’s preferred work schedule can constrain another person’s flexibility.

Managing expectations about responsiveness

A common response to our email management problem is to set firmer boundaries: restricting sending or checking emails after hours, promoting “digital detoxes” during holidays, and introducing law to protect these policies. Although helpful in principle, such measures can be difficult to apply in practice and may create new tensions.

Flexible work promised to allow people to work whenever it works for them. An employee with parenting responsibilities might take time after dinner when their kids are in bed to catch up with emails, or really early in the morning before the kids get up. But this means their team members might be getting emails in the middle of the night and feel compelled to respond.

We call this the “flexibility paradox”: One person’s freedom to work flexibly can inadvertently constrain somebody else’s. Global teams face an additional “time zone trap.” There may simply be no time of day that falls within everyone’s working hours.

So, what could managers do in a practical sense? Teams could agree on reasonable response times for routine email communications; how urgent matters should be signaled and responded to; what tools, other than email, could be used and when; and how individual response habits silently shape collective norms. For example, some members consistently reply within minutes while others respond after longer delays. The former may create a false impression of urgency, whereas the latter may create uncertainty or anxiety for the sender.

Consequently, rather than managing when people are allowed to email, managers and organizations should manage what they should reasonably expect from one another.

Redesigning workflows, not just the inbox

While managing expectations can address part of the problem, our work highlights a more fundamental issue that makes email boundaries such a pressing problem: Are we perhaps overusing email?

Email has become more than a communication tool. It increasingly acts as an organizational infrastructure through which work is coordinated, creating an implicit expectation of continuous connectivity. When every deadline, decision, approval, status update, and document exchange travels through email, the inbox becomes the workflow. At that point, email overload is no longer primarily a communication problem; it is a work-design problem. 

We use the metaphor of the “invisible metronome” to describe how email sets the pace and rhythm of work. Email is technically asynchronous, but smartphones, notifications, and norms of rapid responsiveness can make it feel synchronous; once a message arrives, an implicit clock starts ticking. Email can therefore create an illusion of urgency, influencing when and how people turn their attention to work.

Our suggestion is an alternative approach that makes better use of digital tools that are available to organizations nowadays. Deadlines can be made visible in project calendars. Shared documents can be hosted in workspaces rather than being repeatedly circulated as attachments. Routine approvals can follow defined workflows. And synchronous communications can also take place when needed.  Email can then be reserved for documenting and similar purposes, rather than serving as the default mechanism for keeping work moving.

This also makes flexible work more effective. A well-designed asynchronous workflow should not depend on every colleague being continuously reachable. This shifts the focus from individual inbox discipline to organizational (re)design. Instead of continually trying to limit people’s availability in the name of flexibility, organizations should ask themselves if such a high volume of email activity is required in the first place, or whether additional digital technologies could be used systematically instead for specific purposes.

Making work sustainable for everyone 

In our recent work, we challenge the dominant emphasis on limiting email activity and instead shift attention toward managing expectations and redesigning work itself. Email overload is not simply an individual self-management problem; it can reveal deeper problems in how work is coordinated. A healthier approach to flexible work requires organizations to decouple communication from availability—and effective coordination from constant connectivity.

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