2018 Nature study changed scientists’ understanding of who we tend to
befriend in the office. It’s long been known that people gravitate toward others of similar age, gender, and ethnicity—a fact that has been a thorn in the sides of managers, because it means a team made up largely of, say, male twentysomethings and female fiftysomethings is unlikely to yield many deep friendships.
But when the researchers conducted MRI scans of people watching films, they discovered that good friends tend to have “exceptionally similar” neural responses—a phenomenon known as neural homophily. In other words, friendship isn’t about having a common age, gender, or ethnicity. Instead, it’s about perceiving and responding to the world similarly.
The discovery offers managers a new freedom in trying to facilitate friendships. People with diverse, even wildly different backgrounds may well see the world similarly enough to become very good friends. For example, Jad Abumrad, creator of NPR’s Radiolab, was surprised to discover that his father, a Lebanese immigrant and a physician, had formed a significant friendship with the singer Dolly Parton after treating her at Vanderbilt Hospital. Once Abumrad got over his surprise (and his assumption that his father was exaggerating the friendship), he discovered that Parton and his father were adults of the same generation who had left poor rural childhoods for big-city careers. As a consequence, they had developed similar worldviews—seemingly a textbook example of neural homophily.
In studies, Dunbar has showed that most people have an average of about five
loved ones, 15 good friends, and 50 loose friends. Given that most careerists spend the majority of their waking hours in the office, ideally many of those 15 good friends are at work. But what leaders tend to forget is that it takes time to build friendships—around 40 to 60 hours to form a casual friendship, according to a
2019 study out of the University of Kansas, and over 200 hours to form a deeper, more meaningful one. Studies have repeatedly indicated that these relationships
are critical—just as important as family ties in predicting psychological health, and beneficial to well-being, job satisfaction, and feeling valued by colleagues, not to mention productivity, says Rosemary Blieszner, a distinguished professor emerita
of human development and family science at Virginia Tech.
The good news is that what people want from their friends remains remarkably consistent, whether at work or home. “It doesn’t really change over life,” says Blieszner, whose research shows that people want companionship, affection, trust, occasional advice, and to feel cared about. In the workplace, she notes that looser, friendly relationships—the sort that might develop between two people who are very different teammates—help people collaborate better, feel empathy for each other, and enjoy more downtime. “Even if it’s not deep friendship, people want to feel like someone has their back and trusts them to do what they’re supposed to do,” she says.
Given that most careerists spend the majority of
their waking hours in The office, ideally
many of those
15 good friends
are at work."
“
he workplace has been, in some places and at certain times, a hotbed of
close friendships. In Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, companies like Mars, Cadbury, and Unilever believed that providing a decent environment for workers bred loyalty and better work. As a result, companies put profound efforts into building convivial, pleasant work settings. “You had these extraordinarily designed factories, and workers, mostly managers, lived in these beautiful houses, every one designed differently,” says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford. “They were all very much influenced by Quakers, whether consciously or not.” Central to these working and living environments were community centers, which hosted activities like Sunday lunches and weekend dances, and sports centers, particularly tennis clubs (which were common at British railway companies). Social clubs were also common. “Those entrepreneurs really made big efforts to create environments in which people would be friends,” says Dunbar.
In 1950s America, workplace sociologist James Samuel Coleman discovered that workers were much more likely to socialize if they worked in a factory comprising no more than about 100 people, rather than a bigger operation like Ford. This dovetailed with the finding Dunbar is most famous for today: Humans can manage around 150 meaningful social connections. That number also represents the maximum coherent size for groups of all types—hunter-gatherer communities, office departments, clubs, Christmas-card lists, active social-media networks. Any larger, and they begin fraying. Dunbar says it all comes down to the human cortex: We’re simply not wired to keep track of more people than that, nor to think of them intelligibly. Which is to say that any worker adrift in a department of, say, 400 is less likely to make close friends than if they belonged to a team of eight
in a department of 80.
