Workplace friendships are crucial for creating a strong company culture, with research suggesting that a significant amount of people place a high value on company camaraderie.
Jennifer Dulski is the founder and CEO of Rising Team, a workplace performance platform to boost employee engagement and manager effectiveness. She is also a lecturer in management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
Across a career that has spanned more than 25 years, Dulski has led teams at some of the world’s most high-profile companies, including Google, Meta (then Facebook) and Yahoo, and in that time, she gained an enthusiasm for how leaders create connected, successful teams.
“Strong teams power great organisations, and team development is continuing to evolve to meet the needs of today’s modern workplace. I’m excited to see how team leaders are embracing innovative approaches to team development,” Dulski tells SiliconRepublic.com.
According to Dulski, one such driver of development and employee engagement is the existence of work friendships, noting how impactful it can be for someone to have a workplace confidante.
“Having friends at work makes it more enjoyable because there are people there that you want to see and connect to,” she explains, adding that challenging times are easier to navigate through shared experiences and a support system. From an employer perspective, this higher degree of employee engagement can also improve staff retention.
Forging friendships
Research suggests that since the pandemic the importance of strong interpersonal relationships has grown, with respondents to one particular survey even saying that friendships can impact their decision to remain at their current place of employment.
However, there are a number of obstacles to forging relationships with your co-workers, namely the increase in the amount of people whose work is hybrid or remote. With less time spent in the office and a sharp increase in screen-based interactions, it’s fair to say that making a real connection with colleagues is somewhat complicated.
Dulski notes that for employees eager to connect with their peers, particularly remote workers, “it can seem harder to build deep relationships over video calls, or once a year in-person meetings. Many leaders are using innovative approaches to run virtual trust and connection-building exercises more frequently with their remote teams.”
She suggests that people be active and engaged during team meetings as it is an excellent way to build the foundations for a workplace friendship. “Bringing your authentic self to work also has immense value, as it lets people know who you are as a person so they can find ways to connect with you,” she says.
However, it’s important that company leaders and organisers don’t force relationships in the workplace.“HR and leaders should not be matchmakers for friendships, but instead should create an environment that allows people to get to know each other organically.”
Friendly infrastructure
For both the employer and the employee there are a multitude of benefits associated with a workplace that encourages co-worker friendships, such as a happy company culture, increased productivity and greater job satisfaction.
To achieve this, employers need to prioritise the building of friendship-based workplace infrastructures, which can be less formal spaces such as canteens or break rooms, and create opportunities for co-workers to collaborate and gain trust.
“One barrier to introducing friendship-building workplace infrastructures is the lack of authenticity,” said Dulski. “Companies should encourage interaction among team members, creating and facilitating team-building activities that foster engagement and interaction among people within and across teams.”
A failure to facilitate an environment in which co-workers can bond, socialise and collaborate can have adverse effects on the business as a whole.
“If companies discourage engagement among workers, or do not create avenues for it to happen naturally, they will have a workforce that is disengaged and dissatisfied. This can have a domino effect and hurt collaboration, creativity and productivity in the long term,” warns Dulski.
She also notes that dispersed teams aren’t necessarily at a disadvantage, rather it is an opportunity to innovate, using a broad spectrum of tools and techniques to engage in crucial team development and solve the challenges of remote working.
She has found that, in comparison to how companies operated in the past, there has been a shift towards embracing technologies to progress teams and differentiate yourself through collaborative teamwork.
“Innovative leaders are now taking an entirely new approach by running their own team development sessions with their teams using software-guided tools. This approach immediately lifts key engagement and performance metrics and it sustains them over time,” Dulski explains.
Ultimately for Dulski, work-based friendships are a critical part of the employment experience and we all, regardless of our where we do our work, need to feel connected to our team and organisation.
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