Profiting from friendships

Studies show that close relationships between workmates
are good for business, reports JULIE MIDDELTON.

New Zealand professionals will be guinea pigs for a study which aims to document the effects of close workplace friendships - those involving regular contact outside the office as well as in it.

Massey University psychology doctoral student Rachel Morrison has approached a large retail organisation, a finance company, a hospital and a law firm.

The proposal, which has been greeted with interest, is that employees at three of them will provide insights into how friendships at work affect productivity.

After all, workplaces often bring together people with similar values, and values sustain friendships.

"Organisations are a container for relationships and have an impact on how they form," says Morrison, who hopes to have nutted out early findings by the end of this year.

She is pretty sure that she will be able to confirm in New Zealand what overseas researchers have already suggested - that workplace friendships are, on the whole, good for worker focus and great for profit.

"There are so many positive outcomes in having friendships at work," says Morrison. "Increased communication, social support, trust. If you spend 40 hours a week at work you want to know people around you.

"It's part of human nature to want human interaction. And it's increasingly linked to job satisfaction and turnover."

An informal pilot study she completed found that for many people, work friendships were a crucial motivator.

"Some said that if they had not formed any relationships or friendships, they would leave the company," she says. "Friendships were seen as things that improved their commitment to the company."

This is backed up by studies done overseas. One of the most recent was last year's Gallup Organisation's Q12 workplace evaluations.

The study, of a random sample of American workers, found that having a best friend at work can turn a moderately engaged worker - "engaged" in the sense of being fully involved - into someone highly engaged.

Of the working Americans over 18 years of age who were polled, 51 per cent of those who agreed with the statement "I have a best friend at work" were engaged, against 10 per cent of those who disagreed.

Engaged workers, of course, contribute far more to the bottom line.

Further, 75 per cent who had a best friend at work planned still to be with the company for at least another year, versus 51 per cent who didn't have a best friend.

Friendship is not the only driver of company commitment. But mateship at work outshone what might be seen as more obvious work motivators - pay and benefits.

Across companies, says Gallup senior research director James Hartner, profitability and customer loyalty are strongly associated with a high incidence of best friends in the workplace.

This is echoed by other research. Wharton Business School professor Karen Jehn told the Harvard Business Review in 1997 that although friends at work together did chat about things not related to their jobs, "their interaction greases the wheels for better work-related communication".

Demonstration: Jehn and Pri Pradhan Shah, an assistant professor at the Carlson School of Management in Minneapolis, devised an experiment in which 26 groups of three friends and 27 groups of three acquaintances were asked to follow specific instructions for building models.

The friends built an average of nine models, against 2.45 for the acquaintances.

Friends, says Jehn, were able to challenge one another's ideas in a constructive way. In the groups of acquaintances, people were almost too polite.

Morrison believes that no work-based friendship research has been carried out in New Zealand before, although work has been done on "friendship and friendship maintenance".

She says she is being careful to avoid co-worker romance - "in general there's been a lot of literature on romance in the workplace, and romance and friendships are quite different relationship types".

However, work friendships can have downsides - think of former President Clinton's nemesis, Monica Lewinsky, and her tape-recording "friend" Linda Tripp.

"Dual-role tension" describes what happens when the role of friend and the role of colleague come into conflict.

The friend demands disclosure - "Tell me about this project you're working on" - while the colleague may need to maintain strict confidentiality.

Friendships that span hierarchical boundaries can also be a problem, because of how they are viewed by outsiders.

"One of the central tenets of friendships is equality," says Morrison, "but as a company you've got an organisational hierarchy in place, and a relationship between, say, a supervisor and a team member can structure inequality into the relationship.

"Such relationships tend to be perceived really negatively by other people. It's seen as disruptive of power relationships in an organisation - and that's where you get accusations of special treatment - or perceived special treatment."

Suspicion: "If somebody is perceived as having a direct link to the top," says Morrison, "not only do people think there's special treatment, they're likely to be guarded, in case they get told on.

"As soon as someone is perceived as being closer to the manager, they are probably not going to be treated in the same way."

So how should bosses view close workplace friendships?

"With guarded enthusiasm," suggests Morrison. "Whilst they may bring complications and tensions for people, all the research has shown that it's one of the few things in organisations which reduces the tendency to turnover.

"It's really important for organisations to acknowledge the relationships people have. They are providing support that will help them in their jobs."

As British career consultant Sally Davis notes, in our fast-paced, work-oriented lives we are increasingly making lasting friendships, and even meeting lifetime partners, at the office.

Research by her company, Penna, Sanders and Sidney, suggests that the potential for fulfilling workplace friendships is a new weapon in the war for talent as dual-income families become the norm, traditional social networks break down, and we adopt more self-centred urban living styles.

But fewer than one in 10 employers, says the research, has a formal policy for encouraging a sense of belonging.

* Contact Rachel Morrison on r.morrison@auckland.ac.nz

* How have your at-work friendships impacted on your job? Send your comments to julie_middleton@nzherald.co.nz

Keep it positive

So how do the experts recommend you deal with workplace friendship?

"I think the most important thing is to manage the relationship in such a way that it's not going to be negatively perceived by those with whom you have collegial relationships," says psychologist Rachel Morrison.

Sociologist Jan Yager, author of Business Protocol and Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How it Shapes our Lives, says that her research indicated that casual, not close, friendships are preferable in business.

"Be cautious about revealing too much to a co-worker, superior, subordinate, or mentor, or befriending at work or in business too quickly, too soon, too high up, or too low down."

She believes it takes, on average, three years until enough "tests" have been passed to cement the relationship.

Such a test might involve passing on a low-risk confidence to check a "friend's" reliability.

'Blended relationships'

Boffins who study close friendships at work label them "blended relationships".

* A special peer is someone you would consider a best mate - you'd be close friends even if you didn't work together.

* A collegial peer is a work buddy - you might not share every detail of your life, but the person is more than a mere acquaintance.

You may call the person a friend, maybe a colleague, but you see each other fairly regularly on an equal basis.

* An information peer is someone you don't know well or don't feel close to. You interact, you talk, but you would probably not continue the relationship unless working together.

* A negative relationship is one where you have to interact, but it's characterised by conflict, disagreement, dislike or disrespect.