Firms have caught on to this, in part, but efforts in the past to create smaller groups of workers via sports teams or community centers have become passé.
All that’s left are company cafeterias, and perhaps some form of a town-hall setting. “The problem is that you have to provide facilities,” says Dunbar, adding that lunch areas typically allow little space for mingling. In most cases, workers
are occupied while they eat—checking their phones, taking a walk, and so forth.
A company might host a lunchtime speaker, but this still offers employees scant time to mingle.
“You can’t make people be friends—it has to grow organically,”
says Dunbar. “But in order to do that, you have to create environ-
ments where people stay on-site after work hours. Otherwise
people go home and put their kids to bed.”
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How many work friends do you have? Not all that long ago, developing friendships
during your job was as normal as getting a paycheck. That made sense, given the time
we Spent together and the many morale-boosting events firms put on. Indeed, the right
friendship at work can be crucial to someone's career. But even before the pandemic and
the rise of remote work, experts say such bonds were becoming less and less common.
And now they are flat-out rare.
0-10 Hours
You tell your boss not to hire this guy, but he’s hired anyway and you avoid his gaze.
25 Hours
You try to remember his first name (Jim? John? Jack?), then look it up in the company directory.
41 Hours
You see something online he’d love. You text it to him.
75 Hours
Your first “date.” He invites you to grab a drink after work.
90 Hours
You finally meet outside work. You admit that you hate your boss. Hall calls this “simple friend status.”
92 Hours
Coworkers refer to him as your “work wife.”
110 Hours
Your domestic partner gets sick of hearing anecdotes about him.
130 Hours
Your first fight. He spoiled the end of Succession.
150 Hours
Evening phone calls begin.
200 Hours
He tells you about that thing he did in college. You can’t unhear it. You are now officially “friend-friends.”
You overhear him say his favorite sports team, movie, or record. You feel a faint stirring inside.
11-24 Hours
You exchange phone numbers,
for no particular reason.
40 Hours
Guess what? You’re what researchers call “casual friends.”
50 Hours
You both cancel repeatedly.
75-89 Hours
You actually look forward to going to work.
91 Hours
The majority of your interactions now happen via text message, while at work.
100 Hours
You visit each other’s homes. He has now seen your gaming setup. There’s no going back.
120 Hours
Recovery period. You keep it cordial.
131-149 Hours
The Private Jokes With Each Other phase begins. Coworkers find this irritating.
151-169 Hours
200 Hours
0 Hours
A recent University of Kansas study found that it takes 200 hours to build a true friendship. “You can't snap your fingers and make a friend, says lead researcher Jeffrey Hall, who suggests friendship blooms in stages. Here is our (unscientific) guide on how that could develop:
The Stages of
Workplace Friendship
T
W
According to a Gallup poll, just two in 10 people have a best friend at work. The group that has seen the greatest decline is younger workers: For those age 35 and under, the two-in-10 figure is down from 25 percent in 2019. All of this has gotten some attention since the US Surgeon General’s declaration last year that loneliness can have serious health consequences. “Employees are isolated and lonely,” says Julianne Holt-Lundstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, who posits that the rate of surviving a job for people who are socially connected is 50 percent higher than for those who aren’t.
What’s missing in particular today, experts say, are “best friends at work,” as opposed to “work best friends.” The former, unlike the latter, go out to dinner or to sporting events on a weekend. Interestingly, experts say younger people are especially hungry for these connections, since they tend to be more open about themselves. “Younger people are much more their whole selves at work,” says Hannah Lomax, a senior workplace consultant at Gallup.
But any corporate leader will tell you that fostering friendships at work ranks among their toughest challenges. For starters, people who say they want friends may also resist coming into the office. Despite return-to-office mandates, people are showing up fewer than three days a week, on average, making managers and HR struggle with scheduling even the simplest buddy-making events. And when they do work together at the office, most people are too engrossed in their emails or social media to talk to one another.
