Why Good Work Friends Are Important
Spending a large part of your life doing anything, it quickly becomes apparent that you need to make friends. This can be anything from playing golf to playing Xbox games online. There is an urge for human connections that will lead us to end up being friends with the unlikeliest people based on the accident of them sharing spaces (whether physical or virtual) with us often enough over a sustained period of time.
It is great to find work colleagues who slowly become work friends over time as you can discuss the drudgery of the job with each other and share some humour to help to lighten the load. Sometimes having someone who can just tell you “Hang in there, it’s almost payday!” can be invaluable. Working life can be hard and there are definitely times when having good friends there can make it easier.
Why Work Friends are Important
Having friends who you can discuss aspects of work that may be worrying or bothering you can help to lighten your load somewhat. It is always better to share worries with others rather than keeping them locked up tight inside, as this can be bad for your mental health in the long-run. It is good to be able to vent frustrations to someone who is on your own level and even receive helpful suggestions about how to handle something that you may not have thought of on your own. Sometimes two heads, or more, are better than one at finding workable solutions.
Skill Sharing and Development
Every time you interact with people in the workplace, you exercise your range of transferable skills. If one of yours is that you excel at teamwork and getting the best from people then it is absolutely on-brand that you are making work friends and working well together with them, for your own benefit, theirs and that of the company as a whole.
Having friends in the same workplace can lead to skill sharing and can help you to develop and flourish within the job role. Between workplace friends, it isn’t always a formal thing, you might have queried how they did something that looked like some kind of wizardry to you, and they sent you a YouTube tutorial explaining it. A small interaction but a significant one, as something that had been confusing to you suddenly became something you could do.
This is the kind of relatively small interaction that makes the world of work go around. They may be more hands-on with their skill sharing, they may even decide to run a small masterclass event at your work in an area they are proficient in but where others seem to struggle.
People who have good work friends tend to feel much better adjusted in the workplace and less prone to feelings of self-doubt or impostor syndrome and are far less likely to suffer from workplace-related depressive incidents.
The Value of Knowing Someone "Has Your Back"
In workplace situations, it can sometimes feel like there is a prevalence of cliques or that the management are pretty hard on their staff, so to have a friendly face to check on you after the annual appraisal is finished is invaluable.
“Having your back” in the work sense can mean noticing that you have come into work while hungover and trying their best to get work steered to them rather than you in order to help lighten your load on what is going to be a difficult and painful day anyway. They will do what they can to cover for you and bring you some painkillers when they get a chance.
Sometimes working in a toxic workplace environment can actually solidify friendships as you realise that you need each other in order to get past the current round of difficulties. Having a friend who is “in the trenches” with you in a difficult workplace can be great as you are both against the overbearing and unreasonable management.
The downside to this situation of course is that it may end up with you staying in the job way beyond the point where you should have called it a day, and tendered your resignation in disgust because of the way they treat their employees. Putting your work friend’s wishes before your own in this kind of situation because you don’t want to stop working with them can be very counterproductive and you should take a close look at your motives for staying.
Social Connectedness
Human beings are intensely social creatures, it is how we have domesticated so many animals over centuries and can now keep cats and dogs as pets. We have an in-built need to pack-bond, regardless of how alike or unalike the other or others are to us.
This applies just as much, if not more, when we think about other humans. We need only start to share space and spend time together for a short amount of time and we begin to understand the other person better and empathise with their unique difficulties. It is one of our most fundamental urges as a species and spending eight hours a day with someone makes a stranger into a friend.
Workplace Romances
We’ve discussed friendships, but what about workplace romances? The prevailing wisdom would appear to be that they are a risky thing to start, as when they end they can make life difficult for everyone you both know and have to work with. There is something about relationship breakups where people feel like they have to pick a side and it is actually unhealthy for workplaces to do this.
Having said that, the statistics for workplace romances are also stark and there is considerable proof that these relationships can last a long time. Statistics from the USA suggest that up to one in five people found their spouse through their working environment. This shouldn’t be entirely surprising, given that we spend so much of our lives at work, up to eight hours per day in a full-time job.
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