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Key points
- Workplace relationships are significant determinants of employee satisfaction.
- A Gallup poll from last year showed that employees with a best friend at work reported increased commitment to their jobs.
- Listening, and a willingness to get reasonably personal at work, can help foster deeper workplace relationships.
I’ve worked alone for the last 34 years. There are upsides, of course: My commute is short. My wardrobe is minimal. I have no office politics.
But there are downsides, too: No tech support. Since I never get invited to office holiday parties, I have sugar-cookie deprivation. And I have no one to steal office supplies from.
Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if there’s an even greater downside that I hadn’t considered: I’m the only one at my water cooler.
A growing body of knowledge reveals that perhaps the greatest secret to being happy at a job is having friends at work. Specifically, a best friend. Unfortunately, almost every trend in contemporary society is undermining workplace friendships.
The idea that people derive much of their identity—as well as much of their social life—from work goes back nearly a century to the dawn of the office age. As early as the 1940s, social psychologists like Elton Mayo and Abraham Maslow began to observe that workers fulfilled many of their social needs with colleagues. But not until this century have social scientists truly dug into what a work friend is.
As the New Zealand researchers Rachel Morrison and Terry Nolan wrote not long ago in a paper called “I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends… at Work,” work friendships are voluntary, with “a sense of uniqueness, felt obligations, and both self-disclosure and the sharing of confidences.” These relationships, both with supervisors and peers, are “significant determinants of whether these employees are satisfied with their jobs.”
Last year, Gallup went even further. In a report entitled “The Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work,” Alok Patel and Stephanie Plowman unveiled research suggesting that having a “best friend” in your workplace contributes to a thriving employee experience and to increased communication, commitment, and satisfaction.
Employees who have a best friend at work are significantly more likely to:
Engage customers and internal partners
Get more done in less time
Support a safe workplace with fewer accidents and reliability concerns
Innovate and share ideas
Have fun while at work
Workers of the World, Get Thee to a Water Cooler!
But here’s the problem: Almost every larger trend in contemporary life is conspiring against workplace friendships. For starters, everyone’s going to work on different schedules these days. A survey of North American workers last month from the advertising firm Captivate found that 13 percent of workers had a “work spouse,” less than half who gave the same answer in 2021.
Second, even those returning to the office find themselves out of touch—and out of sync—with their friends. As the Wall Street Journal reported this month, “For some, their professional better half is on another hybrid-work schedule or, like millions of Americans, has left for another job. Work spouses are finding that, much like an actual marriage, it can take some work to reignite that flame.”
Finally, political polarization, the stress on cross-gender platonic relationships in the wake of #MeToo, and increased confusion about same-sex interactions have all compromised workplace camaraderie.
And yet, Gallup’s report found that “having a best friend at work has become more important since the start of the pandemic.” So what are we to do?
Fortunately, with so much attention on loneliness and friendlessness these days (see my recent post, “3 Benefits of Intergenerational Friendships”), we have more knowledge than ever on how to build and maintain relationships.
So here, based on the most up-to-date ideas, are three ways to increase friendships with those you work with—whether in-person, remotely, or, for people like me who work by themselves, on a project-by-project basis:
1. Raise the Flag of Friendship.
The Gallup report makes the eminently sensible—and helpfully simple—point that the biggest way to increase friendship at work is for workers at all levels to declare out loud that friendship is important.
Intentionality starts with leaders who celebrate and champion best friends at work, from the C-suite to front-line managers. Employees learn behavioral norms and cues from their managers and leaders—and they need the "OK" from leaders to develop friendships on the job. Leaders should talk about the importance of having a best friend at work and exemplify intentionality in forming connections.
The report gives specific examples such as encouraging “quick connects” in person or at the start or end of remote calls; calling for open-ended get-togethers where those collaborating on a project, either in shared space or video chat, work side-by-side for a period of time; and organizing social events where traditional workplace hierarchies lessen.
2. Make the Personal Professional.
Workers of a certain generation were raised on the idea of a strict separation between work and family, office and home. Among millennials and GenZ, those membranes have become more porous than ever—and the pandemic blew them to smithereens. Today, the greater challenge is not whether to talk about personal matters at work; it’s how to talk about personal matters at work.
In an intriguing research paper on the importance of icebreakers, Jill Kilanowski of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital explores how structured, contained conversation starters (What was your first job?; Two truths and a lie; etc.) in otherwise stilted professional settings encourage bonding while not overly disrupting office formalities.
Ice breakers are used when a group comes together for a specific mutual purpose. They are helpful to encourage participants to bond, form a new team, get to know people from different backgrounds, and become involved with learning about new subject matter. Ice breakers also help the leader become acquainted with the participants and group interpersonal interactions.
The study says these tools allow workers to become more friendly while maintaining appropriate boundaries. One example: putting a series of “get-to-know-you questions” in a bowl (or, in the case of the hospital where she worked, the shape of a cabbage) and having each team member answer one.
3. Listen More Than You Talk.
The English writer Catherine Blyth is the author of the charming book The Art of Conversation. As someone who interviews people for a living, I keep an underlined copy in my office. Her third chapter is called “Pay Heed: On the Acrobatics of Attention.” Of all the deterrents to friendship, Blyth writes, talking too much may be the greatest. “Talk has hogged the limelight because listening lacks glamour.”
But the greatest conversationalists, she writes, and thus the best of friends, “listen more than talk.”
Listen up! If you want more friends at work, open your ears to what your co-workers are saying—My daughter has a ballet recital coming up; my mother is coming to visit this weekend; I’ve been a little worried about my dog—and follow up the next morning, the next week, or the next meeting, and ask how it went.
As Blythe points out, “Listening is the mother of relating.”
After all, you just may make a new friend.
And you’ll certainly help create a better workplace.
