HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED how tiny John Travolta’s beard is? It’s really small. Like, very, very small. Or at least, it was around the year 2014. In fact, perhaps it doesn’t even qualify as a beard; it’s more an infinitesimal island of facial hair that set itself up on John Travolta’s face and refused to leave. It can’t have been an aesthetic decision, surely not. Perhaps it’s hiding something, some sort of grotesque chin abnormality. Perhaps it’s in a movie contract. Whatever it is, the discovery of John Travolta’s tiny beard was perhaps the greatest moment of friendship celebration I’ve had in an office environment. It truly, truly broke me and a number of others. To this day, photographic proof of the tiny beard can still undo me. Circa 2014, my friend Rosie and I were browsing the Internet (it was our job to do so, at the time) and came across an article by a very funny Australian journalist called Nick Bond. Nick announced the debut of the tiny beard with a full photograph of John Travolta, in a suit, on the red carpet. What followed was a series of photos, each zoomed in slightly more than the last, until the final one, which was literally just the offending facial hair in question. Something about the simple genius of this article really tickled Rosie and me. We came very close to printing it out and wallpapering the entire office with it. For a start, we couldn’t quite believe Nick Bond could get away with publishing increasingly zoomed in photographs of John Travolta’s beard as a legitimate piece of journalism; we worshipped him for this act of pure silliness. To us, it was perfect. Rosie and I both often wrote about social issues and famous people for a living, and nothing pleased us more than this flagrant disregard for the rules of journalism. Of course the content was perfect, too; the dissemination of news like the fact that John Travolta had grown a tiny beard is actually the reason the Internet was invented in the first place. As far as celebrity journalism goes, it’s got it all: intrigue, suspense, chin sweat. And then there was the twist: Rosie had been to a red carpet event in LA and actually had a photograph taken with John Travolta and the tiny beard. Her face was nearly touching the beard as they leaned in for a selfie. She brought the photo up on her laptop and by this stage, we were screaming. We were in such fits of giggles there was no chance of us doing any proper work all afternoon. We cried actual salty tears of happiness. Worse, if we’re going to think about workplace productivity for a moment, is that it was contagious. Obviously people wanted to know what we thought was so funny, so the image of John Travolta’s tiny beard was circulated around the office and we started dragging everyone into the joy of its discovery. When someone went to a meeting or the bathroom, we’d change their screen saver to a picture of The Beard. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard at anything in my life.
And that’s what work friendship can be like: magnificent and funny and irreverent. It can make work a joy, and can literally change your entire attitude to getting up every morning and turning up at the same place every day. Good work friends are total game changers. Sure, they can be a huge distraction — whispering about your latest Tinder date as you mainline free cookies over the sink and dedicating entire email threads to Ryan Gosling’s true feminist intentions are not, strictly speaking, what your boss would consider the best use of your time — but I’d argue everyone needs a certain level of escapism built into their corporate lives or they’d go mad. Work can be satisfying and fulfilling and all that lovely stuff, but it can also be hectic and painful and dull. We are in the middle of an epidemic of workplace stress and it’s causing very serious mental health issues across many industries. What with the immersive experience of having a smartphone and an Internet connection, we are increasingly forgetting to switch off altogether, and more of us are allowing work to seep into every goddamn orifice of our lives. With that in mind, it’s bloody nice to have a friend to share it with.
Having Rosie at work meant I always had a confidant, an advisor and a buddy. We could go get beef pho together down the road and swap secrets, talk about boys and debrief about work. We could check on each other when things got emotional, back each other up in meetings and big up each other’s work. It was a genuine delight to have her as my work buddy, and we’ve kept that friendship going since we both left the job we were doing when we met. The friendship worked because we were both senior employees so there was no power disparity between us and we rarely went after the same stories so there was no envy or competition. We spent so much time together too; probably more than we spent with our families. She was, in the popular language of the cool people, my ‘work wife’. People often refer to their closest friends at work as their ‘work wife’ or ‘work husband’, which probably hints at the fact that we see these people more often than the ones we choose to marry/sleep with/share residential space with/unconditionally adore. The coining of that phrase probably also has something to do with the level of emotional support that person provides. Work can be an extremely stressful place, and your work wife or husband is your sanctuary and your support. That is, if you’ve got a good one. Or maybe two.
