The Magic of Your First Work Friends

Lisa Degliantoni, 22 years old, has learned, but is not limited to, from two best friends she met in her New York City publishing work:

• How to get feedback from your boss without compromising her ideas.

• How to enjoy an office holiday party without getting drunk.

• When taking a summer vacation and teaching torrents to learn perspective.

• When she landed on the perfect man to marry.

Degliantoni, now 50, has a part of her career, family and a sense of herself at work, thanks to her first two colleagues, Ginny Cahill (61) and Molly Miller (56). I feel that.

There is electricity to form that first close friend at work. It’s a thrill to keep drinking too late. It’s fun to throw darts at someone’s desk and drag her into the bathroom to gossip. It’s kindness that she goes to work on a rough morning and her colleagues immediately notice something is wrong.

The friendships of those early careers have become like endangered species. For some young people, including those working in industries such as technology and law that haven’t fully returned to the office, work life now means making video calls from bed. They haven’t met their colleagues in person yet — not to mention forming relationships that they feel are most important at the beginning of their career. For example, Degliantoni felt that her first colleague had fallen somewhere between her companion and the Fairy Godmother.

“You’re different every minute when you’re in your twenties, but these friends really crystallized the person I wanted to be,” said Degliantoni.

Employers are doing their best to make up for lost face-to-face time, with office occupancy still remaining across the country. Less than 50 percent.. At the end of 2021, about 3 million professionals were permanently remote. Therefore, the manager planned virtual trivia sessions, virtual cocktail hours, offsite and onsite. This year, Salesforce opened the Trailblazer Ranch. Here, employees can get together and enjoy nature walks, yoga, cooking classes and meditation. “Headquartered in the cloud,” Zillow has refurbished part of its office space to look like a living room, allowing employees to spend time together.

But for many, all this speaking through the screen has irrefutable loneliness. 26-year-old Marin Callaway started his career in 2018 at the Public Defender Office. There, work bets seemed to increase work friendship bets. She saw her colleague cry when her client lost the case. She also shared her grief with her teammates, knowing that when she lost her relatives, all her teammates would say the right thing.

Callaway is currently completing a legal internship at her Los Angeles office. The floor may not move too much and the motion sensor light may go out.

“I really just have it in because there is no air conditioning in my place,” Callaway said. “People younger than me who have never worked full-time in the office really don’t know what they’re missing.”

What to miss when the zoom is a water cooler

Every time I asked my colleague to drink Zoom Coffee last year, 20-year-old Abe Baker Butler was worried about Abilene.

When he was a kid, his parents referred to Abilene’s paradox and talked about his family’s plans, such as going to the mall and watching ridiculous movies. That is, when the desire to agree leads a group of people to do something. Nobody in the group wants to do it. (The name comes from the unfortunate trip of a scholar who once explained the paradox to Abilene, Texas with his family.)

That’s what Baker Butler thought when he learned during a recent internship that he didn’t want to eat the rest of the pasta and sit in front of the computer for another hour and asked his colleague to have a virtual lunch. was. Nine months after the internship, he was finally able to enter the nonprofit office and realized what he was missing.

“When people have relationship problems or visit their families, I heard about them directly,” he said. “I found out that my colleagues were frustrated, tired, excited, and loved regular foods and foods full of spices and sauces.”

In 1993, Gallup 12 elements I need a workplace. According to Gallup’s chief workplace scientist, Jim Harter, one of the things that surprised clients should be that employees can assert that they have “best friends at work.”Two out of every ten U.S. workers tend to respond strongly in favor, which can mean 7 times With higher work satisfaction Low in cortisol At times of stress.

Executives focused on building friendships often talk about how friendships at work can help, for example, through off-site and retreats. Productivity..More people who have best friends at work Engaged At their job. Their organization has fewer accidents, happy customers and higher profits. In other words, friendship at work helps your business.

When the office moved for so many people in March 2020, it was accompanied by several opportunities to make friends. According to Gallup, the percentage of hybrid employees who have close friends at work has dropped from 22% in 2019 to 18% this year.

Anyway, the company continued to hum. The company remained productive, even though employees crouched at home to form a bond that was completely rooted in timely emoji.

Many have tried extreme forms of long-distance bonding. Andrew Pauly, 32, who works for the Planetary Society, attended the “2001: A Space Odyssey” virtual watch party with his teammates. There, everyone broke beer and exchanged interpretations of the movie, trying to recreate the joy of sitting. Around the office doing a bit from “I think you should leave”. It wasn’t exactly the same.

