This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: Friendship in the workplace

Lynda Gratton
During the pandemic, we know that we had fewer work relationships. And what I realised is that friendship is just so crucial. We know the number one predictor of whether you stay at work is the question, I have a friend at work. And I was thinking about, you know, what is it that makes friendships so important and why would you bother going to work if there was a friend there? And I guess it’s a trusted confidante. It’s someone you can celebrate with or you can commiserate with. It’s the buffer for the routine stress that we all have at work. So as we go back to the office, and I think many of us are, then I think it’s really important that we start asking ourselves, do I have a friend at work?

Isabel Berwick
Today on Working It with me, Isabel Berwick, we’re talking about workplace friendships. Many of us see our work colleagues just as much, if not more, than our friends and family. Or at least that was the case before March 2020. Then home became the office and those water cooler catch-ups were replaced with Zooms and instant messages. But how crucial are these corporate comradeships? And with UK employees reportedly more reluctant than Europeans to stop working from home, could fostering these friendships be the key to filling up the office again? To help me look into it, I’ll be joined later on this episode by Sarah Gordon, who was for many years the FT’s business editor, and more importantly, my best friend at work. She’s now chief executive of the Impact Investing Institute. But for now, here’s Lynda Gratton. Lynda’s a professor of management practice at the London Business School, and she recently released a book called Redesigning Work and is fascinated by the relationships our workplaces foster. I started off with the most important question.

Have you had a best friend at work, Lynda?

Lynda Gratton
I have. I have Herminia Ibarra, who’s also a professor at London Business School. And I can tell you, Isabel, we did a lot of celebrating, quite a lot of commiserating, and we certainly blew off steam a lot.

Isabel Berwick
And do you have any tips for managers or team leaders on how they can sort of, you know, encourage their teams to become friends? I mean, I think the enforced fun is quite cheesy for a lot of people. Are there other ways?

Lynda Gratton
As a psychologist, I’m going to use one of those awful psychological terms, affective forecasting. And the truth is, Isabel, we’re very poor at predicting what makes us happy. But actually, if you look at long-term studies of people, and I’m particularly grateful to Robert Waldinger, who runs the Harvard study which looks at people across their whole lifetime, and he and I have talked a lot about friendship recently. The point that he makes is that because relationships are messy and unpredictable, we tend to downplay the benefits of them. So the first thing is, just realise it’s important. Even though you might not realise that having a friend is a source of happiness, it absolutely is. The second is, make time for it. You know, one of the things that’s really worrying me right now, Isabel, is that, you know, what we’ve done is we’ve gone for the productivity benefits. You know, we’ve streamlined our agenda, we’ve made our pace even brisker. We’ve said we don’t want any distractions. And as a consequence of that, we don’t have any time to make friends. So the second tip is, make time to make friends. The best way to do that is to get rid of at least 50 per cent of the meetings you’ve got in your diary. There you are. I’m a productivity expert, and I’m giving you that piece of advice. And the third thing is, you know, you make friends because of shared experiences. And that could be to do with what you do at work. You know, for example, working on cross-functional projects, it could be volunteering, it could be social — the cheesy social activities which you hate, Isabel, and so do I, but one can do that. And actually, friendship isn’t a transaction. It’s a generosity of listening, of understanding, of sharing your own experience, and of listening to someone else’s experience. So those are my top three tips. Realise it’s important, make time for it and build more shared experiences, even if that’s the cheesy thing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
I just wanted to point out that in case any of my colleagues are listening and are just getting ready to send me offended emails, I promise that I do enjoy nights out with people I work with, but I’m just more of a spontaneous work drinks type of person, rather than assault course in the middle of the country type of person. So speaking of colleagues, here’s someone I mentioned earlier: Sarah Gordon. Sarah, would you say we’re friends?

Sarah Gordon
Of course (laughter). I would say that.

Isabel Berwick
So how important are workplace friendships to you?

