Work Friendships Are Key to Job and Life Satisfaction - Horowitz
Rób Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Work Friendships Are Key to Job and Life Satisfaction - Horowitz
Americans are more likely to make close friends at work than in any other area of their lives, including schools, their neighborhoods, or their places of worship. “More than half of Americans report that they have made a close friend through their workplace (42 percent) or a spouse’s or partner’s workplace (10 percent),” according to the American Perspectives Survey upon which the report draws.
“Americans with close workplace friends are generally more satisfied with their job, more often feel engaged and excited about their work, and are less likely to be looking for new career opportunities.” the report’s authors wrote. Sixty-two percent of workers with close office friends say they are “completely or very satisfied with their current job,” while only 37% of those who do not have friends at work say they are satisfied, according to the survey.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTMore specifically, “workers who are close friends with their coworkers” are nearly three times more likely to say that being part of a team describes their workplace experience “very well” than those who are not friends with their coworkers,” according to the national survey. Similarly, nearly twice as many workers with a close work friend are satisfied with their coworker relationships as those without one.
Along the same lines, people with close workplace friends are more than two times as likely to say they feel “connected to their work and valued by their colleagues” and that their job “provides a great deal of fulfillment and meaning” than those without any friends at work.
Whether or not one has close connections at work also impacts the quality of people’s lives outside the workplace. Nearly twice as many people with no close friends at work say they are “lonely at least a few times a week” than those with close work friends.
More broadly, people with close work friends are “more invested in and satisfied with their community outside of work,” the report’s authors wrote. “Where social capital at work is missing, which is the case especially for noncollege-educated men, loneliness and dissatisfaction prevail.”
The centrality of the workplace as a source of friendship makes the continuing movement to remote work, which accelerated during the pandemic, a potential obstacle to reducing loneliness in our society. “Remote workers are significantly less likely than hybrid and in-person workers to maintain close relationships with coworkers,” the report’s authors note.
As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, among others, asserts, we face an “epidemic of loneliness” in the United States. This epidemic negatively impacts people’s physical health as well as contributes to polarization and division as too many of us don’t have the human connections that counter beliefs that are fellow citizens are not simply people with whom we may disagree, but threats to our way of life.
This new report shows how creating workplaces that foster social connections and friendships is not only good business because it leads to satisfied productive employees; it is a central part of the glue required to foster the bonds needed to create a healthy society.