Parents may need a best friend at work a little more than the rest of us. A meta-analysis we ran at Gallup found that two-thirds of working parents are either struggling or suffering when it comes to their social well-being. They have opportunities, challenges, and decisions to make that those without kids don’t face. And the wrong decision can hurt a family and career simultaneously. Sometimes forever.
If you think “best friend” sounds odd in a workplace context, you’re not alone.
Gallup scientists thought so too, so much so that they resisted using the wording in the Gallup Q12 employee engagement assessment. But during the design phase—a massive project that took years, the input of scientists in several disciplines, and millions of interviews with workers all over the world—they had to admit it: Best friends have an impact on employee engagement that no other kind of friend does.
Managers can help navigate work issues. Spouses can help think through family stuff. But only a best friend at work can do both, with an abiding concern for the person struggling to sort it all out. On top of that, people who have kids at home have less time and energy to make new friends—indeed, most of us start losing friends in our mid-20s—and the workplace is one of the few places adults meet new people.
Unfortunately, these best friends in the workplace seem to be hard to come by. Our meta-analysis of the relationship between team engagement and performance, which includes more than 1.8 million employees in 49 industries, 73 countries, 82,000 teams, and 230 organizations, found that only two in 10 workers can say they have a best friend at work.
Consider this: because improvements in engagement are shown to have measurable results on business outcomes, if managers could bump that number up to six in 10, they could realize 36% fewer safety incidents, 7% more engaged customers, and 12% higher profit.
Relationships are organic. Of the innumerable things managers can do to foster engagement, there’s almost nothing one can do to turn two people into best friends.
But managers can turn people into enemies. Workplace cultures that encourage competitive, zero-sum atmospheres tend to poison relationships. When people have to fight or backstab to get what they need to perform, no one can trust anyone, everyone focuses on one-upmanship, and collaboration is for suckers. In such situations, no one can be friends, and they certainly can’t be engaged.
So to spur genuine friendships, concentrate on engagement. Do it for your company—engaged workers are much more productive and profitable. Do it to meet your own goals—people with best friends at work are better at engaging customers, produce higher quality work, and get hurt on the job less often. And, maybe, do it for your own social well-being. After all, the best friend relationship you spark may be your own.