A friend of mine — let’s call her Ingrid — works in a high-pressure marketing job, in an industry that could easily be described as overtly masculine or male dominated. She is exceptional at what she does, a real prodigy. But outright conflict and the subtler politics of jimmying egos and clashing motives are inevitable in any workplace and that sometimes threatens to take over her job. Navigating the ins and outs, ups and downs, backwards and forwards of people’s intentions and ambitions can be a full-time job in itself, if you’re not careful. And so Ingrid has recruited a duo of best friends — it’s a polygamous work marriage — to support her throughout all that. They met doing a problem-solving task and got on so well as a trio, they became close. They talked at work, got lunch and eventually started going for walks and catch-ups on the weekends. They’ve discovered something rather beautiful, and perhaps rare: they seem to take turns building one person up and making them believe in themselves. When Ingrid had to write a ‘big scary email’ to her boss, her friends helped her draft it. When one of the others had to be assertive with someone senior to her, they practised her speech together. And when the other had to renegotiate her position, all three role-played the scenario until she felt confident enough to do it for real. They call each other when they can’t solve a work problem, share funny things on WhatsApp and offer each other genuine emotional support. They make each other better at their jobs because they crowd source the parts that overwhelm or intimidate them. They lift each other up.
Friendship like this in the office is an obvious morale boost. Having work mates can, at least, put you in a good mood and at best, completely change the way you approach your work life. This isn’t just anecdotal, either. Studies show that having just one close friend at work improves mood, attention span and perhaps more surprisingly, productivity. Work spouses can make us more focused, more loyal and more passionate. A well-known 1999 Gallup Poll found that those who had a friend at work were 43 per cent more likely to report they had received praise and recognition for their work in the past week. The objective of the poll was to identify what companies with high levels of the following are doing right: employee retention, customer metrics, productivity and profitability. The guy who devised the survey questions was almost laughed out of the office when he suggested they ask how strongly people identify with the statement, ‘I have a best friend at work’ but his insistence on including friendship as a metric of corporate success was validated. People with strong work friendships were 37 per cent more likely to report that someone at work has encouraged their development, 27 per cent more likely to report that the mission of their company makes them feel like their work is important and 27 per cent more likely to report that they feel like their opinions matter. All of which is to say, unequivocally, that friendship in the workplace is an important thing. Not just to keep employees happy, but to make them better at their jobs. Research consistently and overwhelmingly suggests that people with at least one strong work friendship perform better, think more creatively, show more initiative and get better results. They get sick less often, have fewer accidents and change jobs less frequently. Managers and bosses all over the world should and do take notice of this research; why else do you think Google bought so many brightly coloured bean bags for their meeting rooms, why else does every start-up and creative agency have a ping pong table? We are becoming increasingly aware that friendship (or at the very least, a congenial atmosphere made up of comfortable, garish furniture and indoor sports) is essential to success, quite contrary to the rather dismal urban myth that the greatest achievers among us are loners.
The importance of workplace camaraderie became obvious to me when I worked at Cosmopolitan magazine in Australia. When I started there as features editor, I had my own office. It was the first time I had my own four walls at work, and it made me feel extremely important. I had space for armchairs so my team could congregate for meetings, and when nobody was looking I could put my cherished turquoise high-heel sneakers up on the desk as I was editing articles. I covered the walls with torn-out pages from magazines: Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, Kerry Washington and Feminist Ryan Gosling. My predecessor had wallpapered an entire cabinet with vintage Cosmo covers: Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez. It was my little sanctuary, my little den of inspiration, and at first, I loved it. It was quiet when I needed to read or think or write. It was peaceful. But then I started to notice that if I wanted actual human interaction, I had to venture out of my four walls or invent a reason to invite someone in. I’d hear little snippets of banter as people walked by my door, but for the most part I missed out on all that casual chit-chat that goes on between very important work tasks. I found myself lingering at the biscuit tin or the microwave, hoping to catch someone on a snack run for a quick hit of social interaction. I’d hear giggling from the open plan parts of the office just outside my room, and feel desperately left out. There were times I’d heckle people as they passed by because I wanted in on whatever joke they were sharing. I started to feel like Ricky Gervais or Steve Carell in The Office; some sort of creep lurking around her colleagues in the hope of feeling like maybe we were friends. And I wanted to be friends with the girls at Cosmo — they were smart and funny and offensively chic. So, when my editor announced that we would have to knock down the walls of my office to make room for new hires, I was thrilled. We turned my office into a little cove with four desks, four chairs, four computers. I instantly got three new work buddies and it changed everything. We called our little area ‘The Quad’ and we adored it (studies show that work friends often come up with nicknames for themselves that they find hilarious or clever, but everyone else regards as questionable at best). The three other women in The Quad were whip-smart, hilarious, ambitious, fierce, gentle, supportive, loving, and ferociously good at what they did. They were an inspiration every day, professionally, and just the kind of diversion I needed.
