Why Making ‘Real’ Friends at Work is So Difficult — And What You Can Do About It.
They say it’s lonely at the top. It turns out it’s lonely in the middle and at the bottom, too.
Think for a moment about your closest friend at work. Do you consider them a Friend or, you know, just a work friend? If you are struggling to think of anyone, don’t worry — you’re not alone. (Well, you are, but you catch my drift.)
According to Gallup, only 20% of people say they have a close friend at work. While a recent report by the parliamentary group tasked with solving loneliness in the UK found that 1 in 10 workers were always or often lonely at work. A figure that doubles for 18–29-year olds, and more than trebles for senior managers.
This is bad for business. Research shows lonely workers are less productive, more likely to leave their jobs, and take more days off. It is also bad for you personally. The science is unambiguous here: your social connections are perhaps the most important factor in your health and happiness.
And if you’re lonely at work you are lonely in life: the average person spends 81,396 hours — the equivalent of more than 9 years — at work. Our workplace friendships are a crucial part of our wellbeing. So, why are so many of us dissatisfied with them?
Zoomified
An obvious place to start is the Covid-19 pandemic. Or rather the disruption of our working lives that it accelerated. There has been a huge rise in home working, hybrid jobs, and, more broadly, those (like me) hacking away in the so-called ‘gig economy.’
Yet these trends don’t explain why so many people are lonely at work. For one thing, even before the pandemic, studies were reporting similar levels of workplace loneliness.
And data in that report from the All Parliamentary Group on Tackling Loneliness also contradicts this simplistic conclusion. Researchers found that home-workers were no lonelier than those who worked ‘on site.’ Part time workers were no lonelier than those who worked full-time. And those who worked in a team were more likely to be lonely than those who worked… alone.
We are therefore confronted with a paradox: having more contact with our colleagues does not make us feel less lonely.
This paradox can be resolved by understanding that it is not the quantity of our relationships at work that makes the difference, it is their quality. And many of our work friendships don’t cut the subsidised canteen mustard. For example, a massive 24% of workers surveyed in the All Parliamentary Report felt their colleagues were like strangers to them — a figure that doubled for managers.
It could be argued that the modern-day workplace gets in the way of our friendships in other ways. We swap jobs far more often than we used to. While, internal teams can form and reform more often that the Sugababes. As the famed sociologist Robert Putnam has put it, ‘Birds of passage, whether by choice or necessity, generally don’t nest.’
It also won’t have escaped your attention that if we chat to our workmates these days, it’s as likely to be via a tech platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams as it is around the watercooler. As the economist Noreena Hertz puts it in her book The Lonely Century:
‘Part of the reason many of us feel so detached from our colleagues today is because the quality of our communication with them is so much shallower than in the past.’
She quotes a 2018 global study that found, ‘employees typically spend nearly half their entire day sending emails and messages to one another, often to people within a radius of just a few desks.’
And it’s not just conversations that are a dying breed. The old social rituals that used to define the workday — the mid-morning tea-break, after work drinks, eating lunch together — also now seem rather quaint.
The nature of modern work undoubtedly plays its part in the alienation many of us feel in the office. But I am going to claim here that our difficulties with friendships at work are an ancient rather than a modern problem — and they are hard to resolve.
A curious brew
One reason our workplace friendships are so hard to navigate is their inherent ambiguity.
On the one hand you are ‘friends’ with your colleagues, yet on the other you are in competition with them. We are generally too polite to surface this fact, but it bubbles away anyhow: whether it be trying to win the promotion, a bonus, or merely your bosses’ favour — you are in a race with your workmates.
Then there’s the demand for ‘professionalism.’ You have to collaborate with your colleagues, whether you like it or not. Fall-out and teamwork becomes filled with friction — plus, you might get a reputation for being ‘difficult.’ So, you grin and bear it, at least sometimes. The point being that while most of our work relationships are marked by friendliness, and not a little banter, they can be hard to fully trust. After all, you are inauthentic, so surely, they must be too?
This ambiguity is amplified when status differentials are introduced into the mix. Consider the plight of the manager: doomed to never quite be part of the gang. Half confidante, half informant, the manager/direct report relationship is an odd mix of coercion and care that is hardly fertile soil for true connection. It’s no wonder that it’s lonely at the top.
