Most of my best friends are people I met in high school or college. I am not trying to relive my youth by clinging to these women; I just don’t have time to make new friends.
My life in 1992—my sophomore year in college—involved a lot of hanging out. I went out with friends for frozen yogurt, beer, long walks. We sat in the hall of our sorority house on Sunday mornings, recapping the weekend’s exploits. On Wednesday nights, we crammed in front of the television for Melrose Place. We talked and listened to each other. Pretty basic stuff.
But, like most women, my responsibilities got bigger (job, mortgage, husband, child) and the thing that got squeezed was hanging out. After all, growing my career was more important than gossiping in the break room with co-workers, who seemed pretty cool, but, well, who had time to really find out?
My logic may have been faulty, according to a book called Vital Friends. The author Tom Rath, who works at Gallup, uses hard-core data to argue his case that friends make us more productive and happier employees—and just happier people in general.
Consider this statistic. People who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged on the job.
Rath argues that people should make an effort to find good friends at work, and employers should encourage such fraternizing. A common reason people cite for leaving a job after a short time is they don't feel connected to anyone there, he said. On the flip side, meaningful relationships retain employees. Rath shares anecdotes like this one: a woman he interviewed told about how she was going to leave the non-profit where she worked after a particularly bad week. A co-worker phoned her that Sunday and talked about how much he valued their friendship. She ended up staying at the job several more years.
Another interesting statistic Rath gleaned from more than eight million interviews in Gallup’s database: When people are asked what they enjoy in a given day, time with friends comes out at the very top.
That’s why Rath even encourages buddying up with the boss. If people say they have a close relationship with their boss, they are twice as likely to be engaged on the job.
It has been months since I first read Vital Friends, and no, I haven’t started hiring baby-sitters so I can go on fro-yo runs with my cubicle mates after work. The truth is my life is busier, and more complicated, than in college. However, I do agree that spending time with friends—whether work friends or other moms at the playground or even those girls from the class of ‘94—does make me happier.
So let’s try to slow down and hang out more. It turns out it is not only fun, it makes us better at our jobs!
Read about a group of colleagues who trained for a marathon together: The Marathon Experience: How Co-Workers Became Close Friends.
