Chris A. Petersen

Strategic Thinker, Professional Speaker, and Workshop Facilitator

Building relationships with female coworkers

You may be familiar with the workplace myth, “We’re not at work to make friends.” In other words, the office is a place for an employee to be an efficient worker, not a place for socializing or forming relationships. It’s the same tired concept, that professional and personal are like oil and vinegar.

In reality, the traditionalists who believe this couldn’t be more wrong. Making friends at work is one of the most important things we’ll ever do. When you work a minimum of eight hours per day, five days a week, it’s safe to say a majority of your waking time is spent at work. As a result, it makes sense to want relationships with your coworkers.

However, a huge number of employees see work as a transactional experience. Although productive conversations take place in the workplace, meaningful bonds are not as plentiful. There are many reasons for this: shortened job tenures, social media (and the ease of messaging friends outside of work), and the blur between work and personal lives.

I have been associated with companies that completely restrict relationships internally and externally with others in the same field of employment. This practice is less prevalent today. When I began my career, a prominent company discouraged any friendships outside of normal work hours. Their practices mandated employees not to participate in sports together outside of work teams, not engage in personal relationships with coworkers, and at times, even recommended not sharing lunch together, especially outside of the office.

Today, work culture is the complete opposite. Companies place a huge priority on team-building activities and exercises in order to create an environment capable of fostering friendships in the workplace. A perfect example of this is e-commerce giant Zappos, whose core values focus on embracing change, creating fun, pursuing growth, and building a positive environment, as well as a family spirit.

Being friends with someone in the workplace is more than having fun with each other. It’s not about having someone to watch YouTube videos, gossip about recent events, or take extended lunches with. It doesn’t even mean you’re required to share your deepest, darkest secrets with your colleague.

Workplace friendships are about establishing a common sense of purpose, and that all-for-one, one-for-all mentality amongst employees. It promotes a group loyalty that can result in a shared commitment towards common work.
I have developed friendships in the workplace that transcended both the job and the company. I have carried great friendships from the first company I worked for to my employment today.

Aside from increased job satisfaction and performance, you might be asking yourself what the benefits of being friends with your coworkers are. Studies have placed more emphasis on the benefits such relationships have for companies, and not enough on the benefits for the employees themselves. Friendship at work can lead to three very important things:

1. Productivity
In the workplace, there is no such thing as independence. Even if you have always considered yourself a strong and independent person, a time will eventually come where you feel the need to ask for a favor or help from a coworker.

This is when the need to be friends with your coworkers is most prominent.

Friends don’t mind lending a hand, even when they have their own hands full. In fact, they are even willing to set their own work aside (on the condition it’s not urgent) to help you make a presentation for your next meeting, or stay after-hours to help you make a report.

Although coworkers will still lend a hand—whether or not you are friends with them—when your boss tells them to, friends actually want to do it without being told, and will put their best foot forward to ensure you don’t lose out. In short, workplace friends will undoubtedly have your back when the going gets tough.

2. Happiness
As mentioned previously, we spend more time at work than we do anywhere else. Having good friends at work can increase happiness, because it instills a sense of belonging or appreciation. Having someone to crack jokes or share light-hearted stories with while working can also have a tremendous impact on reducing stress.

3. Sanity
Work can be a little (or a lot) crazy, either because of the work itself or the people around you. When craziness happens, the only thing that will keep you from tearing your hair out from the roots is having someone to run to, who can empathize and understand.

When you make friends at work, you create a vital support network. Rooting for each other on promotions, consoling each other during rough circumstances, giving advice, or simply providing empathy and support for personal situations—these do wonders for individuals in the workplace.

How to Develop Good Relationships with Coworkers

Oftentimes people in the workplace hear opposing opinions on the role of friendship and its place in the work environment. One side says, “We’re not at work to make friends.” These companies look at the potential downfalls of incorporating friendship into the business plan–such as excessive chatter, romantic entanglements, problems for people who struggle with separating work from play, creating conflict-of-interest scenarios, and challenging independent judgment.

