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Workplace friendships have quietly become one of the most important factors in how people experience work, and most of us have never thought about them strategically. As AI takes over more of the transactional parts of work and remote arrangements strip away the incidental moments of human contact, the case for being intentional about work friendships is getting stronger, not weaker.

Here is the paradox worth sitting with: the more efficient work becomes, the more intentional we may need to become about the inefficient human stuff. Coffee. Lunch. Five minutes talking about the game before the meeting starts. None of that shows up on a utilization report. Collectively, it may be exactly how productive work actually gets done.

In this episode, I share the research that makes this argument hard to dismiss. A February 2026 study in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science found that workplace friendship is deeply connected to how people invest themselves in their work. A July 2026 study in the hospitality industry linked friendship to proactive performance through engagement. And KPMG's 2026 Friends at Work study found that employees with close personal friends at work were dramatically more likely to say their work mattered to them and that they could focus on developing their skills. In prior KPMG research, employees valued close workplace friendships equal to a 20% salary premium. That is not a perk. That is compensation-equivalent.

I also get personal. I share what it has meant for my own business to share an office and studio with my colleague and now work BFF, Shawna Suckow. As a speaker and entrepreneur who is often either alone in a room or talking to a crowd of hundreds, having a real work friend has changed the texture of my workday in ways I did not fully anticipate.

And I close with what this means in practice: for individual contributors, for remote and hybrid workers, and for leaders who may be accidentally optimizing connection right out of their workplace culture.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

LINKS RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:

Shawna Suckow — Janel's officemate and work BFF, certified speaking professional, marketing expert for small businesses

Have you ever caught yourself thinking that you don't really need friends at work, just good colleagues, clear expectations, and maybe a decent manager? Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it? It might also be one of the most costly assumptions that you are quietly making. There is a subtle but growing movement in how people think about work, and it's kind of little transactional.

It goes something like this: Work is work. I'm here to do my job, not make friends. I can be professional and collaborative and even pleasant, but I don't need this relationship layer. It's inefficient, and it's not what I'm paid for.

Now, remote work absolutely reinforces this. When you're not in the same building, the incidental stuff like the coffee run, or even waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, the hallway conversation, the five minutes talking about the weekend or walking to and from the parking lot-that stuff just simply doesn't happen. And for a lot of people, it turns out that they didn't miss it as much as they maybe thought they would. Work kept happening, deliverables kept getting delivered.

Now AI is pushing it even further. As more transactional parts of work get automated, there are even fewer natural touch points between people that require that human interaction. You can move through a workday with extraordinary efficiency and almost no genuine human connection. But just because you can, does that mean you should?

Here's the thing: to some people, it maybe sounds wonderful, clean, efficient, focused, productive, not being bogged down by what other people other people's small talk and so on. Now, the real argument of this episode, and you may have guessed, is that it may also be profoundly short-sighted to not have friends at work. So here's a paradox worth sort of being with for a little bit: the more efficient that the work becomes, the more intentional we need to become about the inefficient human stuff-having coffee together, going to lunch, talking about the Vikings game for five minutes before the meeting starts, asking how someone's kid is doing after a rough week-now none of that looks productive on paper. None of that's going to show up in your workplace utilization report, but collectively, it may be creating relationship through how and and and enabling how productive work actually gets done and how it actually happens.

Now, again, let's go back to AI for a moment. As AI takes over more and more of the transactional bits, the human layer doesn't become less important. It potentially becomes more important and vastly more important because what's left when AI handles the transactional part is judgment and trust, creativity, connection, collaboration, and those things don't happen in a vacuum. They happen between people who have a real relationship with one another, and they happen even more effectively if that relationship has been elevated to a friendship.

Now, here's how it happens: your coworker becomes your work friend, your work friend becomes your real friend, and when you have real friends at work, that changes the dynamic of being together in that place. I want you to think of somebody right now who fits that bill for you-a coworker who became a work friend, a work friend who became a real friend. Do they make your life better? Darn tootin, they do.

Absolutely. In fact, as you're thinking of this person right now, text them. Just thought of you. So glad you're my work friend or my work BFF or whatever you refer to them as, and maybe share this episode with them as well, and say, Hey, I was thinking of you while I was listening to this episode, and you might have racked up a number of work friends over the course of your career.

You might have a work friend that you're thinking of right now from a job that you were in years ago. In fact, this is a great opportunity to reach out to that friend, let them know that you've been thinking about them, or that this episode prompted you to think of them, and then share the episode with them because it's going to help them think of a work friend that they maybe haven't been in touch with for a while as well. All right, now KPMG's 2026 Friends at Work study, which they've now been doing for a few years, put it this way: Quote as AI increasingly handles more complex tasks, the cognitive and emotional demands on people in the workplace are only increasing. Now, I'll share a little bit more about that research in a few minutes, but it's worth noting that the people absorbing the pressure, building trust, and carrying the organizational culture are also the ones who are most likely to have close friends at work, and that is not a coincidence.

So the folks with the close relationships and the close friends at work are really broadly influencing your organization's culture. Now that could be also your section's culture, your department's culture, your team's culture-it can work all the way down like that. Now, the research on workplace friendship is building, and it's surprisingly consistent across industries and cultures because some of this research has been done in the U.S. and some of it has been done in other countries. In February of 2026, so just about six months ago or so, in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, there was an article brilliantly titled Friends with in parentheses workplace benefits.

Isn't that clever? In that study, the researchers examined workplace friendship in relation to job involvement, organizational commitment, and employee well-being, and what it found is that friendship isn't peripheral to the employee experience. It is central, and it is deeply connected to how people invest in themselves at work and how people invest in the work itself. In July 2026, so just two months ago, the hospitality industry released a study that found that workplace friendship was related to proactive performance through employee engagement, and it came down to employee engagement.

