How Our Company Benefits from Our Friendships at Work
Unfortunately, very few managers, HR professionals, or corporate legal teams are lying awake at night trying to figure out how to bond more people in their organizations. I can attest that they aren’t Googling “friendship speaker” or “how to encourage friendships at work.” But they should be.
We all should be because the challenges we are stressed about—such as increasing employee engagement, building a diverse workforce that gets along, maximizing the productivity of our employees, lowering stress and burnout, recruiting talented employees who fit our culture, training for better customer service, decreasing health-care costs, encouraging collaboration and creativity, addressing employee drug use, preparing for workplace violence, preventing sexual harassment, developing stronger leaders, and reducing employee turnover—all have healthy relationships at their core.
Every single one of those objectives comes down to the personal and relational health of the people we employ.
And even more pointedly, to how they like, enjoy, and respect those with whom they work. A new report, “Well-Being in the Workplace,” recently released from the Myers-Briggs Company, showcases the findings from a three-year international study of more than ten thousand people in 131 countries and confirms that “relationships are the leading contributor to workplace well-being.”1
The leading contributor. I wasn’t shocked at all that our relationships were one of the biggest contributors to our satisfaction at work—Gallup started tracking that outcome a generation ago—but to see, again, that relationships edged out other crucial factors, such as job meaning, personal accomplishments, engagement, and positive emotions, is still hard to really believe.
It’s their relationships at work that matter most while they’re there. While employee satisfaction is not one factor alone, it is nearly impossible to attain it if our employees feel alone. Their relationships to each other continue to score higher than we’re collectively admitting. So even if we could assume that every employee walking in our front doors each day was getting their relational needs met outside of work (which they aren’t), it wouldn’t be enough. Unfortunately, too many of them are arriving at work lonely, feeling lonely while they’re in our care, and going back home even more lonely and stressed.
We have the incredible opportunity to disrupt that cycle in a way that serves our missions and boosts our bottom line.
THE COST OF LONELINESS ON PROFITABILITY
It can be a tricky game to try to put a precise price tag on loneliness in our workforce, particularly as there’s a range of how lonely we all are, a host of problems when trying to measure it, and a variety of ways it gets expressed on the job. But ask those who are lonely and more than a third of them blatantly admit that it results in them making more mistakes, feeling less productive, and getting sick more often.2
That adds up. In fact, as the UK was the first country to appoint a Minister of Loneliness, in 2018, they’ve been pioneering some great research on the topic in general but also more specifically on how loneliness affects our business costs. They’ve looked at such things as how loneliness affects employee health outcomes, the costs associated with absence due to sickness, how it affects employee well-being, and the price tag to employers in loss of productivity and voluntary staff turnover. They’ve conservatively estimated that their lonely workers are costing employers upwards of £2.5 billion ($3.5 billion) and conclude, “Our findings of substantial costs from loneliness to UK employers strongly suggest that it is in their interests to take both reactive and preventative approaches to minimise [sic] the loneliness of their employees.”3
Let’s break that down a bit and dive a bit deeper in some of the metrics that are correlated with our loneliness at work, starting with one of the biggest headaches for leaders and HR professionals: employee retention and turnover.
Employee Engagement and Retention
Sherri, a COO at a hospital, felt sick realizing that turnover was costing them almost $10 million a year, so knowing that their savings could be significant if they could increase their retention by even a few percentage points she went to her HR team and asked, “What can we do?”
One of their big ideas was to put together a campaign to encourage more friendships at work. Sherri later told me, “I rolled my eyes and thought ‘they’ve got to be kidding me,’ but then they showed me the research and we ended up reaching our retention goals last year.”
Of course, when giving notice, no one says, “I’m leaving because I’m lonely,” but Workhuman reports that the more friends we have at work, the less likely we are to take another job offer, whereas even one friend doubles the likelihood of employees saying they “love” their company and are proud to work there. (Interestingly, that number continues to increase as their number of reported friends increases.) And these aren’t employees who just stay longer, but they are also more trusting of leadership and report feeling significantly more engaged.4
What does that engagement look like? According to Gallup, the company that has long been tracking the connection between friendship and engagement, “An organization full of employees who believe they belong is an organization full of employees who feel purposeful, inspired and alive—in other words, engaged.”5 Employees with a best friend at work are:
• 43 percent more likely to report having received praise or recognition for their work in the last seven days.
