When times are tough, what keeps people going? Whether we are talking about laborers starving in a concentration camp or CEO’s facing a hostile takeover, people are more likely to keep showing up for work and find work satisfying when they care about the people they work with and have at least one meaningful friendship among their co-workers.
Having close friends at work has long been seen as a suspect activity. After all, can you really be honest with friends about their work performance? Isn’t it better to keep things on a professional, impersonal level? While keeping our distance at work may make it easier to fire someone or harder to garner unwarranted favors, it is also associated with higher turnover, more absenteeism, more accidents, less satisfaction with pay and with the work itself, and reduced creativity and investment of energy on the job (Tom Rath, Vital Friends, Gallup Press, 2006). When we fail to foster good friendships at work we apparently throw the baby of meaning at work out with the bathwater of potential favoritism.