Asymmetries of power are hard to overcome in friendships. Of course, that doesn’t mean that higher-status partners don’t delude themselves that they have been.¹
It is admittedly a confusing situation: friendliness, offered largely in self-interest (or under duress) by the lower status party, can look and sound like friendship. Parsing apart discretionary goodwill from contractual obligation cheerfully executed is tricky — especially as they often co-exist.
The powerful only realise that genuine friendship is absent in certain moments — usually when they seek to shift the ‘friendship’ beyond its formal boundaries. See: the episode of I’m Alan Partridge, where Alan hosts a party in his room for the staff of the Linton Travel Tavern, who he now considers friends. Spoiler alert: it’s awkward.
An ancient, not a modern problem
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle thought a lot about workplace friendships.
He argued that, whether we realise it or not, our relationships at work are fundamentally based around utility: we are friends because we are useful to one another. We have little more in common than a shared task and context.
Consider how awkward it can be when we bump into a work ‘friend’ out in the real world. You spot a colleague approaching from the other end of the supermarket aisle, and what do you do? Wave? Rush over and smother them in a warm embrace? No. You dive into the freezer section and bury yourself under the peas.
What we tend to end up with at work is a pseudo-intimacy. In lieu of having anything meaningful in common with colleagues, we reach for easier signifiers of belonging. Such as the jargon we use, or the in-jokes we share.
Or the fact we are all ‘Googlers’ or ‘Tweeps’ or ‘Microsofties,’ embodying the ‘values’ scrawled on the walls in jaunty fonts and working towards some transcendent (and vaguely specified) ‘purpose’ or ‘mission.’ Even though nobody really knows what any of this sub-Robert Baden-Powell wank means, beyond the imperative that we all exhibit a vague ‘teaminess.’
If this doesn’t do the trick, then we bond over the people and even concepts we hate. Whether that be internally (the boss, other departments, the procurement system), externally (customers, rival firms), or the very idea of work itself (Mondays, pointless meetings.) It is a belonging based not on who we are as individuals, but on who (and what) we are not as a group. A siege mentality without the siege.
At its most overarching, bonding at work derives from the idea that ‘we’re all mad round here!’ All groups — individual firms, whole professions, hobby clubs — tend to this dynamic. On the surface, it’s self-effacing: the corporate bond deriving from an irreverent, projected self-loathing. So, lawyers joke that they are all greedy or boring, salespeople that they are amoral liars, HR folk that they are the colouring-in department
But it can easily become the opposite. A very natural pride in the unique characteristics of one’s group subtly morphing into a belief in the superiority of said group.
‘We shall be a coterie that exists for the sake of being a coterie; a little self-elected (and therefore absurd) aristocracy, basking in the moonshine of our collective self-approval,’ as CS Lewis brutally observed.
Anyway, the key point for Aristotle is that the friendships that are most satisfying are based not only on the camaraderie of being ‘in it together’ — although that is no insignificant thing, nor on our usefulness to one another, but on a sense that our that our relationship somehow transcends both of these things. People seem unwilling, or at least unable, to make these sorts of bonds in the workplace.
The definition problem
As we’ve already explored, the solution is not simply for employees to spend more time together. It’s about making the time we do share feel more meaningful.
In order to do that, we need to address perhaps the most fundamental problem we face when we try to talk about friendship: what even is a friend?
Friendship is famously hard to define. We all agree that there is a difference between an acquaintance, a friend and a close friend, but what is it? Where do the boundaries lie?
If we can’t agree on the quality that makes a friend ‘close’, ‘good’ or ‘real’, then we can’t go after getting more of that quality in our work friendships. The trouble is, people disagree about what this transcending quality is and have done since Aristotle.
Modern mores dictate that this quality is ‘intimacy.’ Your ‘real’ friends know the ‘real you.’
On this line of thinking, in order to have better friends we all need to learn to be more vulnerable at work.
