Service and maintenance electricians who spend their entire work week shuttling from one customer’s location to the next are in a position to benefit from a psychological phenomenon that most of them—and their managers—might never have imagined: the awesome power of weak friendships.

Because service and maintenance electricians are in and out of so many facilities and dealing with different people, they are apt to form a bevy of “weak ties” with a multitude of folks who they might regard, at best, as casual acquaintances. Psychologists tell us that having these kind of “weak” relationships contributes to our health and well-being. It also has unexpected benefits to business—especially service-related.

From childhood, we are inculcated with a belief in the value of having—and being—a best friend. There are inspiring accounts of lifelong friendships, including such well-known buddies as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, or Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla.

We would never expect to be regaled with stories about strong reasons for maintaining weak connections with legions of other people. But now we can be.

The power of weak relationships

To understand this, however, we have to go back and picture a day in graduate school in Canada when Gillian Sandstrom gained her earliest insight into the remarkable power of weak personal relationships. Although she was excelling in her classes, Sandstrom was suffering from a crisis of confidence in her own academic ability. (She would later call that “impostor syndrome.”)

Crossing campus to class, at one point Sandstrom began a daily habit of smiling and waving to a woman who operated a hot dog stand on a street corner along the way. They exchanged these friendly, silent greetings each day from a distance—but never up close.

In due time, Sandstrom began to detect a dramatic uplift in her spirits. She came to the conclusion that her recovery was mostly a product of her “weak friendship” with that friendly hot dog seller. Out of this deeply personal self-analysis, she formed her initial hypothesis about the hearty benefits of weak ties.

Today, Sandstrom is a senior lecturer in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex and a thought leader in the psychology of weak friendships.

CX and EX

There is a clear connection between Sandstrom’s weak-ties concepts and the on-the-job experiences of service and maintenance electricians. That connection is at the intersection of the customer and employee experiences.

Although it sounds like a simple pairing of two common nouns, “customer experience,” CX, was lifted to the level of standard business terminology by an article in Harvard Business Review, co-authored 25 years ago by Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.

The employee experience (EX) has also gained currency and earned sufficiently broad acceptance in business communications and publications. We see CX and EX as two sides of the same coin.

In every type of commercial transaction, the people on the front lines make everything happen. Often, they are merely acquaintances with each other. Even when a salesperson has persevered through many calls and in-person visits to capture a new account, the players on both sides will likely not have progressed beyond weak ties.

Nonetheless, these frontline players can enjoy a fundamental sense of personal accomplishment at the completion of every transaction, which can recharge their feeling of engagement. This in an era where surveys by the Gallup organization perennially repeat projections that about two-thirds of the U.S. workforce is decidedly “disengaged” on the job. If being disengaged is a precursor to leaving, then the single biggest obstacle to workforce development—retaining and maintaining talented individuals—will arise.

Our favorite definition of service is “problem­-solving.” We regard problem-­solving as one of the most important aspects of service and maintenance electricians’ roles, because it allows them to bask every day in the satisfaction of knowing they solved a customer’s problems. That sustains continuing commitment to their job.

Now we can also see and understand the importance of weak ties between frontline players as a contribution to workforce development—and strive to enhance it.

John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the United States, observed in a well-known case in 1819 that a corporation is an artificial being, invisible and intangible. Put another way, companies don’t do business with companies: people do business with people. Managed thoughtfully, the chemistry in each new CX-EX combination will bolster the bottom line and reinforce the employee roster. 

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