A shrinking network is bad for employees and bad for companies.

For companies, smaller networks reduce creativity and innovation. Organisations with employees who feel unconnected are at risk of high turnover or even fraud and negligence. For employees, a decreasing network makes developing important work connections, finding a new job, being promoted, or progressing in a career less likely.

Until recently, our networks have mostly remained steady or grown over time, even when we move or change jobs. At most, they churn as new relationships are created to replace those we have lost.

What’s unusual about the pandemic is that old relationships are not being replaced by new ones. And this is problematic because people need connections for business and social benefit as well as for mental health.

If you think of your network as a series of concentric circles that decrease in emotional intensity as you move toward the larger outer rings, the innermost circle contains the five or so people you turn to in times of severe emotional and financial distress. The outermost ring is made up of the roughly 1,500 acquaintances or weak ties whom you would recognise by sight. When the Yale researchers compared the personal and work networks of hundreds of individuals pre- and post-pandemic, they found that the size of the outermost ring had shrunk. That shrinkage was accompanied by a strengthening of connections with people in the innermost ring.

Researchers call this “turtling up.” A Harvard Business School study of digital interactions in a tech company found that exchanges between close collaborators increased by 40% post-lockdown at the expense of 10% less communication between more distant colleagues. Over the long term, turtling up and a dearth of opportunities to interact with strangers are leading to network shrinkage.

Interestingly, this network shrinkage is predominant in men. Women’s networks haven’t shrunk nearly as much. When researchers compared the networks of 200 individuals in June 2019 and then a year later, they found that the men’s networks had shrunk by more than 450 people, or close to 30%. Women’s networks hardly shrank at all.

It is unlikely that women are spending more time networking than men during the pandemic. The difference is probably due to women’s natural networking style providing an advantage. Women talk to maintain emotional closeness. They talk face-to-face, on the phone, etc. Evolutionary psychologists found that was not true of men. Instead of talking, men do things together. They play sports. They drink. They fish. They play cards. They don’t talk like women do, according to the data. And WFH restrictions made it more difficult for people who do things together to stay connected.

As CBDs come back to life in Australia, it’s critical to focus on reconnection now. Without an active effort at regenerating lost relationships, the consequences of network shrinkage are likely to be enduring. And regenerating networks does not mean more Zoom calls. In fact, research shows that video conferencing is not useful for keeping social connections. (It’s impossible to maintain eye contact with your audience when you are looking into a camera.) You need to get out there and re-connect in person. It’s time to stop turtling up. Your social wellbeing, your business prospects, and your mental health depend upon it.

Yours sincerely,