While these are valid risks of encouraging positive relationships in the workplace, this mindset is is focused on making work the transactional center of efficient people tackling a list of tasks. However, research proves allowing and promoting team-building is more beneficial in the long run for employees.

In the past, companies who sat on the “no friends” side of the fence restricted opportunities for their employees to build relationships. Oftentimes this took the form of discouraging employees from participating on the same sports team, romantic relationships, and in extreme cases even discouraging eating together on lunch breaks.   

Companies that sit on the other side of the fence (and in this day and age, most companies are pro-friendship) stress the need for healthy work relationships, placing value in team-building exercises in order to foster friendship in the workplace. People can make or break the work environment, and how they relate to one another is critical. Friendships at work can produce extremely desirable things:

  1. Increased and steady productivity
  2. Steady levels of happiness and enjoyment
  3. And finally, providing stable mental environments

It’s important to have healthy relationships with your coworkers in the office. It provides avenues for workers to problem solve and tackle projects together; instead of feeling like an obligation, camaraderie and relationship building creates a situation of a friend needing assistance to finish a big project.

On average, the full-time employee spends eight hours a day at work. The critical variable: is the work environment draining and detrimental to productivity, or are there people to offer jokes, light-hearted stories, and a shoulder to lean on during times of large workloads, resulting in a welcoming space to work? Introducing opportunities for employees to forge work friendships not only allows a time to de-stress, but also a time to laugh.

Which ties into the final point – staying sane. When the deluge of hectic craziness hits, sometimes only a shared groan can remind you that you’re human. Making friends in the workplace creates a support network and does wonders for morale, mental health, and productivity.

Regardless of where you work, more often than not you will have to interact with people; you will have a boss, you will have people you’re serving, and you will have people you’re working with. Developing and maintaining good relationships with coworkers is important.

Let’s look at ways to cultivate and develop good relationships with coworkers:

Know how to present yourself

Putting your best foot forward is always intimidating when beginning a new job or beginning a new friendship. Being personable and confident in the skills you have, as well as who you are, allows you to interact with coworkers about tasks and assignments, providing avenues to break the ice. While it may take time to learn how to perform the responsibilities of the position you’ve been hired for, it’s also important to learn how to integrate yourself into the company.

Use good communication skills

Communication takes work – and is learned through a trial-and-error process. Listening, asking questions, being honest, being open, and being prepared and confident in what you’re trying to say are all important pieces of being a good communicator. Getting personal allows you to build a connection by focusing on how a message is being understood by the listener. Ensuring that the information you’re passing on in a conversation is correct is critical. If you lack confidence in whether or not your information is valid, admit uncertainty. When speaking with another person, avoid superfluous and vague words and phrases that would detract from what you’re saying. Most importantly, effective communication is knowing what, when, and how to communicate with those around you. By being a good communicator, people can get to know you on a deeper and more personal level, resulting in friendship.

Establish appropriate boundaries

Remember, building relationships with coworkers is so that the workload goes faster and getting through it becomes more efficient. If, instead, you use the workplace to pick up a romantic relationship, it will complicate not only how you relate to the individual you’re now seeing, but the dynamic between you and the other workers. Keeping in mind that the workplace is the environment to develop strategies to work better, instead of a place to find new drinking buddies is helpful for drawing those lines.

Learning how to separate professional and personal relationships

In some cases, you may be privy to more knowledge about a situation than your coworker friend, and you’ll be faced with the choice of either sharing what you know even though it’s detrimental for the information to be shared, or keeping the information from your friend but dealing with feelings of betrayal. Or you may be in a scenario where you and your friend are competing and being ranked against each other. A necessary skill is learning how to celebrate your friend’s success when they do better than you, and how to maintain friendship through jealousy which may result from doing better than your friends.