It’s all having a hidden but substantial effect on the bottom line. Culture is widely believed to drive one-third of corporate profits. More broadly, it’s regarded as the glue that holds employees together. Workers with an on-the-job bestie get more done, are more efficient, share ideas more, and are more engaging with customers and coworkers. Gallup numbers show that a corporate culture in which best friends are common correlates with company-wide profitability, safety, inventory control, and retention. So how do you make everyone become friends?
“Debbie and I met when we both worked at a university. We'd speak when we passed in the hall, and she would periodically come down to my office and chat. Little by little we learned that we had a lot in common: We were the same age, we were both chatterboxes married to quiet men, and we both enjoyed crafts and decorating. Our periodic lunches and gradual Christmas gift exchanges morphed into including our spouses. Today our friendship has spanned over 20 years. During the pandemic, the four of us wanted to continue our holiday gift exchanges, so we parked our cars next to each other, ordered meals, and sent our masked spouses to pick up the food while we chatted on speakerphone. I can't remember a time before she was in my life."
Carol Gee, Editor, Goizueta Business School, Emory University
By Arianne Cohen
Illustrations by Tim Ames
Only two in 10 people say they have a best friend at work. But companies, aware of how much culture matters, say trying to foster friendships couldn't be more awkward.
A
Even if it's not deep Friendship,
people want to feel like someone has their back,
and trusts them to do what they're
supposed
to do."
“
HR leaders freely admit that fostering friendships at work is one of their toughest challenges. Here are some approaches they are trying, with mixed results:
How Firms Are
Facilitating Friendships
Choirs
icture Jennifer, a longtime HR person tasked with making sure employees
get along and form friendships. What should she do?
There’s no way to guarantee workers will make friends, but the recipe for encouraging friendships is simple: A series of 30- to 60-minute interactions around non-work activities, such as dancing, soccer, or cooking. Dunbar says,
for example, that Norwegian hospital staffs particularly enjoy group sing-alongs—with benefits for both their morale and work attendance. “The effect is absolutely magical. Everyone comes away feeling very elevated and bonded with the participants, even if they don’t talk to each other,” he says. “It attracts people who were initially very reluctant to be involved.”
Even if the groundwork for creating friendships is relatively simple, workplaces often get it wrong. Common errors include activities that seem overly contrived, or require substantial time commitments (ideally, the limit should be 45 to 60 minutes per week). Parents, particularly women, are often sidelined from after-work activities because of childcare responsibilities. “That’s a really bad dynamic, because it makes employees feel like the workplace is not compatible with their lives,” says Blieszner. Typically, the solution is to hold casual activities during the business day (such as a monthly birthday party), thereby building a sense of belonging slowly, over time, in a relaxed atmosphere.
To help guide you away from getting it wrong, two researchers from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus sat down during the pandemic and created a “taxonomy of reasons” that prevent people from making friends. They found
a total of 40 reasons, and grouped them into categories such as lack of time
and introversion. Roughly one-third of workers (figures vary) are natural introverts, and need to be steered into friend-making situations. “You keep
the invitation open, and maybe Joe in engineering will decide to come one
day,” says Blieszner.
The problem is, most companies no longer have a Jennifer to oversee these efforts. “In the end, the best advice is that you need people whose job it is to make friendships possible,” says Dunbar. In his view, HR departments have been “ground into a vortex of box-checking, fearing lawyers, and avoiding government fines.” In any case, he says, the best efforts of HR won’t solve anything if everyone comes to work and leaves. He posits that many organizations would
be much better off with HR people arranging parties: “Their value to the organization would be many times the salaries you’re paying."
P
Friendship isn't about age, gender, or ethnicity,
but about seeing the world in a
similar way."
“
READ THE
FULL MAGAZINE
View the
podcast
Many organizations,
including the Society for
Human Resource Management,
pay for lunch when employees
seek to build new relationships
with far-flung coworkers.