Sarah Gordon
I think they’ve been incredibly important. I mean, it’s very interesting, Lynda, saying that we undervalue those friendships because I think that’s very true. And you exploring this subject has made me think in a more focused way about how significant they’ve been to me throughout my working life. And I think that they’re rather different at different stages of one’s professional career. I think the great joy, and I know we had a lot of fun when we were considerably younger and didn’t have children and the responsibilities that we now have, but, you know, the going out for a drink after work, the really sort of fun, young socialising you do with your colleagues and that group of people you have at that stage is incredibly important. And then I think in many ways, the interaction that you have with your friends at a later stage is, I found, even more rewarding because it’s that mixture of personal enjoyment but also professional stimulus that you get from those friends. You know, we’ve been very lucky at the FT. I mean, I had a fantastic room that I worked in for many years with a number of wonderful colleagues. And we had a massive laugh but we also really bashed subjects out together. We really talked things through, and I’m sure our reporting was better for it.

Isabel Berwick
Yes, I think the intellectual buzz of having like-minded colleagues is perhaps something we underrate.

Sarah Gordon
Yes, definitely. And I mean, it’s certainly something that, you know, I’m now, as you said, the chief executive of a small organisation, the Impact Investing Institute, and I have an absolutely fantastic team of mainly young people, but, you know, fabulous young people. But it’s a very different situation when you’re a chief executive. And I think as you do move up the ranks, you can get lonelier, you can have fewer work friends. And it’s interesting that Lynda said having a work friend was the number one predictor of staying in a job. I certainly think it was one of the huge benefits that I felt of working at the FT for nearly 20 years as I did. And I’ve certainly found it difficult making the transition to a role where you couldn’t have quite that same level of equal friendship with your colleagues.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, but I suppose for CEOs, if you’ve made friends on the way up or in different areas, you can keep those friends. But the immediacy of friendship in the workplace is something that you have to forgo, I guess.

Sarah Gordon
I think so. And I do think that mixture of sharing personal experience and professional insights or topics is something that you do lose as a chief executive. Although I do think it’s quite funny, Isabel, that, I mean, it’s now three years, yeah, more than three years since I left the FT, but you and I still (laughter) we still talk about work a lot when we see each other and we still find it really fascinating because talking about work is really interesting.

Isabel Berwick
Yes, you see, and I doubt that anything can replace the shared knowledge that you have. You can start from a fairly advanced place. You don’t have to explain all the dramatis personae to your friend. You know who the idiots are. Not that there are any at the FT, obviously.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
So we recently wrote about friendship in the newsletter and did a callout for readers, and I got lots of interesting comments, but particularly one from Maurice Obadia and Corinne Ripoche, who are French researchers, and Maurice has spent decades researching friendship at work. It’s been his life’s work and what he calls it the relationship economy, which I really like. And he says the three key elements that make up the relationship economy are time dedicated for creating purposeful and powerful relationships, positive energy between individuals, and shared qualitative information. So the time, energy and information nexus creates a friendship economy, and he’s trying to say that it’s just as important as any other sort of economic measure, which I think is slightly out there, but fascinating.

Sarah Gordon
It is fascinating, but it’s rather the same as Lynda saying that we need to cancel 50 per cent of our meetings and dedicate it to building those work friendships. I’m not sure as a boss I would be particularly happy about my entire team saying, right, we’re not doing our meetings for 50 per cent of the time, we’re just going to go and have coffee and gossip together because work friendships are so important. I mean, I do recognise that we’ve undervalued them and perhaps it’s going too far in the other direction, but there’s also work.

Isabel Berwick
OK, but just hold your horses there, Sarah, because as Lynda says, it can be beneficial for businesses too to have colleagues who are friends.

Lynda Gratton
The truth is that friendship plays a really important role in why we stay at work and actually why we become more engaged at work. You know, some interesting research that shows that people really are more engaged and more likely to do interesting work if they’ve got a friend at work. And one of the things that I’m noticing is that people are coming into the office and saying, why am I here? All I’m doing is sitting on Zoom meetings with my, you know, noise-cancelling headphones on because it’s so noisy. If I go into the office, it’s because I’ve got a friend at work. I want to speak to a friend. So I think if you’re a manager who’s asking yourself, how am I going to get people back into the office? You get them into the office because there’s a friend there. That’s something that they can do, something to look forward to. You know, London Business School had our first in-person faculty meeting yesterday and honestly, it was so joyful. The hundred of us hadn’t seen each other together and it was a joyful experience. And I think if you want people to come back into the office, it’s got to be joy that brings them back. It isn’t going to be threats, by the way. Threats, as we know, are not the way to get people back.

