“Anyone fancy a pint after work?” is a question that most workers are familiar with. Going to the pub with colleagues can be an enjoyable, unofficial team building exercise and great way to unwind. But could it jeopardise your career?
No one wants to awkwardly avoid eye contact with a colleague they were a little too close to just hours before. Drunkenly oversharing your personal problems or bitching about colleagues, which often happens down the pub, does not promote an image of professionalism or togetherness.
But wanting to befriend the people you spend the majority of your day with is not unusual – and can actually be beneficial.
Companies often recruit like-minded people so it is natural to want to socialise with them, says Chantal Gautier, a psychologist and academic at the University of Westminster. There are psychological benefits to having friends at work, she says. “Having a group of people you can relate to and fall back on is definitely a way to deal with stress, especially if you’re not getting support from higher up.” As long as it’s genuine. “If you’re socialising for strategic reasons, you want to befriend a boss in order to move ahead, there’s an issue of integrity,” she adds.
Studies have shown that friendships with colleagues can also increase productivity. A study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that “idle chatter” at work can increase efficiency. Meanwhile a US Gallup survey found that people with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to fully engage with their job.
Jessica Methot, an academic at Rutgers University, has carried out research on the subject. She found that befriending colleagues, and spending time with them outside the workplace, has a largely positive effect on work performance, job satisfaction and company loyalty. “Forging friendships with co-workers can help provide higher quality information exchanges, allowing co-workers to feel safe probing for more information and asking follow-up questions,” she says.
But Gautier questions whether there is a direct link between friendships at work and increased productivity. She suggests instead that friendships make employees more willing to go to work. Other factors, like recognition, promotion opportunities and leadership style have a notable impact on worker productivity too, she says.
There appears to be a generational dimension to this debate. A LinkedIn survey found that one third of millennials, aged between 18-24, thought socialising with colleagues would help advance their careers. Almost half of the survey’s respondents, aged between 55 and 65, said friendships with colleagues had no bearing on their work performance.
With the line between work and leisure becoming increasingly blurred, can socialising out of hours be a good way to plug generational gaps in the workplace?
Methot’s research suggests that although “supervisor-subordinate” friendships are relatively rare, they generally have positive consequences and are linked to increases in job satisfaction, feelings of self-worth and physical health. “Having a high-quality relationship with one’s supervisor is really important, critical even, for feeling connected to and engaged in one’s work, but there’s a fine line to walk to manage impressions,” she says.
“It’s OK to befriend someone more senior, provided the boundaries are quite clear,” says Gautier. In very hierarchical organisations, senior employees may simply refuse to socialise with subordinates, “because they feel they’re going to lose the power and control”.
As well as a generational gap, there is also the risk that after-work pub rituals make teetotallers or colleagues with family commitments feel excluded. There are clear benefits to having friendships at work, particularly as workers spend increasingly long hours behind the screen, missing out on basic human contact. Whether the pub is the best place to do this is up for debate.
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