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I actually started out in the workplace thinking, “I’m here to work, I don’t need to make friends. I don’t need people to like me. As long as I do my work, do it on time, it doesn’t matter whether I get along with people or not.” I quickly realized whether I wanted to or not, I was going to have relationships with people at work. We were going to have maybe friendships, but certainly collegial relationships where we had to interact in order to get things done. But then also, if you think about it, we spend so much time at work. The idea that you wouldn’t have a relationship with these people who you spend day in and day out with is just incredibly misguided.
The Impact of Positive Relationships
We actually know from lots of research that the more positive we feel about our interactions with our coworkers, the better we are off, the better our team is off, and the better the organization is off. There’s just so many positive benefits to having healthy relationships with colleagues at work. Gallup has studied this for decades, and they show people who have a best friend at work tend to perform better, are more creative, have better well-being. There’s even research from a team at Rutgers that shows that people who consider each other best friends at work get higher performance reviews. So we know it has an impact on our ability to do our job and has an impact on our ability to do our job well.
The Impact of Negative Relationships
One of the most eye-opening things for me as a person, as a colleague, and as a researcher has been the depth to which negative relationships impact us. I think we often think, well, it’s just work, right? I can go home, I can let go of this negative interaction or this colleague who’s pushing my buttons. But what we see in the research is that it has a real effect on everything from our cognitive functioning to our resilience, of course, to our performance, but also to our wellbeing, how we feel outside of work. One negative interaction or one uncivil interaction between you and another colleague can have a detrimental effect on your own well-being, not to mention an effect on the people who witness that interaction. There’s really interesting research that the people who witness a negative interaction, an uncivil interaction, can’t focus as well, they’re not as resilient, they don’t perform as well.
Cultivating Good Relationships
Good relationships at work tend to have a caring nature. That doesn’t mean you have to be best friends, you don’t have to be office BFFs, but you actually care about one another’s success. You have an interest in one another’s lives. You have one another’s backs. You also need to have candor, which is the ability to really speak your mind. Speak up when you disagree with someone. “I have some feedback. Can I share it with you?” Or to even just say, “You know what? I have a different idea about how this may play out. Can we discuss it?”
This is one of the things that’s often missing from workplaces and specifically from individual relationships in workplaces. The more a work culture allows for open and honest debate and dissent, the stronger our relationships are in that workplace and the higher engagement and satisfaction we have in those workplaces. And it makes sense. If you don’t have to walk on eggshells around your colleagues, if you don’t have to watch what you say or bite your tongue or hide your thoughts or feelings or opinions, you’re going to be much more of yourself, you’re going to bring more of yourself to work, and you’re going to have stronger relationships as a result.