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.
Good relationships start when someone serves a bid for another person's attention and the bid is volleyed back. It is surprisingly easy for people in close proximity to ignore one another's bids, and many people will not bid again if they are ignored even once. Step One in initiating friendship at work is to simply begin a conversation, ask a question, pay a compliment, or extend an invitation, and Step Two is to respond positively when others do the same.
Once the ball is in play, friendship is deepened as people solve work problems together, unite in creative projects, have fun together, share details of their lives, pay attention to one another's stories, or show they understand one another's honest feelings. Even people who don't initially like each other can become reasonably good friends if they take the time to find out more about what makes the other tick.
While close work friends give us support and a sense of rapport, broad networks often provide the creative solutions our friends, who probably think like us, don't see. Introverts excel at having a few close friends; extraverts open up their lives to almost anyone; but all of us need both broad networks and a at least a few trusted confidants to have a great experience at work.
One of the hardest skills of friendship is making repairs when empathy and trust have broken down. Admitting mistakes, or at least acknowledging with empathy and regret the hurt another is feeling because of our actions, is the first step of an effective apology. The next is making clear what we will do to remedy the situation, or what we will do differently in the future to prevent it. We finish the job when we ask what else we could do to make things right. Effective apologies help grease the skids of good relationships whether within families, companies, or countries.
Do you have at least one best friend at work? If not, are you willing to make a bid or respond to someone else who has made one to you? Are you deepening existing friendships by getting interested in other people's lives, supporting their goals, and sharing your own? Do you also invest in networking with a broad array of people whose takes on work vary from your own? When you run into problems with friends, do you both apologize and forgive?
Developing the skills of friendship is a crucial way to find more meaning and satisfaction in work and in life.
For more ideas about fostering meaning at work for yourself or your employees, see TheWhyOfWork.com.