• 37 percent more likely to report that someone at work encourages their development.
• 35 percent more likely to report coworker commitment to quality.
• 28 percent more likely to report that, in the last six months, someone at work has talked to them about their progress.
• 27 percent more likely to report that the mission of their company makes them feel their job is important.
• 27 percent more likely to report that their opinions seem to count at work.
• 21 percent more likely to report that, at work, they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day.6
All these numbers drive engagement and retention, which adds up to more profitability. We increase the number of workers who feel connected to a best friend and we increase the likelihood of them feeling connected to their job.
Our employees need to hear a strong yes when they ask, “Do I belong here?”
Employee Compensation
Even throwing money at them doesn’t make as big of a difference as fostering their friendships.
A study across Europe found that even though half of employees feel underpaid, the majority of them said they’d turn down a pay raise if it meant working with someone they didn’t like. When asked why they stay at their current job, their number one answer—even before things such as enjoying their role, the development of their career, or being good at their job—was, “I have a good relationship with my colleagues.”7 Similarly, Workhuman reports that US professionals rank compensation as the third most important factor, following behind enjoying the people we work with when answering why we stay at our companies.8 And numerous studies are showing that this value for belonging at work scores even higher for Generation Z and Millennials.
We can’t underpay our employees, but we have to remember that giving a raise not only doesn’t solve the issue of their disengagement, but it costs us even more if that employee stays disengaged. LinkedIn Learning has put together an employee disengagement calculator built on the data that 17.2 percent of an organization’s workforce is disengaged and that disengaged employees cost their organization 34 percent of their salary. That means if you have five thousand employees with a median salary of $60,000, the total cost of disengagement to your organization comes out to $17.5 million a year.9 Not a cheap price tag, at all. So while a disengaged employee earning $60,000 a year will cost $20,400, a salary increase to $80,000 now costs $27,200 a year if the person is still disengaged.
Let’s compensate them and connect them.
Employee Health, Safety, and Resilience
The health of our employees, if they are lonely, is at greater risk than if they are chain-smokers, obese, or addicted to alcohol. But what we care about more than our average employee might care about is how that translates to five fewer sick days a year and almost half as many workplace accidents.10 Employees with friends have stronger immune systems, lower rates of anxiety and depression, recover from surgeries faster, and show up to work with more energy.
Motivated by the desire to create a safer workplace, one CEO of a construction company brought me in to teach relationships to his employees—mostly men, a mix of engineers, architects, and cement pourers. He guessed that most of those men, on their own, weren’t going to go sign up for a “friendship class.” But by teaching them relationship skills in his work setting, he not only built a stronger and safer workforce who could use those skills to his direct benefit; but it was to his indirect benefit when they fostered better relationships at home too. “Honestly,” he said, “the happier they are at home means they show up at work happier too.” Six months later, he chuckled as he shared with me that he still overhears guys saying to each other, “Remember, Shasta said we need to practice sharing our lives with each other.” They wanted that connection; they just needed permission and training.
Men, who on average die younger than women, also happen to usually report feeling lonelier than women and having fewer best friends. I’m guessing there’s a correlation. What we teach all of our employees at work can improve the health of their lives in every way. If we facilitate the connections that humans need during the day (or whenever our employees work), then we can go to sleep at night knowing we’re lengthening the lives, boosting the health, reducing the stress, and strengthening the mental health of humanity in general, instead of being the ones blamed for their burnout, exhaustion, and poor health.
For Sherri, the hospital COO, she knew that to lower turnover and increase engagement meant increasing the resilience of those in her care. “Our associates are exposed to pain, death, and trauma every day,” she said. “We realized it’s not just keeping people in our system but helping them recover from the stress of their jobs fast enough to be able to stay here.” And as we saw in the last chapter, it’s through relationships that we protect our bodies from absorbing the stress, feel more hopeful, and strengthen our mental health.