The thing about full-time work in an office is that you need something to break up the monotony. In my experience, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to be motivated, alert and productive from 9 till 5 (or, more accurately, from when you wake up and first check your emails/social media till whenever you physically stop checking them at night). Procrastination, for me, is an entirely mandatory part of the process of working. So I truly can’t see the harm in pressing pause on trying to collate 3,852 sex tips because your boss wants the most sex tips ever collated in one article by Wednesday for a little banter about the ridiculous time Harriet auditioned to be one of the girls on The Bachelor and answered the question, ‘If you were a drink, what would you be?’ with the most endearingly hopeless answer possible: ‘Tap water’. Frankly, as long as you’re meeting your deadlines, I don’t see why you can’t stop transcribing your interview with Khloe Kardashian momentarily so you can discuss the fact that Sean from Accounting is definitely shamelessly pursuing Harriet one very enthusiastic desk visit at a time. We have evolved to use gossip as a mechanism for intimacy, and you cannot tell me that whispering about who just asked for time off to get their breasts evened out doesn’t make you feel closer to your work mates. As long as you’re not being malicious or hurting anyone, a bit of banter in the office is entirely necessary for reasons of sanity and camaraderie. Work is work; your passion for it can turn up some days and abandon you on others. But good friendship is always there, if you look after it right. Good friends at work can be the difference between sinking and swimming. They can get you through mistakes, fights, deadlines, meetings, redundancies, rumours and awkward interactions at Christmas parties. They can give you professional advice over coffee, break-up solace during lunch and Tinder encouragement at Friday night drinks. They can, if you’re lucky, walk an entirely delightful line between your professional and private lives, skipping between the two when you require it.
And what a beautiful moment it is, when you first realise that someone from work wants to be a part of your crew. When you start a job somewhere, befriending people can be a little bit like asking them out on a date: you can’t be entirely sure they feel the same way about you, so gingerly extending an invitation to lunch or drinks after work can be awkward and nerve-racking. I spoke to Gyan, who got her start in magazines in Australia, about the exact moment she realised her mate Julia wanted to be more than just work colleagues. They’d known each other a while — Julia had come in for work experience and then, tenacious girl that she was, returned for an internship at the magazine where Gyan worked. Gyan knew she wanted to be mates with Julia, but she didn’t know quite how to seal the deal. Until, that is, they were walking from the office to the train station and Julia, impromptu, started telling Gyan a story about a boy. It was the first time they’d really deviated from work-based chat, and Gyan jumped at the chance to lift the friendship out of its work-only context. She listened and then told her own story about a boy, just as they arrived at the station and had to catch different trains. Since that moment, Gyan and Julia have been really close friends; they travel to music festivals together, go out and have had so many sleepovers they’ve lost count. But Gyan can trace it all back to that one conversation, when she knew their friendship had crossed over from professional territory to personal. Frankly, I can’t imagine having a job (or staying in a job) without having someone make that transition in your life. How do you get by without an ally in the office? Who do you painstakingly debrief with, and who else in your life cares about the minutiae of office politics and interactions?