Free lunches
A major brewery
installed a bar and pub-like
seating in a lobby, encouraging
people to stop by in free moments
during the day or on their way
home. Today, there are 20-year-old
Facebook groups of bar friends
that continue to thrive.
Lobby lounge
Meta hosts a
weeknight barbecue with
beers and grilled foods. A
rule of thumb: Free (or nearly
free) high-quality food in a
relaxing environment
generally encourages
mingling.
Weekly BBQ
No skill necessary.
Singing groups that meet
once a week are known for
producing camaraderie.
The friends she did make, she says, were mostly teammates on the company soccer team
she played for, on and off, for eight years. “Our team's Facebook group is still going
strong," she says.
hen Joanne left her job as an automotive executive, she left behind corporate
perks like her subsidized luxury car and her air miles, not to mention the Sturm
und Drang of the job: boss emails, stressful presentations, early-morning flights.
But there was one thing she didn't leave behind: work friends.
Isla Sibanda, cybersecurity and network consultanT
“I got an offer to work at a well-known cybersecurity company. I was warmly welcomed by all but one colleague. She was a year older than me and had been working with the business for two years. She had started in the same position I did. So why didn't she like me? She feared I was going to try and take over her position! Being mentored by someone who feels threatened by you is no joke. She was curt and aloof towards me, and I thought it would be the end of my career at that company. Until one day when I confronted her, and we clarified each of our intentions. That turned out to be the start of an amazing friendship. Today, Sara is one of the most thoughtful people I know."
Travis Kliever, global business development advisor, RemotePad
“When I met Aaron, we were nothing short of rivals. Every project felt like a battle for supremacy, and our roles in the company placed us in direct competition. We were cordial, yes, but there was always an undercurrent of rivalry in our interactions. Then we found ourselves collaborating on a complex project. During long brainstorming sessions and coffee-fueled late nights, our relationship began to shift. Our professional respect for each other gradually morphed into a genuine friendship, and we began sharing not just work strategies but also personal stories and laughs. In the end, the friendship didn't erase our competitive spirit—but it channeled it into a healthier place."
Friend?
My (Work)
You BE
Won't
He tells you about that thing he did in college. You can’t unhear it. You are now officially “friend-friends.”
200 Hours
The Private Jokes With Each Other phase begins. Coworkers find this irritating.
151-169 Hours
Evening phone calls begin.
150 Hours
Recovery period. You keep it cordial.
131-149 Hours
Your first fight. He spoiled the end of Succession.
130 Hours
You visit each other’s homes. He has now seen your gaming setup. There’s no going back.
120 Hours
Your domestic partner gets sick of hearing anecdotes about him.
110 Hours
The majority of your interactions now happen via text message, while at work.
100 Hours
Coworkers refer to him as your “work wife.”
92 Hours
You actually look forward to going to work.
91 Hours
You finally meet outside work. You admit that you hate your boss. Hall calls this “simple friend status.”
90 Hours
You both cancel repeatedly.
75-89 Hours
Your first “date.” He invites you to grab a drink after work.
75 Hours
Guess what? You’re what researchers call “casual friends.”
50 Hours
You see something online he’d love. You text it to him.
41 Hours
You exchange phone numbers,
for no particular reason.
40 Hours
You try to remember his first name (Jim? John? Jack?), then look it up in the company directory.
25 Hours
You overhear him say his favorite sports team, movie, or record. You feel a faint stirring inside.
11-24 Hours
You tell your boss not to hire this guy, but he’s hired anyway and you avoid his gaze.
0-10 Hours
200 Hours
0 Hours
Carol Gee, Editor, Goizueta Business School, Emory University
“Debbie and I met when we both worked at a university. We'd speak when we passed in the hall, and she would periodically come down to my office and chat. Little by little we learned that we had a lot in common: We were the same age,
we were both chatterboxes married to quiet men, and we both enjoyed crafts and decorating. Our periodic lunches and gradual Christmas gift exchanges morphed into including our spouses. Today our friendship has spanned over 20 years. During the pandemic, the four of us wanted to continue our holiday gift exchanges, so we parked our cars next to each other, ordered meals, and sent our masked spouses to pick up the food while we chatted on speakerphone. I can't remember a time before she was in my life."