Isabel Berwick
No. Threats, definitely not. Free food, yes. Threats, no.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
I was curious to see if there were any downsides to friendships in the office and when we write about this in the FT, the comments are normally full of readers saying how mixing work and pleasure is a recipe for disaster. And that can be true because business is often very cut-throat and it’s not uncommon to shaft people on your way to the top — not you, Sarah. What’s your take on this? Do you think there is a downside to friendship at work?

Sarah Gordon
I don’t think there’s a downside exactly. But I do think that like all relationships, you have to negotiate them quite carefully. I think there are often tensions arising when you’ve been in a team with someone and one of you gets promoted and the other one doesn’t. And, you know, it can be quite tricky negotiating those transitions. And I do also think, of course, you know, friends fall out. We don’t. But some friendships do end. And that can be as, in some cases, as tricky as when work relationships end. So I don’t think one should underestimate that, you know, it’s not just a positive thing.

Isabel Berwick
No. And I think some of the readers are quite strong in their comments that express negative feelings about friendship, but it tends to be more of an exclusion thing. So for example, we’ve got one here saying, “You want a friend, get a dog.” That’s attributed to Gordon Gekko. There were lots of FT readers very approving of that one. Another one here: “‘First-world problem’ is common slang for the kind of problem that people in developing or under-developed countries are too busy to care about” — this writer comes from Kenya, by the way — “because the latter are typically occupied with other problems, such as deadly epidemics, civil wars, political corruptions, and don’t have any energy left to focus on ephemeral office relationships”. So that’s a different perspective on it. But I guess for me, the downside is that when someone leaves, you can feel absolutely bereft and it leaves a gap in your engagement, actually, in your enjoyment of work. So I wrote a column when you left the FT. I’ll put it in the show notes. And I did get some wonderful comments and emails from readers who also felt there had been something very special that they’d lost when their friends left work. So here’s my favourite: “I’ve just left some of my best friends when I moved to a new job. It felt awful at first, and the feeling of being apart is sometimes almost tangible. But luckily, I’m not too far away and can still see them regularly.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
So Sarah, there’s one thing we haven’t talked about here, which is slightly tangential, but it’s the office-spouse friendship, which is something that I’m obsessed with. Have you ever had an office spouse?

Sarah Gordon
No. And I do remember being extremely jealous of you because you not only had me, you lucky thing, as your best friend at work, but you also had an office spouse. I felt it was greedy.

Isabel Berwick
It was a bit greedy, but it’s perhaps erring into slightly trickier territory because the office spouse is often someone of the opposite gender, and sometimes those relationships can fall into emotional affair or actual affair set-ups. But I think at its purest, the office spouse is a really wonderful iteration of friendship at work and one that I think is undervalued.

Isabel Berwick
So I really enjoyed talking to Lynda and obviously, I enjoyed talking to Sarah. I think work friendships are incredibly important. I felt like I was an outlier for many years in this respect, but I think after the pandemic, people are really starting to re-evaluate what it is we want from work. And it’s so important to feel connected to our colleagues. We’ve been remote for a long time. Lots of people have started jobs in the pandemic and they don’t know anyone. So if you’ve never thought about work as somewhere where you could make friends, maybe now is the time to think again. And if we can ditch any meetings at all, I would be delighted.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks again to Lynda Gratton and Sarah Gordon for joining me today. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Please do get in touch with us. We want to hear from you. We’re at workingit@ft.com or with me @IsabelBerwick on Twitter. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our new Working It newsletter. Some behind-the-scenes extras from the podcast and work and careers stories you won’t find anywhere else. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. Working It is produced by Novel for the Financial Times. Thanks to the producer Anna Sinfield, executive producer Joe Wheeler, research from Leigh Mayer and mix from Chris O’Shaughnessy. From the FT, we have editorial direction from Renée Kaplan and Manuela Saragosa and production support from Persis Love. Thanks for listening.

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