For Agnes, that moment of friendship revelation in the office was a little more complicated. When she first met her eventual work wife, she didn’t actually like her. They were both smokers so they’d see each other on smoke breaks and gently avoid one another. This woman committed some of the deadliest office sins known to man and woman: she brought in smelly lunches and she talked loudly on the phone. She gave every impression of being obnoxious, self-involved, even garish. Meanwhile, Agnes read the Communist Manifesto alone in the office cafeteria, which, she admits now, probably made her seem equally unapproachable. They went about their jobs with a faint but consistent dislike for one another, and no intention whatsoever to strike up a friendship. Then, one day, they were literally the only two people in the smoking area and social convention forced them to attempt small talk with one another. They stayed in that smoking area an unnatural length of time, chatting and discovering that the other person was not, as previously suspected, terribly disagreeable. From then on, they were inseparable and dependent upon each other for much of their job’s enjoyment. They were working in IT at the time, on a product they neither believed in nor felt particularly passionate about, so their friendship became a strong reason to actually come into the office each day. Agnes’s friend continued to bring in smelly lunches and eat popcorn noisily, but she forgave her because by then she knew it had no particular bearing on her personality. Eventually, they both moved on from those jobs, but they continued a morning ritual of meeting for coffee at Starbucks near Baker Street tube stop in London — the perfect way to start the work day, with a little caffeine and gossip. Agnes lives in London and her friend moved to Austria, so now they only see each other twice a year. But they do it properly: her friend’s husband takes the kids away for three days so she and Agnes get a chance to have an immersive, intensive friendship love-in. The moral of Agnes’s story, to me, is that everyone should conceivably be able to find a friend at work. Befriending the noisy eater in her office turned into a lifelong friendship, and provided Agnes with sorely needed solace in an inspirationally barren workplace. It changed her entire approach to work. Sure, she had less spare time to bone up on socialist literature over lunch, but she had the true pleasure of office companionship and I would wish that upon everyone.
And yet an alarmingly small number of us actually have these important work friendships. The company Total Jobs spoke to 4,000 employees and 100 employers for their research into the ‘work spouse’ phenomenon and they discovered just 17 per cent of those people claimed to have a work spouse, AKA a close friend at work. This is despite the fact that 70 per cent of employers say they think friendship is good for morale, company culture and the health of the people they employ. It’s despite the fact that every statistic and survey suggests friendship makes people happier, healthier, more creative and more productive. Those who do have at least one close friend at work are overwhelmingly better off: they report feeling stronger and more valued as a member of staff, more excited to come into work and more productive. In fact, in spite of all the gossiping and banter that goes on, just four per cent of those surveyed said they felt less productive because of a friendship at work. Twenty-three per cent would consider leaving their job if their ‘work spouse’ did and seven per cent would describe the news that their friend was leaving as bereavement.
I spoke to so many people — friends of my own, generous strangers from the Internet — who live out the statistics about friendship in the workplace. Hayley and Lauren work at a charity organisation together and they’re so besotted with one another as work mates, they’re known as the ‘Bert and Ernie’ of their office (though they of course prefer to think of themselves as the Tina Fey and Amy Poehler of the not-for-profit sector). Hayley says they’re like the old guys in The Muppets during meetings, sitting up the back and whisper-heckling. They have come to mean so much to each other, because they are literally one another’s best job perks. Amy and Frances, who work in entertainment journalism, ended up getting matching tattoos because they were so devoted to one another as work friends and then later, as life friends. Amy says the ‘lols and bants’ they had at work got her through severe anxiety and enabled her to keep doing her job. These sets of work buddies are demonstrably happier in their jobs and their lives in general because they have good, reliable companionship at work. A Relationships at Work study by LinkedIn found that 46 per cent of professionals worldwide believe work friends are important to their overall happiness. A study by London events company Wildgoose found that 61 per cent of people value their happiness at work — of which friendship is a major component — over financial reward. Eighty-one per cent of women and 45 per cent of men said they would take happiness at work before a salary increase. Fifty-seven per cent of people in the 120 businesses Wildgoose surveyed say friendship makes work more enjoyable — and you can only assume the remaining 43 per cent are yet to discover how completely lovely it can be.
So, then, we have to ask: with such resounding evidence in favour of workplace friendship, why is it still rare? I have a few theories. For a start, we’ve still got this residual feeling that offices are strictly professional places. They’re not, not any more. They used to be perhaps, back when people had clear delineations between their personal and their professional lives. Back when people could arrive at work, put in their hours and return home, not to be contacted by their boss, their client or their colleagues. Back when they had a semblance of privacy, a private life they could call their own, an existence they could tap into only from the confines of their home. All of that is virtually unheard of now that we have blurred the lines between our professional and private selves so rigorously. In most industries today — certainly in your standard corporate office set-up — we bring to work a hybrid of those selves. We have to. It’s become necessary to do so, because work has seeped outside of the standard 35 hours in an office and started to define who we are, not just what we do. Work is an intrinsic part of our identities now, as well as a stubborn and consuming part of our schedules. Millennials, whom I shall defend forever and a day, have had to adapt to fast-increasing demands on their time and identities. It’s well documented and recognised in corporate circles that young people are more cavalier about disclosing personal information in the workplace, more likely to befriend one another and more brazen with their contacting of people from the office outside of hours. They add/follow/like their colleagues on social media now, too, because to them, even the performativity of the personal is professional. According to a LinkedIn study, 67 per cent of millennials are likely to share personal details at work including their salary, their relationships and family issues, compared to just one-third of baby boomers. As far as casual communication outside of work goes, 28 per cent of millennials have texted their manager after hours about a non-work issue, compared to just 10 per cent of baby boomers. When you look at generational attitudes to work culture, there is a very real shift happening in how personal we are willing to get at work. If we remain professional at work at all times, without allowing our senses of humour, our humanity and our compassion to pop up at the office, then we will go utterly mad. Some people, I have to say, already have. Stress, anxiety, panic and serious existential anguish are alarmingly common side-effects of a working life now — and something must be done. In the absence of a solution that involves dialling back the presence of technology in our lives and reclaiming personal time for ourselves, the best possible thing we can do is develop positive relationships at work so we can perform the ultimate multi-task: work and friendship. All of that begins with a willingness to be our private selves in the office. It begins with a deliberate, strategic injection of kindness and candour.
