It Has Never Been Harder, or More Essential, to Have a Work Best Friend

It Has Never Been Harder, or More Essential, to Have a Work Best Friend

Some do’s and don’ts for finding a worthy ally in a hybrid workplace.

By Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling

June 26, 2024 9:00 pm ET

 

 

Katherine Tester, a management consultant in Minneapolis, started her job in 2021, when everyone at her company was working remotely. “You hear all the time how it gets harder and harder to make friends as you get older—and then the pandemic happened and it was like: Boom!” the 39-year-old says. But on a Zoom conference call she felt a sudden connection with Abbie Stuckey, a 33-year-old account manager. “I just knew I liked her,” Tester recalls.

Their side chats during client meetings swiftly bloomed into private texts, then frequent video calls. “Our 30-minute meetings turned into, ‘I’m just gonna grab a glass of wine and I’ll be right back,’” says Stuckey. Their friendship helped them feel more engaged at work and better understood at home, where they were both juggling full-time jobs with young children when nothing seemed normal. Eventually, over in-person drinks at a company gathering, Tester took Stuckey’s hand and proposed: “Abbie, will you be my real friend outside of work?” Stuckey said yes. 

These days everyone seems to be talking about the value of a work best friend. On Instagram and TikTok, the “#workbestie” has been on the rise. Gallup data repeatedly show that employees with work best friends feel more invested and productive in their jobs.

Yet the new normal of hybrid work makes reliable camaraderie elusive. A Gallup survey of nearly 4,000 hybrid workers in 2022 found 17% said they had a work best friend, down from 22% in 2019. The results haven’t been good for employee morale, particularly among young people, who are more eager to bring their whole selves to work. “Any corporate leader will tell you that fostering friendships at work ranks among their toughest challenges,” opined a recent cover story of Briefings Magazine, published by Korn Ferry, a management consulting firm.

As anyone who has been on a small-talk-free Zoom call knows, the modern workplace has become a more isolated and confusing place. Along with the usual anxieties about status, purpose and productivity, add more flux, transience and anxieties about AI. Amid these shifts, a trustworthy connection, forged in the pixelated pastures of Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams, can feel like an antidote. Yes, it is now harder to find this person, but we believe these new “context agnostic” bonds are more powerful and necessary than previous in-person work friendships.

We speak from experience. When we met, back when we both worked at this very newspaper, we were friends the way office friends used to be. We traded water-cooler banter and ventured into the wilds of Midtown Manhattan for chopped salads. We then moved on to other jobs, got laid off from those jobs, reconnected and commiserated about our missteps over yet more chopped salads.

Even though we no longer shared a workplace, there was something refreshing about being able to confide in each other about the micro-dramas of our professional lives, featuring a cast of characters we both already knew. Instead of watching each other’s eyes glaze over, like when we shared these gripes and gossips with our spouses—these stories were, after all, about people they had never met—we each felt seen. We were able to trade advice tailored to the personalities of those involved. This, we realized, is what makes a true work best friend singular: They innately understand the intricacies of our daily trials in a way that outsiders, even partners, simply cannot.

 

What this process taught us is that the best work friendships rise above mere venting about colleagues. An ideal work best friend helps you thrive by delivering honest assessments of how you come across on the job. We often had to level with each other about the best way to manage feedback on our manuscript. Sitting around complaining wasn’t going to improve anything.

“The best friendships that are work-centric are with those people who are ‘for us.’ And being ‘for’ one another often involves constructive feedback,” says Gwen Romans, an executive coach in Bend, Ore., whose clients work for law firms and tech companies such as Microsoft and Google.

 

Given the vulnerability involved in this kind of candor, Romans stresses the importance of taking things slow. “If people have leadership aspirations, I think unfortunately we have to be a little guarded,” she says. Having seen how screenshots of ill-considered jokes can lead to disciplinary action, Romans advises clients to take a beat before they write something snarky to a new work friend on Slack or email.

Juliana Pinto McKeen, 35, learned that moving too hastily can cause other problems. She says she “bonded quickly” with a staff member while she was an intern at a social-service agency in Manhattan in 2019. When the staffer began texting constantly, McKeen felt overwhelmed but uneasy pulling back and was relieved when her internship wrapped up the following spring.

Experts say that the best work friends have comparable power and aren’t in direct competition. If they report to a different boss or are on a different team, it can be easier to trust that the feedback is unbiased. Colleagues with different skills can also bring a fresh perspective to a project.

Take Zach Minot, 43, and Danette Lee, 33, who met in 2021 when Lee joined Brightfield, a New York-based software company. As director of presales, Lee needed a better grasp of the product, so she reached out to Minot, the VP of product management. Although they were on different teams and coasts, they found they had similar styles of working and began communicating on Zoom and in Slack daily. “It was very easy to identify her as a person who gets the right work done the right way,” says Minot.

As their friendship grew, so did their trust. “Zach is a very logical person, and I would probably say I’m a lot more fired up and emotional,” says Lee. Whenever she’s “fired up,” she has Minot read her drafted emails before she sends them. Minot, meanwhile, says he runs all of his PowerPoint decks by Lee because she knows how to talk about the product in a conversational way.

Sensing worker bonhomie is good for business, companies are now trying to foster friendships by planning events and creating cozy office lounges. Company karaoke parties may feel forced, but the potential payoff is considerable. When people are close with their co-workers, “they can get more done in less time, they’re more likely to share innovative ideas,” says Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief workplace scientist. Romans says that while her clients are initially skeptical of these “forced family fun” events, they usually emerge feeling more loyal to their company and more excited to go to work.

For all the talk of work-life boundaries, work is still often so much more than a way to make a living. It is where we spend most of our time and often where we meet people with similar interests. Even after the rupture of the pandemic, which forced a reckoning with the role we want work to play in our lives, we can’t help seeking meaning from how we spend so many hours of our days. With a work best friend, it is easier to fulfill these very human desires for purpose and pleasure, regardless of the job at hand.

Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling are co-authors of the new novel “The Memo,” published by Harper Perennial.