Building adult friendships with “coworkers” just got better and more accessible

Groove is transforming relationships, one focus session at a time

Making friends as an adult is hard. I’ve talked to dozens of people, specifically in their 20s and 30s, over the last year about this.

In October 2021, I facilitated a weekend-long summit in Denver for leaders who are actively building the future of higher education and online learning. On the last day of the summit, we asked everyone to bring a business idea to life, one that solves a problem in the world that they’re connected to. We narrowed it down to 8 ideas. Every single one was related to building deeper connections among adults. Most of the ideas didn’t even have to do with the future of higher ed space! The one I worked on was a solution to finding more ‘knockable friendships’, reminding us of the ones in college where you could knock on someone’s door and say, “Hey, wanna do something right now?”

As the world of work shifts and more people are leaning into remote work, adults are rethinking how they make friends in this new reality.

Anne Helen Petersen is an author and thought leader in this space, who just released a book with Charlie Warzel, called Out of Office. As she was building this book, she wrote often and publicly about the concepts she was excited to weave into the discussion.

This Culture Study article from her newsletter has stuck with me for months.

In it, she cites a 2018 study, performed by HR consultancy Future Workplace and Virgin Pulse, which “found that 70 percent of employees claimed friendship at their job was the most important element of a happy work life”.

Petersen argues how this stat alone isn’t quite the full picture. She says:

“These arguments are built on the supposition of work as the primary, enduring locus of meaning in your life. Think of it this way: Maybe office workers feel the need to make friends at work is because they spend so much time working that there’s little time to cultivate or sustain friendship elsewhere. Maybe it’s so hard to make friends in your 30s because you’re working all the time.”

It’s a great argument. Traditional work structures historically haven’t offered the flexibility for employees to design their days and time. We know that building meaningful relationships require a couple of key ingredients, including frequency.

If I met a new friend at a concert, for example, think about how many times we’d have to hang out to get really close — to develop a level of closeness you might have with a previous coworker or friend from college. How many times would this new friend and I need to intentionally set aside a few hours to meet up to get “close” or become best friends?

This study, shared with me by a Groover who felt like this captured the magic of how Groove works, found that casual friendships emerge around 30 hours spent together, good friendships emerge around 140 hours spent together, and best friendships do not emerge until after 300 hours spent together.

Frequency is already built into the equation when becoming friends with coworkers, plus scheduling logistics was easy. You were at the same place every day for the same hours and typically finished up work around the same time.

When workers were faced with the new realities of work from home during the pandemic, the hardest thing for workers who never worked remotely before to grasp, according to Petersen, was: Your current WFH scenario is not your future WFH scenario. Your options are not “in the office, with other people, 9 to 6 every day” or “miserable and alone in my small apartment.”

There can be an in-between! Petersen offers some ideas for how to spend time as a flexible worker to satisfy that social craving, like working with a couple of friends in the same physical location now that Covid restrictions have changed. That assumes you have friends nearby that you could actually get sh*t done with.

Groove is an incredible solution for both of these problems Petersen proposes: making new adult friends and finding social interaction in your workday.

On Groove, you can form relationships by just showing up on video for a few minutes here and there and then going through the bonding experience of focusing alongside 1–3 other people. You don’t need to show up for 8 hours, 5 days a week to form friendships and relationships on Groove. You can pop on a few times throughout the week, and bump into familiar faces.

So, for all of you out there reading this, if you’re craving adult friendships and also need to get sh*t done to move your business or creative projects forward, check out Groove. I can’t stop talking about it because I truly believe it’s solving such an important need in the world…not just because I work there; I work there because I believed in the mission the moment I heard about it and needed to jump in to contribute.

“We don’t work from home because work is what matters most. We work from home to free ourselves to focus on what actually does.”

I’m giving a standing ovation for this line. Mic drop for work-life harmony.