This will doubtless split the room. There will be some readers, clutching their dog-earned copy of Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead, giddy from their morning gong bath, wondering what took me so long. There will be others triggered by the V-word, taken back to their last office away-day when they were forced to bare their soul in team ‘speed dating,’ where they ended up panicking and telling the intern about that time on their stag-do when they shat the bed.
By now this clarion call for vulnerability might seem familiar. LinkedIn is already a frothing river of emotional cola, overflowing with cloying posts from people ‘opening up’ about this, or ‘normalizing’ the other. Yet while there can be value in ‘taking off the mask’ and ‘bringing your whole self’ to the office — especially in the hyper-competitive corporate cultures in which many people work — this definition of intimacy is narrow and distinctly modern.
Apt to quickly descend into a circle jerk of new-age platitudes, where we attempt to out-do one another in the shame game. Our sufferings just another asset to sweat in our perennial quest to build our ‘personal brand,’ as we seek to maximise the ROI on our misery capital.
If it is vulnerability that we need more of at work, then I think it is of a broader, less emotional — perhaps more old-fashioned — sort. C.S. Lewis gets at it in his definition of friendship:
‘Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure… The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”’
Does this not describe what many of our best friendships are like? And the quality that has been lost when we sense that they’ve become less taut? Or flabby, even? Less essential to our lives?
Our most meaningful friendships tend to be ‘about’ something. Whether that be a shared project, time of life, or common interest. If it is an intimacy, then it is a very active sort, based as much on doing as it is talking. Because what’s most important here is not what is revealed by the friends, what energizes the relationship lies outside of them. It is the shared journey: the common fascination, the juicy mutual question they pursue together.
Thus, far from work undermining our friendships, it can be the most vital part of it. Indeed, many of the friendship circles of legend have revolved around work: the French impressionist painters, the Beat poets, Damien Hirst and the YBAs, Alexei Sayle and the godfather’s ‘alternative’ comedy in the 80s, and so on.
For these friendship groups, the work was not only the thing that brought them together, it was what allowed them to come to truly know one another. As C.S. Lewis put it:
‘You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.’
The point: talk is often cheap. And our actions are often more articulate than we could ever be. Not only in showcasing our big, meaty virtues — courage, kindness, creativity — but also our irreducible specificity as people. Our unique human presence.
As essayist Adam Gopnik writes in his wise book on mastery:
‘Every brush mark we make, every note we play, every sentence we craft — every left turn we take into traffic! — betrays the totality of ourselves…’
In other words: who we are shows up not only in what we do, but in how we do it.
‘It’s why we love vibrato in a voice, legato in piano performance, why we catalogue the tics and mannerisms of a baseball player at bat — Joe Morgan’s way of rotating his arm like a wing — as much as we watch his numbers.’
Work’s a drag
If personality is embodied, then mutual knowledge can only be reached by sharing time and space and activity with another person. However, we are increasingly building a working world where this happens less and less.
Whether that be because of the rise of remote work or because of a transformation in the economy that began decades ago: the coming of the information age and the invention of the ‘knowledge worker.’
If you are reading this, the chances are that you are one of these workers. Perhaps you spend most of your day sat at your desk, tapping away at a keyboard, sending emails, or writing boring reports. Breaking occasionally from this monotony to attend a meeting you think is pointless.
It is the knowledge worker’s lot: get to the end of the week, exhausted and stressed but wondering what on earth you’ve actually done; so distanced has our labour become from tangible effect, let alone human impact.
I might be making my case too strongly here. But my broader point is that the thinness of much modern work plays into the thinness of our friendships at work. Our job simply doesn’t allow us to show the best parts of ourselves. And it hardly requires the revelation of virtue, beyond the placid tolerance of our lot.² Is it any wonder we feel like strangers to one another?
‘It is common today to locate one’s ‘true self’ in one’s leisure choices,’ writes philosopher Matthew Crawford, in his quietly seminal book on modern work.
‘Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursuing other activities, where life becomes meaningful. The mortgage broker works hard all year, then he goes and climbs Mount Everest. The exaggerated psychic content of his summer vacation sustains through the fall, winter, and spring… There is a disconnect between his work life and his leisure life; in one he accumulates money and in the other he accumulates psychic nourishment. Each part depends on and enables the other, but does so in the manner of a transaction between sub-selves, rather than as the intelligibly linked parts of a coherent life.’