Isla Sibanda, cybersecurity and network consultanT
“I got an offer to work at a well-known cybersecurity company. I was warmly welcomed by all but one colleague. She was a year older than me and had been working with the business for two years. She had started in the same position I did. So why didn't she like me? She feared I was going to try and take over her position! Being mentored by someone who feels threatened by you is no joke. She was curt and aloof towards me, and I thought it would be the end of my career at that company. Until one day when I confronted her, and we clarified each of our intentions. That turned out to be the start of an amazing friendship. Today, Sara is one of the most thoughtful people I know."
Choirs
He tells you about that thing he did in college. You can’t unhear it. You are now officially “friend-friends.”
200 Hours
The Private Jokes With Each Other phase begins. Coworkers find this irritating.
151-169 Hours
Evening phone calls begin.
150 Hours
Recovery period. You keep it cordial.
131-149 Hours
Your first fight. He spoiled the end of Succession.
130 Hours
You visit each other’s homes. He has now seen your gaming setup. There’s no going back.
120 Hours
Your domestic partner gets sick of hearing anecdotes about him.
110 Hours
The majority of your interactions now happen via text message, while at work.
100 Hours
Coworkers refer to him as your “work wife.”
92 Hours
You actually look forward to going to work.
91 Hours
You finally meet outside work. You admit that you hate your boss. Hall calls this “simple friend status.”
90 Hours
You both cancel repeatedly.
75-89 Hours
Your first “date.” He invites you to grab a drink after work.
75 Hours
Guess what? You’re what researchers call “casual friends.”
50 Hours
You see something online he’d love. You text it to him.
41 Hours
You exchange phone numbers,
for no particular reason.
40 Hours
You try to remember his first name (Jim? John? Jack?), then look it up in the company directory.
25 Hours
You overhear him say his favorite sports team, movie, or record. You feel a faint stirring inside.
11-24 Hours
You tell your boss not to hire this guy, but he’s hired anyway and you avoid his gaze.
0-10 Hours
200 Hours
0 Hours
He tells you about that thing he did in college. You can’t unhear it. You are now officially “friend-friends.”
200 Hours
The Private Jokes With Each Other phase begins. Coworkers find this irritating.
151-169 Hours
Evening phone calls begin.
150 Hours
Recovery period. You keep it cordial.
131-149 Hours
Your first fight. He spoiled the end of Succession.
130 Hours
You visit each other’s homes. He has now seen your gaming setup. There’s no going back.
120 Hours
Your domestic partner gets sick of hearing anecdotes about him.
110 Hours
The majority of your interactions now happen via text message, while at work.
100 Hours
Coworkers refer to him as your “work wife.”
92 Hours
You actually look forward to going to work.
91 Hours
You finally meet outside work. You admit that you hate your boss. Hall calls this “simple friend status.”
90 Hours
You both cancel repeatedly.
75-89 Hours
Your first “date.” He invites you to grab a drink after work.
75 Hours
Guess what? You’re what researchers call “casual friends.”
50 Hours
You see something online he’d love. You text it to him.
41 Hours
You exchange phone numbers, for no particular reason.
40 Hours
You try to remember his first name (Jim? John? Jack?), then look it up in the company directory.
25 Hours
You overhear him say his favorite sports team, movie, or record. You feel a faint stirring inside.
11-24 Hours
You tell your boss not to hire this guy, but he’s hired anyway and you avoid his gaze.
0-10 Hours
200 Hours
0 Hours
A recent University of Kansas study found that
it takes 200 hours to build a true friendship. “You can't snap your fingers and make a friend, says lead researcher Jeffrey Hall, who suggests friendship blooms in stages. Here is our (unscientific) guide
on how that could develop:
The Stages of
Workplace Friendship