The best stretch of my working life is a period I remember fondly as “Sundays with Jennifer,” six months or so in college when I was waiting tables alongside my favorite coworker, named — you guessed it — Jennifer. We spent our shifts chatting and screwing around, treating patrons as little more than an interruption in our weekly hang. We spent weeks planning a “cake party” for our other work friends. One day she brought in weed cookies and one of our coworkers got so high they couldn’t figure out how to get out of the bathroom. I do not know if our customers enjoyed the Em-Jen experience, let alone our employer, but we did.
Would I do that today? Ehhh, almost definitely not. For one thing, I take work more seriously now. I’m also more ambivalent about the idea of making close friends at work. I’ve been at Business Insider for only a few months, and I work in a hybrid situation, so it’s trickier to befriend colleagues. It’s not that I don’t want to get to know anyone, but as someone who’s been guilty of blurring the line between professional and personal too much in the past, I’ve found it refreshing to have some distance. This realization is coming at a time when work friendships are dying out, and the more I think about it, the more I think it may be for the best.
The most obvious reason for the demise of the work friend is the rise of remote work. It’s hard to make a new work bestie via Slack and Zoom. While most white-collar workers aren’t fully remote anymore, many are still in hybrid situations. The pandemic changed the way people interact and socialize with their colleagues, even in person. We’re no longer in the trenches together day after day. This shifting context has led to some changes in the way we develop relationships at work.
There’s been a lot of alarmist rhetoric around friendless work. The general line is that work friendships are good because social connections at work keep people productive and engaged and help them manage stress. These friendships improve their job satisfaction and make them less likely to quit. Even if someone is sure they don’t care about making nice with their colleagues, networking is still a thing, and refusing to play ball may very well hurt their career in the long run. The lonest of the lone wolves needs some sort of connection.
“I really don’t think human beings can toil at their jobs for 40, 50, 60 hours a week without social support in a healthy manner for a sustained amount of time,” said Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist who founded the Institute for Life at Work.
I’m not disputing that personal bonds are important in the working world. Developing a rapport with colleagues is a good idea, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to scramble to find an office BFF. Even before the pandemic, workplaces moved out of the center of people’s lives as they aged. You get older and have kids, and you’re not so interested in chatting with your 20-something colleagues about their wild weekends. Or you become a manager, and the happy-hour invites slow to a trickle because people don’t want to knock back a bunch of beers in front of the boss.
More working from home and a detachment from the physical office sped up this transition for many people. Worse things could happen. After years of being told to bring our whole selves to work, many of us could stand to leave a little more at home.
The reason people work from home is because it’s good for their personal life.
Much of the research on friendships at work focuses on how it’s a good deal for employers. Employees’ feeling a sense of kumbaya helps them get more done and improves bottom-line results. In some cases, this can come at the expense of employees’ best interests. Deeper emotional ties can make them more hesitant to leave their jobs — they’re comfortable, and they don’t want to leave their friends behind. That’s great for bosses, but for workers, I mean, who cares? I’ve loved gossiping with coworkers, but I hope that never caused any of them to doubt whether they should leave for a better opportunity.
“If you feel disconnected from your coworkers, you’re less of a team player. But those are all work-related outcomes,” said William Chopik, a social-personality psychologist at Michigan State University who studies relationships. “The reason people work from home is because it’s good for their personal life.” Chopik added that usually research on working from home focuses on whether it makes people worse at their jobs and not on whether, for example, the lack of a commute benefits them.
There are plenty of non-career-related downsides, too. Work friendships can lead to cliquishness and exclusion or even just endless whining sessions among colleagues. Workplaces are often competitive, and if one friend gets ahead, tensions can arise. We are sometimes suspicious of our coworkers, wondering if they’re interacting with us only because they want something, and we doubt we can trust them at all.
On a fundamental level, work friendships aren’t the same as friendship friendships. Confusing the two can lead to tension or hurt feelings. A 2018 paper argues that the “four defining features of friendship (informality, voluntariness, communal norms, and socioemotional goals) are in tension with four fundamental elements of organizational life (formal roles, involuntary constraints, exchange norms, and instrumental goals). We hopefully aren’t friends with others because we’re getting something proportionate and specific out of the relationship in the way we are with work. Saying something embarrassingly stupid in front of a friend is much more acceptable than saying it in front of a coworker, where a certain level of formality is usually part of the deal.
“I think we should try to bring our best professional selves to work, but why should we bring our intimate selves to work?” said Hakan Ozcelik, a professor of management at the College of Business Administration at Sacramento State University. “Our intimate selves and our needs and our desires and our purposes in our intimate roles as human beings should be fulfilled in other domains in our lives rather than at work.”
He recently presented research that looked at employees’ emotions at work, eliciting stories of when people felt happy, sad, angry, etc. What he and his coauthors found was that task-related events, such as finishing a project, were likelier to result in positive emotions than relationship-related events, such as getting appreciation from a colleague. Employees were likelier to report negative emotions in response to relationship-related events than task-related events.
Ozcelik argued that Perhaps this means the task-related events, rather than the relationship-related events, are where “the happiness, the real joy, comes from,” Ozcelik said.
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for friendships at work. It depends on the workplace, your colleagues, and your own personality. Some people need to feel like they belong at work, while others derive most of their satisfaction from the job itself. Hadley, the organizational psychologist, was adamant that no one should try to go it alone forever, professionally, though she acknowledged some workarounds. Perhaps you don’t have a lot of friends in your office but you start going to a coworking space or an industry networking event and meeting people there.
It’s fine to shut your laptop at 5, tell Jane or Joe or whoever to have a good night, and not know what that night entails.
“You need professional colleagues in some kind of relationship way,” she said.
There’s space for moderation, though, or even the chance to shed some work friendships for good. Given that we spent the past few decades being told to bring our whole selves to work or hearing from employers about how we’re all family, it seems like a positive development that some workers are implementing more boundaries, to use some therapyspeak. You don’t have to be a jerk to your colleagues, but you also don’t have to invite them to your wedding or say yes to happy hour or know all the ins and outs of their personal lives. It’s fine to shut your laptop at 5, tell Jane or Joe or whoever to have a good night, and not know what that night entails. In a culture as work-obsessed as ours, it’s OK to lean out some and still stay connected.
“Work is about getting certain things done by using your skills and your intelligence and your network, and so whatever you do there creates an aura,” Ozcelik said. “And then if you are connected to that environment, that’s great. You are not a lonely employee. But that doesn’t mean that there are people there who love you.”
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.