If we partition our work selves from our leisure selves, do we not do the same thing with our friendships? Annexing our ‘real’ friends from our work friendships, subtly closing ourselves off to their possibility?³
So, what are we to do about it?
I have argued in this essay that while our problems with friendships at work are not created by the modern world, they are certainly exacerbated by it. Given all these obstacles, how might we go about making better friends at work?
There are two ways of attacking this question. One is to shrug our shoulders and say: If friendships at work tend to be difficult and superficial, let’s focus instead on our social relationships outside of work. In this view, the best thing our workplace can do for our social life is to give us the time and space to pursue one.
The policies are already well known here: flexible working, 4-day weeks, the right to ‘turn off,’ a reduction in working hours. Oh, and the end of dystopian uber-campuses like the Google Plex or the Apple Anus, where employees not only have a desk but can get a haircut, a vaginoplasty, go ten-pin bowling, and share a meal (from a choice of 39 different cuisines) with a hologram Anne Frank.
I have some sympathy with this view. Yet it is unrealistic to think we won’t spend a huge amount of our life at work for the foreseeable future. Our work friendships will remain a significant part of our social mix, as data from the Survey Centre for American Life shows:
‘Americans are now more likely to make friends at work than any other way — including at school, in their neighbourhood, at their place of worship, or even through existing friends.’
I suspect this is true of people in the UK, too. It says much about the decline of social capital beyond the office, but that is a conversation for another time. For now, it is sensible to think practically about how we might improve our work friendships — without requiring the so-called ‘information economy’ to fall apart.
Five Things to Think About
1) Let people see who you (really) are
We code-switch when we come to work, and show-up in our corporate mask — a certain flattened version of our self. This is often for good reason: we are there to get a job done and don’t want ‘our own shit’ to impinge on the productivity of the group. We might also worry that confessing to difficulties — in our mental health, for example — could mean we are seen as weak, or otherwise judged. Or we may fear that it could hold our career back long term: what if people think we can’t ‘hack it’? Or that we are unreliable?
Yet keeping up this persona can make us feel lonely. It also denies us one of our most potent tools in building connection with others: our vulnerability.
If the V-word makes you squirm, then start small. Getting vulnerable at work doesn’t have to mean telling a colleague that daddy never loved you or elucidating the topography of an intimate rash. It can just be talking shop a bit less and instead letting them get to know you a bit.
Many people develop a sort-of schizophrenia in their career, where they come to associate personality with a lack of professionalism, and so leave theirs hanging like a second jacket by the office door. Yet human beings are multi-dimensional. We aren’t just graphic designers, data analysts, or compliance managers. We are mothers, sons, and granddaughters. We are mountain climbers, Zumba enthusiasts, and keen amateur chefs. We can speak two languages, ride a horse, and once talked a man down off a bridge. We can show a lot more of ourselves at work.
2) Get out of the office
As we do often code-switch when we show-up at work, meeting outside of that environment can allow us to show a more authentic version of our self.
This is the logic behind the — much derided — corporate institution known as the ‘teambuilding event.’ You know the thing I mean. You and forty colleagues head out for an ‘away day’ where you do a bit of ‘strategy work’ for an hour or so and then head out to do some sort of activity. Like an escape room. Or raft building. Or cocktail making. Or perhaps you head to Epping Forrest, make Keith from back-office dress-up as a pig and hunt him with bow and arrows? When that’s all run its course, you migrate to a bar, where everyone drinks until someone has an affair.
It’s not difficult to take the piss out of teambuilding. However, it’s vital: one of the few opportunities we get to see another side of our colleagues.
3) Make your virtual communication more human
Virtual meetings are a fact of life now. They aren’t going away, so our attention should turn instead to how we might design them in a way that maximizes the chances of meaningful connection.
One obvious thing you can do is to ask participants to have their cameras on (when the size of meeting allows.) Another less obvious idea: make sure you start meetings with a space for people to talk about things outside of the task.
I read that Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general for the US government — a man who has made tackling loneliness a central part of his approach to making Americans healthier — begins his staff meetings by asking people to share one thing about their personal life. Nothing too dramatic: maybe something fun they did the night before? He found that this step was everyone’s favourite part of the meeting.
