What are jobs good for, anyway? I mean, aside from the money and career prospects? I submit it’s the free pizza, the free toilet paper, and the free friends—not necessarily in that order. And now, a new op-ed suggests we’ve stopped getting cozy with our coworkers for a variety of reasons. What gives?
Before we delve: If this research is true, it is super saddening. Not using work as a playground for future friend or romantic prospects seems, if nothing else, a missed opportunity. If you’re clocking even 20 hours a week at some job, you should milk it for all its worth, because lord knows that is what your employer is doing to you.
In a NYT op-ed, Adam Grant writes that Americans’ interest in making work friends had dropped considerably over the years. Grant writes:
In 1985, about half of Americans said they had a close friend at work; by 2004, this was true for only 30 percent. And in nationally representative surveys of American high school seniors, the proportion who said it was very important to find a job where they could make friends dropped from 54 percent in 1976, to 48 percent in 1991, to 41 percent in 2006.
We may start companies with our friends, but we don’t become friends with our co-workers. “We are not only ‘bowling alone,’ ” Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford, observes, “We are increasingly ‘working alone.’”
And get this: Only a third of Americans have invited work friends over to their house—compared to 71 percent of those surveyed in India. Grant also cites research that finds Americans struggling to pick up on “socioemotional” aspects of work interactions, from talking about what you’re up to for the weekend to more subtle communication surrounding ordinary tasks.
He offers some theories about this strange all-work, no-play mindset. One, long-term employment is rarer than ever—if most of us jump around every few years, we’re less likely to really cement the deeper friendships that can accompany putting in decades at one company. Furthermore, virtual work or flextime can keep us literally apart from our coworkers, disrupting the potential for deeper bonds. (Grant also cites studies that suggest that, as long as you show up in person at least half the week, you can apparently maintain interpersonal harmony.) It could be that we all have so many other “real-life” friends we maintain via social media (or, at least, pretend to) that we mistakenly feel like the friend bus is full. It could also be that the American workplace culture is deeply rooted in the Protestant work ethic, designed entirely to keep our noses to the silent grind.
Probably, he argues, we think more of work as something to clock in and out of as efficiently as possible so as to get on to our actual lives—and friends—than a place to nurture lifelong connections, even after we move on to new prospects.
This is our mistake, Grant notes. Having friends at work increases work happiness, whether it’s actually making it more fun, or performing better at problem-solving. Some companies try to foster these friendships with work activities and eating together. And it doesn’t take much to do this, since “a single interaction marked by respect, trust and mutual engagement is enough to generate energy for both parties.”
Commenters on the piece argue all sorts of additional theories as to why today’s workers might be friend-averse on the job: too many crossed professional lines when you blur boundaries; maybe you work with a bunch of crazies, in which case, better to keep your distance; as you get older, you get more selective about who you spend time with; hostile environments and legal liabilities are all too fraught to make work friends worth it; and my favorite, from “Katherine” in Richmond, Va.: “Familiarity breeds contempt.”
But I’ve always considered myself incredibly lucky on the work-friend score. Most of my best friends are from work, and I’ve always gravitated toward environments where likeminded people were plentiful. Jobs where I couldn’t make friends were the worst places I’d ever worked—and coincidentally places I couldn’t escape a second too soon— because nothing eases the suffering of tedious work like some basic camaraderie.