How exactly, after all, do you cultivate intimacy? The fastest and most reliable way of making a friend is to share personal information with someone. Friendship is an exchange of vulnerabilities; a deal done in personal exposure. Of course it’s going to be difficult for some people, especially those who began their careers in a stiff corporate environment, to feel comfortable sharing personal details with their work mates. But — and this gives me hope for the work friendships of the future — that seems to be changing. Young people, bless their catchphrase T-shirts and trendy office sneakers, are leading the charge when it comes to healthy vulnerability at work. They are finding room in their corporate lives to attend to their mental health, maintain their sanity and meet their emotional needs — and they’re doing it by making buddies, I swear to Beyoncé. As we eat into our personal time with work commitments (we don’t even take lunch breaks any more), it has become necessary to satisfy our emotional needs at work, too. With skyrocketing levels of stress, fatigue and burnout literally threatening and shortening people’s lives, the very least we can do for ourselves is find solace and support. That is to say, we need work wives and work husbands and work BFFs more than ever because without them, all we have is the impending doom of an existence entirely defined by how well we perform at work. I don’t know about you, but I’m simply not ready and not willing to surrender to that kind of apocalypse right now.
Speaking of unruly hell, things can get worse than just not having a work spouse to call your own. Being a loner at work is sad, but salvageable. What’s not acceptable is workplace bullying and possibly even worse, workplace cruelty under the guise of friendship. I’ve known offensively disingenuous and outright cruel people in work environments, and I’ve watched how they can destroy a person’s self-esteem, confidence and ability to function. I’ve known people to leave jobs with their identities in tatters because one asshole or another decides to make their life at work a living hell. And it can be so much more dangerous to encounter one of these toxic people at work because there are so many layers of secrecy and professionalism. Not to mention, of course, that you are stuck with that person by circumstance. At least if you become entangled in a toxic friendship in your own time, you can wriggle out of it with some clarity and support from a really decent therapist/friend/ally. But when you come up against an abominable person at work — either someone who shamelessly belittles you or goes about their cruelty in a sneakier fashion — it can be so much harder to find your way out.
Claudia met her toxic work friend when she started a new job in a new city. Let’s call this person Pauline. Pauline was slightly senior to Claudia, say, one job title up in the office hierarchy. So, right from the beginning, there was a discrepancy in power that made their friendship complicated, even precarious. But they were both in their early-to-mid twenties, both into theatre, both particularly invested in the stories of a famous boy wizard by the name of Harry Potter. So they struck up a friendship outside of work: they’d go to Friday night drinks and Pauline would crash at Claudia’s place when she got drunk because it was closer to the centre of London. As Claudia tells it, they had that enchanting sense of being kindred spirits you get when you realise you’re into the same things, but even at the very beginning of their friendship, there were warning signs about Pauline. Pauline didn’t get on with a lot of other people in the office; she was the sort of person who collected disagreements and sometimes, even she and Claudia would spar. But, as you do when you have that fresh, naive faith in a new friend, Claudia didn’t worry too much. It was about 18 months into the friendship that cracks really began to show, and Claudia realised that perhaps Pauline had never been a friend at all; not really. Claudia started to notice, with that nauseating sort of hindsight, that Pauline had been quite cruel and controlling, and perhaps not very nice at all. She had enjoyed her seniority to Claudia a little too much, indulged in her sense of importance a little too enthusiastically, tested the limits of the friendship a little too gleefully. It was a classic toxic friendship in the sense that Claudia never knew quite where she stood, or worse, suspected she knew exactly where she stood in Pauline’s estimation of things. Pauline toyed with Claudia’s confidence, both professionally and personally, sometimes in a clandestine way, other times in a very open, almost outlandish way, in front of other people. She was cruel to Claudia, but Claudia didn’t have many friends outside of work, so she persisted with the friendship, taking hit after hit to her self-esteem.
