Should coworkers be friends?
Teasing apart the age old question
Some of my closest friends today are coworkers from past jobs.
When I worked in consulting, it was very natural to become close friends with others in my start class, particularly since we mostly worked on separate case teams. We were all new college grads who’d moved to a new place and were figuring out how to “adult” together. It didn’t feel that much like being friends with coworkers because we were off on our various projects during the week and often barely caught glimpses of each other in the office. That said, over time, I also became friends with a number of people who’d been on the same case team as me. In those situations, there was a lot more interaction on a regular basis.
When I started working in startup-land, I also became close friends with coworkers. Then, I was working shoulder-to-shoulder alongside these people day in and day out, and also being friends with them in our outside-of-work hours. This felt more akin to becoming friends with my teammates on the same case, except that it was permanent, meaning our overlapping project wasn’t coming to an end after x months had passed. Pretty soon, the pros and cons of this type of friendship revealed themselves.
Since working at a larger company, I’ve pontificated a lot on the tradeoffs of such friendships. When I first started, I had fairly high conviction that I wanted to hold new boundaries and not become friends with coworkers. However, over the past year, I’ve met some great people and gotten closer to them. Naturally, I’ve started to build some degree of friendship that extends beyond work. As my conviction has wavered, I’ve perhaps been reminded of the benefits of friends at work.
On the one hand, it’s way more fun. I can be snarky and exchange true feelings and thoughts rather than always having a veil of seriousness. Whether friends or not, I try to generally be myself at work, but being friends means I can be a bit more unfiltered. This makes work feel less abrupt in the broader context of my life, because it allows me to transition back and forth rather than requiring me to shed one skin and don another. I also believe that being closer to people and understanding them better allows us all to be more effective at our jobs. Sometimes it makes me better at anticipating their needs and supporting them better or empowers me to provide more candid feedback that helps them grow and develop, just to name a few ways.
On the other hand, I think back to some of the downsides that I’ve experienced:
It makes it harder to have good work-life balance. There is no compartmentalization or clear divide. A post-work text conversation can devolve from non-work topics to work topics really quickly, if both parties aren’t drawing certain lines.
Moreover, it can make simple work obligations or disagreements feel magnified and way more personal. A debate suddenly feels more like a personal attack. Something where there wasn’t a need to bring in ego suddenly feels all about ego, or feelings are suddenly hurt when a decision is made with the wellbeing of the business in mind. What if you disagree at work? Can you continue on perfectly normally outside of work?
Does it break some sort of code of professionalism? I generally believe that I can still be professional and good at my job even if I’m sometimes silly or more of myself than just my buttoned up work self. But in moments of insecurity, I worry that being my unfiltered, raw self can lead others around me to doubt my abilities.
At the end of the day, I still don’t have good answers here.
It could be that the compromise is to embrace work friendships so long as there are healthy boundaries.
I actually set a new year’s goal of making one more friend at work this year because I felt that the friendships I’d developed so far have been meaningful and rewarding. I wonder if perhaps it is also easier for me now to be friends with my coworkers, as most people are not a part of my direct team. I don’t work super closely together with one set of people—in fact, it’s quite distributed. It’s entirely possible that the distance helps make it more fun and less risky to be friends.
Alas, I’d be curious to hear thoughts on this in the comments!