Here's why you need work friends

Hi friend,

Most of us spend more time with our coworkers than with family and friends, yet we invest the least effort in those relationships.

This week, I share three practical tools to help you build and rebuild connection with the people you work with, including:

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I’m just going to come out and say it…

I think everyone should have a work friend (or a few).

Not everyone likes it when I say this, not everyone agrees. And that’s alright.

When I say to people, “You need to have work friends”, they say one of two things:

Today’s newsletter is for both groups. I’m going to chat about why it’s important to have work friends, then give you three practical ways to start building and rebuilding connection at work.

I’m sure you’ve seen those heartwarming viral videos where someone goes around dishing out compliments to strangers, giving flowers to strangers, asking strangers if they’d like a cup of tea. 

They get thousands of likes and comments. People gush over them.

But our daily reality looks quite different. 

Over 800,000 deaths worldwide are linked to loneliness annually, yet we’ve created an unspoken culture where we avoid eye contact on public transport on the way to work, we wear headphones to dodge interaction in the office, and we show up a few minutes late to meetings to purposefully avoid the pre-meeting small talk. (Yes, people really do this).

The irony is we love watching people connect online but we’re scared of creating connection ourselves.

The data shows that one in five of us feel lonely at work daily.

And I’m not surprised because something has changed in the last five years. Many of us have 500 LinkedIn connections but can’t think of anyone to call when we need a new role. We walk past someone’s desk and can’t remember how to start a casual conversation. We communicate through screens, through Slack messages, through carefully worded emails that take 20 minutes to write because we're trying to get the tone just right. 

There’s something I try to but just can’t understand. Many of us spend more time with our coworkers than with our family and friends. Seven, eight, nine hours a day, five days a week. And yet, we invest the least effort in learning how to interact with the people we're surrounded by the most.

What are we doing?

We’ve seen firsthand how remote and hybrid life have become normal and our natural opportunities for human connection have disappeared. Research from KPMG shows that within two years loneliness and isolation have almost doubled at work. We’re craving connection and simultaneously losing the basic skills to build it.  

Seeing as many of us are surrounded by coworkers, I think part of the solution lies in building relationships with the people we spend the most time with. 

Building stronger relationships with coworkers is a sensible career move. It also happens to be the antidote to workplace loneliness. The research shows that when you have work friends, you become more visible, your time at work grows more meaningful, your productivity rises, and you have people in your corner when things get hard.

The benefits are clear.

When I go into workplaces to deliver training, I’m made privy to what’s really going on behind the scenes. People are turning to machines to handle the parts of work that feel too difficult.

I’ve seen some someone in HR using an LLM to generate interview questions for candidates. Someone in their early career using it for conversation starters for a networking event. Someone else using it to come up with ideas for a brainstorming session (which, in my opinion, is using an LLM in the opposite way to how it should be used because surely we can still come up with our own ideas?)

My point is these are things we should be able to do ourselves. The workplace is becoming more automated by the day and, as individuals, we’re contributing to it.

There’s also the challenge that people don’t want to be friends with people at work. More than half of us say we avoid making friends at all. People tell me they’re super private and prefer to keep the work separate from the personal. That’s fine. Although, I’d still say that you can have work friends and keep them at work.

If you do decide to let someone in a little more, they could turn out to be a real gem and lifelong friend.

When I was in my early career, I had a manager who managed me for a year, when I moved team she turned into my mentor, after a little while she became a work friend, and now she’s a close friend of over 10 years. I know we’ll be lifelong friends. She’s a gem.

When I was doing a work placement as a Spanish teacher in the UK, I had a coworker who turned into a work friend, then a friend friend. She turned out to be another gem. 13 years later and I’m going to Spain this weekend to spend time with her and two others because we were lucky enough to pick up other friends along the way (Olé!)

When these friendships were work friendships, a few things stood out: we each had an ally when things got tough, we could support each other, we helped each other, we had shared jokes.

Come to think of it… one of them left the workplace before me and I became disengaged because my support system, my voice of reason, my workplace entertainment had gone. I guess that highlights the importance of having more than one work friend.

When I ask people what makes them not want to talk to people at work, they say things like:

The changes we’ve experienced at work since 2020 have really challenged our workplace relationships and our ability and desire to connect. However, we can help ourselves reconnect with each other.

Here are three practical ways that have helped me most. (It’s not an exhaustive list, more something to get you started)

Spark engaging conversation

I know starting a conversation feels scary, but we cannot spend our working lives talking to machines. We just can’t. We’re not doing it.

Research shows brief conversations significantly boost happiness and belonging. The problem isn’t that we don’t want connection, it’s that we’ve forgotten how to create it through conversation.

I highly encourage you to ask people questions to find out whether you have any shared interests or shared problems at work that you can connect over.

Dr John Medina has researched dopamine, which we know to be the chemical of excitement and motivation. He found that dopamine creates mental markers in our brains. Think of these mental markers as post-it notes. If you come across someone who makes you feel excited and powers you up with energy, you’re likely to remember them. One of the ways we can start and maintain conversations with people is to ask dopamine-filled questions: 

Highlight, exciting, love, interesting, best. These are all words that make us feel good and want to engage with the person in front of us.

This is small talk. Many people shy away from small talk because they find it awkward. And I get it. But the people who avoid small talk close themselves off from building relationships. Small talk doesn’t need to last an hour. You could get started with 1 minute of small talk before getting into something deeper. Either way, we need something to fill the gap between nothing and a deep and meaningful conversation.

Pay attention to your micromoves

Micromoves are small actions or behaviours that affect the way we relate to each other. I first read about micromoves in a Harvard Business Review article by Kerry Roberts Gibson and Beth Schinoff. They explain that we tend to characterise working relationships as either good or bad, but the reality is they ebb and flow.

If you look closely, coworker relationships consist of a series of micromoves like:

 We’re constantly engaging in micromoves in the workplace. Pay a little more attention to them and they’ll help you build connection with others.

Keep conversation notes

I have a list in my phone of people I speak to regularly and people I want to build relationships with. After each interaction, I update my conversation notes:

I might message them before we next meet to say, “I saw this and it reminded me about that thing you’re working on”. Or before our next conversation, I’ll reference my notes and continue the conversation where we left off.

I think of it as a way to start and hold conversation. When I reference something from a previous conversation, I see that flash in the person’s eyes as they register the fact that someone has remembered something important to them and is interested enough to want to hear more.

I keep notes on small details like a job someone’s applying for or a book someone said they wanted to read. It never fails to surprise and delight people.