Employee Innovation and Collaboration
But we don’t just want our people healthy and staying forever if we don’t feel like they are also showing up with creativity, innovation, and the ability to collaborate. Enter Google’s famous “Project Aristotle” study in which they spent years studying teams with the hopes of discovering what made the difference between high- and low-performing teams. It’s one thing to simply assign a bunch of people to a project or task and quite another to have the confidence that they’ll maximize their collective strengths, consider diverse ideas, and take the risks to pursue big ideas.
We’ll unpack their results a bit more in the next chapter, but suffice it to say here: we now know that the secret to teams is what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson calls “psychological safety,” which she defines as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”11
Interpersonal risk taking doesn’t happen in a vacuum without trust. And it doesn’t happen with people we fear will judge us or our differing ideas. Psychological safety rests on a foundation of healthy relationships—people who know how to communicate well, empathize with each other, and who feel that they can rely on one another. It’s one thing to recruit and hire talent, but if our people don’t know how to bump into each other and allow themselves to be impacted by those around them to create something bigger than one of them—then we’re leaving big ideas and money on the table.
In fact, look at the seven statements used to help measure whether a team has psychological safety and see if you think there’s one that doesn’t come down to healthy relationships.
• If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
• Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
• People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
• It is safe to take a risk on this team.
• It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
• No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
• Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.12
A team, of course, is nothing if not the strength of the relationship between its members. They don’t have to be best friends, but as you’ll see in the next chapter, you certainly want them to exhibit the outcome of a healthy friendship in which everyone has the skills to connect in helpful ways. Which leads us to our next point.
Employee Interpersonal Skills and Customer Service
Without a doubt, the biggest growth (an 83 percent jump from 49 million to 90 million!13) in our job market since 1980 is in jobs requiring stronger social skills. And by social skills we mean interpersonal, communication, and management skills. Gone are the days when we can simply put our head down and grunt our way through our work. Fewer of us can show up and get our job done merely by being present or flexing our muscles. To that point, Minouche Shafik, the director of the London School of Economics, articulated in 2018 that “in the past, jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in the future they’ll be about the heart.”14 I’d argue we’re in that future already. In a report by Pew Research titled “The State of American Jobs,” when workers are asked about which skills we rely on most in our jobs, the top of the list was interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and good written and spoken communications skills.15
And what I found most interesting is that while more and more of us might describe our jobs as “sitting behind a computer,” only a third of us say computer skills are central to the work we do. And since most of us tend to just repeat the same technical skills in the same small handful of software applications, the stress of learning technical skills is far more intermittent than the ongoing issues we have with the people we work beside.
These interpersonal skills we say matter most to our job success need to be taught in our workplaces. If we want our workforce treating our customers better, understanding how to sell more effectively, participating in collaborative efforts, or speaking up for what they need and what ideas they have—it’s going to fall on our organizations to teach these skills.
I wish it weren’t so. I wish I could tell you that your new employees have been well versed in interpersonal skills from their educational experiences. Unfortunately, only 8 percent of us feel we’ve learned these skills through our formal education. That’s leaving most of us just bumping along, honing whatever skills we acquire by watching and practicing. And we all know the modeling most of us have isn’t necessarily what we want replicated.
The more we focus on training relationship skills within our walls, the more we are equipping our workforce with the skills that broaden our walls. The same three skills that foster healthy friendships with our colleagues and managers are the same skills that strengthen the relationships the company depends upon with its clients, vendors, stockholders, and potential customers.
The bottom line of every company—from leadership training to team building, from research and development to sales and marketing—rests upon our ability to know how to build, deepen, and repair relationships.
• Too many companies use their social media platforms more as one-directional megaphones rather than as a tool for building relationships with their current and potential customers.
• Too many employees describe their off-site meetings as either boring or simply fun diversions, rather than as a strategic experience designed to deepen the team engagement.
• Too many board members and leaders interact as though schmoozing is what bonds people, rather than learning what actually creates a healthy bond and practicing those authentic behaviors.
• Too many customer service representatives see their job as simply trying to put out the fire as fast as they can, rather than stepping into the opportunity to deepen a relationship with a customer.
