Careers
How to Save Your Work Friendships Post-Pandemic
Remote, hybrid, distanced — relationships require time invested
The pandemic has not been kind to work friendships. “Without face-to-face contact, our emotional attachment to our workplace friends is deteriorating really quickly,” says Jessica Methot, an associate professor of human resources management at Rutgers University. “These relationships just kind of froze. People don’t have a reason to reach out for work, so they just aren’t really talking to these people anymore.”
Frozen relationships don’t necessarily thaw. One study showed that the sense of emotional closeness between friends plummets by a third after two months of not seeing each other, and 80% after five months.
Cue the existential crisis: Are work friends really friends at all? Do we spend most of our daytime hours with people who can’t be bothered to call? Was it all fake? Are coworkers just stand-ins for connection?
Methot dryly replies, “I don’t think there has been a better test to answer these questions than the pandemic.”
Before lamenting yet another tragic pandemic loss, know that work friendships are, as human relationships go, really bizarre. “They are basically born out of being in the same place at the same time — these are not necessarily people who we would have been friends with otherwise,” Methot says. “When we remove that office space, that really calls into question the foundation of that relationship.”
And they’re not necessarily all positive. Though work buddies are overall beneficial — and correlate with all sorts of benefits like higher happiness, job performance and satisfaction — these relationships are also predictably beset with tension. How do you manage your feelings when your bestie beats you out for the promotion you desperately wanted? Do you disclose to your boss-friend that you’re gobbling Xanax and gulping Prozac? At what point is it dishonest not to mention it? What happens if you no longer want to be friends with your cubicle-mate? When is it OK to warn a lower-ranking friend of a problem coming their way?
These are no-win situations, and the workplace presents them in droves, due to the conflicting interests of friendship and organization. It’s OK to enjoy the temporary relief that the pandemic has provided.
But you miss your work wife. And the long-term professional risk is that the absence of work friends makes work less engaging and enjoyable and, well, rather bleak. This is a problem. “What we’re seeing is a negative effect on loyalty to the organization, and a sense of loneliness and lack of belonging,” says Hilla Dotan, an organizational behaviorist at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management. “People feel they’re missing out on the whole social side of work, as well as losing their identity within the organization.”
Dotan is a hardcore proponent of shoring up your pandemic work friendships as best you can, and doing what you need to do to keep your work besties in your corner. “I strongly encourage people to build and maintain these friendships, even now, when it’s so difficult,” she says. “Call each other, try to meet—if you can, meet outside or in the park or for coffee.” Here’s how to be proactive:
Identify one-to-four work friends you want to keep. “We don’t all need to be friends with everyone,” Methot says. On average, people have one to three work friends, she says.
Start small. “Even just a brief check-in can be really meaningful,” Methot says. “Because we all know that people are struggling with time famine and family obligations and poor working conditions, we’re more likely to withdraw and not reach out — when reaching out is precisely the behavior we should be engaging in.”
Aim to see each other twice a week. “Coming into work one to two days a week is sufficient to maintain the existing friendships,” Dotan says. “Not coming in at all is really problematic.” Online counts if needed.
If you are new to the company, drop everything and get to the office when it’s safe. “Coming in three to four days a week is really, really important in order to build those relationships and feel a part of an organization, to actually understand what’s going on in this organization and its politics,” Dotan says.
Send surprises or food. Surprise deliveries to a beloved coworker are always popular: chocolate, snacks, flowers. Dotan reports success among Israeli managers sending meal delivery to workers for shared Zoom lunches, and a Dutch company sending out coffeemakers with the company logo for shared Zoom coffee breaks.
If all this friendship-repair, by the way, sounds like your personal hell, honor that instinct. Around 20% of employees, Dotan says, don’t want a work friend, are very happy without a work friend, and prefer to keep it that way. Fly your no-friend flag high. For everyone else, work friends are particularly valuable this year. “They are wonderful because they understand both the professional side of our lives, and now the personal difficulties that everybody is going through,” Dotan says.