Then Pauline left the company to do her dream job. As it happened, Claudia could see her dream job right alongside her at this new gig. And so, disillusioned with the friendship but hardened enough by it to still see value in the connection, Claudia asked for Pauline’s help getting a job in Pauline’s new company. It was entirely plausible; Claudia was very good at her job and uniquely employable, given her specific set of expertise. So it wasn’t an outlandish or awkward thing to ask Pauline to suss out the possibilities. Pauline, who clearly still enjoyed being of value to Claudia, promised to fight in her corner and bring her over to this new company. But it didn’t exactly work out that way. Pauline’s promises were empty and she let months pass without doing anything to help Claudia. It was beyond unhelpful — by this stage, things had transpired at her old job and Claudia now needed this new job to stay in the country. But Pauline kept Claudia in this cycle of promise and disappointment, which was ultimately tantamount to career sabotage, and the role never eventuated. What friendship they had left dropped off almost entirely and it became a purely transactional relationship: formal, distant, perfunctory. Looking back on the friendship, Claudia is just not convinced she ever meant anything real to Pauline; that she ever really qualified as a friend. And certainly, she wasn’t treated like a friend, not really, not when she’s being honest with herself about it. Claudia ended up leaving her job and searching for a new one, with the serious risk of having to leave the country looming over her, dejected and ravaged by this friendship which had always had undercurrents of emotional abuse. Claudia suspects this is just how Pauline conducts relationships in her life: with tenderness when she feels like it and it suits her, but ultimately with a strange callousness bordering on narcissism. Months later, she is still shaken by the experience of having Pauline in her life, under the guise of friendship. It seriously eroded her confidence and it will take a while to get that back.
This sort of toxic friendship in the workplace is inevitable because terrible people have day jobs, too. We cannot hope to always meet glorious, uplifting people in the context of work and we cannot always be guaranteed the Bert to our Ernie or the Tina to our Amy. Work friendship is very often to do with luck, perhaps more so than in the outside world. It’s a little bit like school in the sense that you find yourself in this finite group of human beings for a period in your life, for many hours a day, five days a week, and you have to find the best companionship possible or go it alone. It can be a savage environment for so many reasons, not least the fact that bullies need to make a living, too, and they don’t especially care who they destroy in order to do so. Workplace bullying is, in my opinion, one of the great scourges of corporate culture and something we are woefully mishandling as a general rule. It’s very difficult to define, identify and report bullying because it’s insidious and manipulative by its very nature, and besides, the victim doesn’t want to make it worse or risk losing their job by getting HR involved. It’s virtually impossible to report ‘a growing, ominous sense that I’ve been emotionally abused by someone I thought was my friend’ too, because it’s delicate and so often happens without the full cognisance of the person embroiled in it. And so we are left with this rather stark set of options at work: find the real mates if you’re lucky, detect the fake ones if you’re sharp, avoid the truly abominable ones by virtue of extreme wit and, if all that fails, quit. I can’t help thinking we could be doing more to eradicate bullying and set our KPIs of kindness significantly higher. I know there are so many factors at play when you’re trying to find and keep a job — financial security, creative satisfaction, ambition fulfilment, career advancement strategy, all that potentially great stuff. But I have to say, my personal policy on the professional is to prioritise happiness, and therefore friendship, even at work. It’s a difficult thing to do, I get it; success can be a clinical thing and we’ve certainly seen unkind people reach great levels of it. Friendship isn’t compulsory for success, and perhaps that’s why so many people forego it. We’re in an era where even the contestants on reality TV shows frequently proclaim, ‘I’m not here to make friends.’ I just think that above pretty much all else, we bloody should be. That’s all. Do me a favour, though, if you can. Just try upping your loveliness output at work and see if you can nab yourself an office spouse. Trial it for a while. Find me personally to let me know if all the stats lie and friends don’t make you happier, more productive and better at your job.