• Too many supervisors treat their vendors as hired hands, rather than with the intention to deepen the loyalty and build more trust.
• Too many designers and advertisers run toward “How do we show off this product?” rather than asking the more significant question, “What would build our relationship best with our target audience?”
The truth is that once we teach our employees how to build healthy relationships, then we have given them the key to know how to deepen all the relationships our companies depend upon for our success. If we can provide intentional opportunities to help them practice those skills on their teams and in their departments, then we can rest assured that their social muscles are getting a workout, becoming stronger for every other relationship they experience.
THE CALL TO ORGANIZATIONS TO FOCUS ON CONNECTION
Far too few people can even articulate what a healthy relationship looks like, let alone identify exactly what actions lead to trust and bonding, and then have the positive experience of putting those into action. That’s what we’re going to look at in the next chapter. But before we go there, I want to call us back to our collective mission.
When we see reports stating that anywhere between 20 percent and 60 percent of our population is showing up at work with loneliness—whether from social isolation, lack of intimacy, loss of meaningful relationships in their family, an experience in their lives they feel no one understands, or from not feeling appreciated in their workplace—it is past time to teach them how to feed that hunger. If we don’t, we basically have employees with serious unmet needs (similar to not getting enough sleep or not having enough food to eat) showing up with less energy, empathy, joy, and clarity.
We may not feel like this is our responsibility, but the people relying on us think otherwise.
In the Friendships in the Workplace Survey, 60 percent of those surveyed don’t believe their employer does enough to foster their friendships at work. (Similar numbers can be found in other studies.16) Which would be unfortunate by itself, but it’s made worse in that one in four people said their friendships, or lack of them, was “entirely” dependent upon the workplace culture around them. Add those who think the company is “probably” responsible, and that’s 56 percent of our workforce who feels their friendships rely on the tone we set.
Whether I have a best friend at work is entirely dependent on the workplace culture. |
||||
Definitely True |
Probably True |
I Don’t Know |
Probably False |
Definitely False |
24% |
32% |
16% |
18% |
10% |
Only 10 percent don’t hold us completely responsible.
And while it’s good business to care for those who determine the quality of our products and services, it’s also good humanity to see the opportunity we have to make a massive contribution to cure what is nothing less than a deadly epidemic.
For where else are we going to turn this Titanic around? We’re not joining bowling leagues, attending church, hanging out with our neighbors, or participating in civic organizations as we used to. Work is the primary place where we are gathering. Our jobs are definitely a paycheck we need, but they are also the place where we come together to connect and make a difference. Our companies are central to our lives—they are the primary place where we meet people, the place where we spend the most time, and the place where we have the potential to be most seen for what we can offer to others.
So if our workplaces are where we can make the biggest difference to our collective health, then guess who we need helping connect us?
Yes, you.
We need you influencing your team, your department, your organization, your industry to consider how we might do business differently, better. We need you trusting the science and telling them it’s okay to make friends at work. We need you trusting your heart that they need friends at work.
We need connectors who can stand in the spaces that are too quiet, too chaotic, too competitive, too toxic, too exhausting, too image conscious and help give us permission to connect in more meaningful ways.
We need supervisors who micromanage less and friendship facilitate more.
We need more human resources professionals who, instead of getting scared by all the risks of connection, get excited by the rewards that come with it too. For they will know that nothing mighty is made without risk, but they will inquire, “How can we build a stronger community to better withstand some of the risks?”
We need more visionaries in the C suites who don’t just look at the people around them as resources to an end but rather as relationships for which they are responsible. For responsible you are. Whether you want to be, or not, you are the leaders of our communities today. It is around your leadership that we gather, around your workplace that we call our second home, and around your other hires that will affect our health more than any other factor. Please see how much we need you to lead us not only toward revenue, but toward relationships.
And we need you because you need us too. We know your titles can feel alienating, that your roles can leave you feeling unseen and misunderstood, and that your responsibilities have often been prioritized over the relationships you’ve needed too. You’re not meant to lead us and then feel alone.
Connection, I promise, is good for your people, good for your business, and good for you.