“It looks real. It tastes real,” Pauly said. “But our brain knows it’s not real.”

For those who have worked in the office for decades, something has been lost in the move to remote work. There is a thirst for a type of relationship that transforms everyone involved, far beyond the business cases of colleagues.

“I really made my best friend in publishing,” said Degliantoni. “Here I became this person-on the train, dressed up, doing the real job-and they helped guide me through it.”

Friendship as a mirror

Molly West Duffy and Lisfosleen, authors of “Big Feelings: How to Get Okay When Things Go wrong,” created a typology of friends at work. Someone is confident that they can leave any secret to them. There is an inspiration that is also known as a crush on platonic work. There is an enthusiasm that can not only stir up your competitive spirit, but also boost your success. (The relationship between the writers themselves, born of each other’s friends, deepened when they learned how much fun it was to write and draw together.)

All of these types are growth that your colleagues can support. High school and college friends see each other through parties, family feuds, romance, and seijin-shiki. But colleagues are looking at each other through the world of ideas. And they are easier to find early in your career.

“Bonds in their twenties tend to withstand the changes in life that occur in their thirties,” West Duffy said.

Behind all that growth and change, the lack of friends at work can lead to something simpler: loneliness.

Marisa G. Franco, 31, about five years ago at college, was a psychologist and author of the next book, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Helps Make and Maintain Friends. I started my first job, but to focus on friendships with her colleagues. She was the only black assistant professor in her faculty and she didn’t want to open herself to white colleagues and risk judgments.

“I felt the weight of very different things and was worried that the more I was exposed to them, the more I could experience racism and microaggression,” Dr. Franco recalled.

She spent her days surrounded by people, so she didn’t have to worry about being cut off.But randomly, one afternoon she decided to measure herself UCLA Loneliness Scale, Measure the feeling of isolation. She found her feeling very lonely because she had her colleagues around her but she knew nothing but work.

So when Dr. Franco started a new job in the federal government in 2019, she decided to start revealing more about herself to the people around her. She talked about her summer plans and vacations. She told them about the microaggression she experienced at her workplace, including being mistaken for her black colleague.

For Dr. Franco, building friendships at work helped her reshape the way she sees herself. “Friends reflect our identity on us,” she said.

“Let’s say you’re just promoted, you’re taking on a new role, and you’re a little worried about it, but all your colleagues see you as a leader,” she continued. “It can help you feel like spoofing.”

Connect through work

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are renowned psychologists, and their research has helped explain the workings of our minds. But their collaboration also revealed something beyond the work of the brain, the work of the heart. In their early days, before the fallout recorded by journalist Michael Lewis in the book, they provided a classic example of what can make the friendships formed by shared work so magical. increase.

They shattered each other, completed each other’s writings, and even shared typewriters. When they first worked on the treatise together, they felt the partnership was so seamless that they couldn’t decide who should be the lead author. They tossed a coin.

“We understood each other faster than we understood ourselves,” Dr. Kahneman once said. “I still get goose bumps.”

The book on the partnership between Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky, entitled “The Undoing Project,” said Lewis said that what made the joint friendship unique was the intertwining with personal ambitions.

“What makes a business friendship stand out is that we have a product and we’re actually creating something together,” Lewis said.

In conversations with dozens of people about working from home, many explained the feeling of loss when their creative process was limited to their laptops. I found it difficult to reproduce the closeness that induces goosebumps online. Abigail Jacob, 21, a student at the University of Michigan, is an intern in a fairly empty Lower Manhattan office and may have a video call with a colleague who works from home.

“I go in every day, sit in professional clothes in front of my computer, and keep going until I leave,” Jacob said. “What about a more fulfilling and vibrant office?”

Degliantoni wonders what would have happened to his younger version if he hadn’t appeared in the office for the first day of work in 1995. That morning she was sitting in her cubicle when she heard two women talking. basketball.

“I completely disturbed them, and I remembered,” What are you talking about? What basketball game? ” “Who is this annoying intern talking to us?”

One of the women was Kay Hill, an art director who used to work for the New York Times, and the other was Miller. Even now, more than 25 years later, they continue to be her best friends. Degliantoni sometimes thinks: Thank god I hit my head against the cubicle. If not, she might have stopped publishing altogether, as she thought she would do at the age of 26, before Kay Hill intervened. She may not have applied for a particular promotion or spoken at a meeting. Also, everything wouldn’t have been so much fun.

“It’s very important for people to see an example of what their future looks like or not,” said Degliantoni. “It’s one of the best things about office culture. You can learn who you want to be.”