We are so busy — and we have become so aware of meeting ‘best practice’ — that we let an obsession with productivity crowd out the humanity from our jobs. Putting it back in might be a ‘waste of time,’ but it would make everyone feel less lonely.
4) Be deliberate
Friendships don’t simple happen ‘naturally.’ Not in ‘real life’ nor at work. We have to be intentional about it. Here are a few simple ways you might be deliberate in making friends at work:
- Be an ‘Igniter.’ As psychologist Dr Marisa Franco explained to me, there tends to be one person in any group that makes social things happen. So, be that person who shows leadership. Be the one that suggests everyone goes out to lunch. If you sense a kindred spirit in the office, suggest grabbing a coffee together, or taking a walk.
- Take the small talk bullets. This is another aspect of initiating: be the fire-lighter on the social barbeque. People like to talk, but they don’t like to go first — grasp the nettle.
- Be curious. If colleagues don’t reveal their full, three-dimensional personality, then help them out: ask questions!
- Don’t forget to have positive conversations. Often conversations with colleagues become centered around solving problems. It’s easy for interactions to become entirely transactional — and for us to subtly dehumanise colleagues, treating them like cogs in a machine — especially when we only interact in digital shorthand.
Oh, and guys: don’t leave all this to women. Women often act as the ‘kin keepers’ in the office: organising all the gatherings, buying the birthday cards, bringing in the brownies. It’s time us blokes stepped up.
5) Gratitude
I’d like to end on a positive note. We don’t have to be capital F friends with a work colleague for the friendship to be worthwhile. We can still draw a lot of pleasure from it while understanding that our relationship will always be bounded to some extent, and never tip into anything more. That’s OK. As C.S. Lewis expressed it, ‘We don’t disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold.’
We might be able to count our ‘true’ friends — however we choose to define what that means — on one hand. Beyond these individuals, most of our friendships in life are merely ‘good enough’ — and we need plenty of these too.
Yet these so-called ‘superficial’ friendships — like those we have at work, or at the gym, or with the parents at our children’s school — are actually a call to gratitude. They demand that we appreciate great friendship, or most often, snatches of it, like we do glimpses of beauty; that we see see it as one of life’s greatest gifts — all the more valuable because of its scarcity.
Max Dickins is a writer and a comedian. His funny and honest memoir about men and friendship, Billy No Mates, is out now in hardback, e-book and audio book. www.maxdickins.com
Footnotes
- I am perhaps not honouring here a mixed-status relationship that both parties find meaningful at work, namely that of mentor and mentee. I don’t doubt the heft and quiet pleasure of this bond. Yet it is inherently transactional and bounded, in a way that a ‘real’ friendship is not.
- Or, perhaps, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in our head at the same time: one, that our job is massively important, and two, that we don’t really give a shit.
- Crawford suggests that the modern working world is antithetical to friendship, as the Team has now become ‘the controlling unit of personality.’ We are expected to subsume our individual identity into a corporate identity:
‘The contemporary office requires the development of a self that is ready for teamwork, rooted in shared habits of flexibility rather than strong individual character.’
So we are expected to subsume our individual identity into a corporate identity. In other words: we all become too bland to be friends.
This is an interesting point and begs the question: do our employers even want their employees to be friends?
You might point point to ping pong tables, bean bags and lunchtime ‘socials’ as evidence that they do. But the logic behind these gestures is not really as a way to foster friendship, it’s to encourage the sort of serendipitous conversations that can lead to innovation. (As in, the motivation is the bottom line.)
Friendships are often distrusted by those in authority. People who get on too well might not be focussed on the job at hand, and, worse still, distract others with their hijinks. Managers are wary of cliques and the subtle challenge to power represented in close friendships. As CS Lewis has put it, ‘Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion.’
Is it a coincidence that organisations generally emphasise and celebrate the team as the key social unit? Friendship, perhaps paradoxically, works against this instinct. And that’s before you think of modern concerns around equity: whether consciously or not, friends tend to hoard opportunity amongst each other, and that isn’t fair. See: ‘the old boys club.’
