Priya, an engineer in California, was on a deadline. Under pressure, she emailed a younger friend working on the same project to ask for some data that the project needed to get done on time. She and the woman weren’t super close, but Priya considered her colleague an ally and a buddy—previously they had “trauma-bonded,” as Priya puts it, over the way the project had been mismanaged. “I said, ‘Hey, can you grab this information for me?’” she says. Her friend emailed back a single-word response: “No.”
Priya, who is not giving her full name so as not to cause issues at work, couldn’t understand why the woman had been so short with her. During an in-office gathering the next week, Priya told her colleague that her one-word response made her feel like she was mad at her. She asked, “Can you please just communicate with me about why you don’t want to do this, so I understand?” Priya was as puzzled by her friend’s reaction to this conversation as she was by the initial refusal: “She said, ‘Priya, I don’t owe you anything.’”
Even good friends are rarely on the same page about everything. But when one friend’s expectations (that she shouldn’t have to do extra work) conflict with another’s (that they’re in this together), it can be confusing. Priya’s no longer sure whether she should trust her colleagues the way she did before. “I try to keep it civil,” she says. “But you start to really realize that your co-workers are not your friends.”
Work friendships are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, work is vastly more bearable—and maybe even strays into fun—when you’re friends with your fellow-laborers. Friendship can make odious tasks tolerable and worthwhile tasks more satisfying. An effective collaborator can turn a good idea into an inspired outcome. Gallup data has found that employees who have a bestie at work are more likely to get more done, innovate, share ideas, keep the workplace safe, have fun, and engage with customers and co-workers.
But friendship is about authenticity, acceptance, and agenda-free companionship. The point of work is to accomplish tasks, to cooperate despite any personal differences. Friends treat each other as equals, whereas workplaces are necessarily hierarchical and specialized. It’s inappropriate to favor one colleague over another, but friends do that all the time. You hang with friends because you want to. You go to work because you’re paid to. Some academic studies have shown that workplace friendships can be a mixed blessing. They can increase trust but add to employee stress when they go sour. They can boost cohesion, but also cause division. They can energize people but also drain their resources.
“The work context and the friendship context are often at odds,” says Beth Schinoff, an assistant professor of management at the University of Delaware. “The norms that guide how you behave at work, things like formality and professionalism, are very different from the informality, the authenticity that you have to have with your friends.” There is almost no way for those expectations to not eventually cause conflict, especially when there’s disagreement on how to execute a task, a need for confidentiality, or a status difference—when one of the friends is the other’s manager or boss.
Acknowledge the tension
But there are ways to have good friends and a productive work environment at the same time. Here’s what experts recommend.
Work friends often experience what experts call “role confusion.” In a difficult situation—when co-workers disagree on how a problem should be solved or which direction to push a project— they’re not sure if it’s more important to be a good employee or to be a good friend. It’s especially tough to be a friend and a supervisor. Mo Wang, a business professor at the University of Florida, points out that when one person controls their friend’s access to resources and advancement, they face a quandary. “Are they going to treat the other person as a subordinate or follower?” he asks. “Or do they treat the other person as a friend?” Their interactions are probably going to be closely watched by other colleagues for any hint of favoritism, which adds to the strain.
The best way to handle this is to be upfront about the potential awkwardness of the situation. “The key is communicating more effectively, and being open and honest about places in which you’re feeling this tension,” says Julianna Pillemer, an assistant business professor at New York University. “And also being honest with yourself, about your own values and what those boundaries look like.” If you used to have lunch all the time with your buddy, and you can’t do that as his boss without drawing some side-eye, don’t just go cold turkey; explain it to him. And if you need to keep some information confidential, explain why.
Separate the channels
Schinoff suggests making the issue of having two roles as overt as possible by telling your friend whether you are talking to them as a buddy or as a colleague. “You have to be very intentional about choosing which relationship you’re going to work on at any given moment,” she says. You can deploy such phrases as “I’m taking my ‘friend hat’ off for a second” or “speaking as your manager…”
Pillemer takes it a step further. She and her work friends contact each other by email for work-related matters and by text or social media to send personal notes, plan social gatherings, and share memes. “It eliminates that role conflict,” she says, “because you know what role you’re in at that given moment.”
Blend or block
What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. Some people want to make work a social zone and love to have family photos strewn about their workspaces. Others prefer to keep their private lives completely separate. And the same goes for workplaces, which can have vastly different cultures. A construction site will have a different level of formality and interaction than a law office. When establishing boundaries around friendship at work, it’s helpful to know whether you prefer to blend your private and professional lives or to separate them out in blocks and fully engage with one world at a time. You should pursue your office friendships along the lines that make you most comfortable, while also maintaining an awareness of the expectations of your particular workplace.
Take it slow
Friendships are often dictated by proximity. You find companions among those around you. But Pillemer cautions against mistaking closeness for trustworthiness. Once you’ve divulged things to work friends, there’s no taking them back, and if the relationship gets rocky because of work tension, oversharing can damage both the friendship and your workplace’s productivity, which can impact your performance. “I encourage people to not rush in,” says Pillemer. Instead, take the time to figure out if a colleague is going to be the kind of friend you want to see outside work hours. “Give it 10 coffee chats before you’re really divulging a lot,” she says. “You want to really ensure that you want it to go beyond being a work friend.”
Be good at your job
There will come a time when, as Schinoff puts it, you’ll need to make a decision regarding a colleague “in which your loyalty to them as a friend and your belief about what is best as a co-worker are in conflict.” And then you have to choose whether to put your friend or your workplace first. But there are also times when you might be able to find a workaround that benefits both. Wang gives the example of an employee who comes to their manager, who is also their friend, seeking travel funds for a work-related conference for which there is no budget. The manager has to abide by company policy, but if she knows the policies really well, she can help the friend find the money elsewhere. The better people know how to work the levers of their company, the more they can be both friend and colleague.
Try to find each other’s perspective
Priya thought she and her buddy were on the same page about their team’s project, so she turned to her for an assist. Friends don’t usually let each other down when they’re asked for help, but co-workers operate on different rules. Priya put the successful completion of the task first and expected those around her to do the same; her colleague believed she shouldn’t have to work harder just because the project was mismanaged by the higher-ups. Had she explained to Priya why she wouldn’t do the task, the conflict might have been avoided. “As a friend, we could develop a little bit of perspective, put ourselves in our friend’s shoes,” says Wang. “Their behaviors are not just governed by the friendship with us.”