So, in other words, friendship may help create conditions in which people don't just do what's minimally required; they take initiative. They stay engaged, and you know we've been hearing the employee engagement data from Gallup for how many years, decades even. And this is a dial or a lever that can actually make a meaningful difference in terms of somebody's engagement. When people have friends at work, they are engaged and take initiative to the point where they care about outcomes beyond just their job description.

And then, again, that KPMG data. I want to talk a little bit more about that right now. Their friends at work study, the one that I referred to now a couple of times earlier, it found that employees with close personal friends at work showed dramatically higher engagement. 87 of the people studied said they could focus on developing their skills when they had friends, compared to only 52 who didn't have that same reported close friend at work and didn't really socialize at work. So it wasn't just like a close friend or not a close friend.

It's like, do you cultivate friends? Do you feel like you have friends at work, or do you feel like you don't really socialize at work? Okay, so that was a stratification here. 87 of the ones who said they had friends and regularly socialize at work could focus on developing their skills, compared to only 52 who said they don't focus on their skills as much, and they're not as connected. Okay, and 84 said their work mattered to them personally.

Those who were socially connected versus only 62 of those who said who don't socialize regularly or have friends at work said that their work mattered to them personally. Okay, so these were pretty big leaps in terms of percentages. So here's the number that may land the hardest with your company, and that is in prior KPMG research, employees valued close workplace workplace friendships equally to roughly a 20 salary premium. Okay, it's not a perk.

It's not a nice to have. They were comparing it to the financial benefits of working at that organization. So there's a compensation equivalent. Okay.

Now there is one complicating finding that we need to be straight with. In that comes out of this research, the KPMG study also found that employees with close personal friends at work are also more likely to leave. 42 are actively job seeking in the next year, so nearly three times the rate of other groups. So that's not an argument against workplace friendship. It's more of a warning signal for leaders: the most engaged, the most connected people in your organization-they are also the ones who are in the highest demand elsewhere.

So you really do want to retain those folks who have those strong friendships because they'll just go build the friendships elsewhere, and they'll stay friends with the people who are at your organization now. I mean, think about it. You probably have work friends that span several jobs, maybe even several decades. Okay, so people will maintain their friendships even after they long leave your organization.

So if you're not building an environment where those people want to stay. Their friendships will eventually go with them. They will leave the organization, make new friends at the places that they land, and maybe even recruit your own their friends from from your own organization to come and join them at the new place. Now, in addition to being fascinated by the research, because you know I always am fascinated by the research, but this topic is also personal for me.

Now, as you probably know, I office out of the house. I lease a commercial office space. This backdrop that you see if you're watching on YouTube, this is in the commercial office space that I that I rent. So it's a two room space.

There is my studio, and there is my colleague Shawna's studio over on this side of the space. We have a door that closes, a little kitchenette in between, and then we have two work desks and a little couch and our lunch table and everything over on the other side of the office where we get our work done, kind of the back office work, if you will. Now, Shawna and I have formally shared an office for the past six months, and prior to that, she was just dropping by at the previous office that I was in and co-working with me for a day here and a day there. And I don't know if you know the story of this.

If you don't, we'll link up the in the show notes the actual episode where I talked about how that building was being torn down and I needed to find new office space anyway, and I landed in this space. The backdrop looks exactly the same because I moved all the furniture with me. But anyway, you get the idea. Now, Shawna and I at that time decided to formally go in on the lease together, and this speaking business it can be a very lonely business.

I'm either in my office all by myself, or talking to a camera, recording a podcast episode, or even when I'm delivering a virtual program, I'm in my office all by all by myself. And when I'm delivering a program from the stage, there could be hundreds, maybe even 1000s of people in the audience. But I'm-they're not my coworkers. I'm-I sometimes do become friends with some of them.

That's maybe an episode, a different episode, but it is categorically different than having coworkers when you're, you know, speaking one to many. So this can be a very lonely business, and having a work friend, especially a work friend who really gets the business, makes a tremendous difference for me. We can celebrate the wins together. It is also somebody to share the losses with when something doesn't go right, or I didn't get the contract, or whatever it is.

And you know, also it's somebody who gets it. It changes the texture of my workday because I have somebody to eat lunch with, somebody to take a short walk with, somebody to talk about my weekend plans with, or what's going on with our families, somebody to bounce an idea off of, or and get this, I do this quite regularly. If I am shopping for new clothes to wear on stage, I will bring that clothes in, I will put it on, and I will give Shawna the fashion runway, and she will tell me yay or nay because I trust her judgment immensely. So again, somebody to not just bounce new ideas off of, but my model my clothes for.

Her content and her market are totally different from mine, so we're not in direct competition. We can give each other good ideas. We've got diverse thinking and different viewpoints that we share with one another, and perhaps most importantly, we make each other laugh and and she we play little practical jokes on each other and we do silly things and that makes our days and our work more fun. So there are tons of good reasons for having and and you know I mean my business is my business so I'm not going anywhere so from a retention strategy from a retention strategy I think it really does help me to have another coworker again I'm not gonna I'm not about to leave the business but it makes the business so much more fun to do it with somebody else and again we started off like well, Shawna and I both have our certified speaking professional certification from the National Speakers Association, and we got our CSPs the same year in 2019.

And Shawna, I'll link her website up in the in the show notes in case you're interested. And this is episode 286, so the show notes can be foundjanelenderson.com forward slash 286. So Shawna Suckow is my office mate, and again, I'll link her website up. But she works with small businesses on marketing, and again, totally different customer base and client base than than who I work with.

But it's just so much fun to have somebody to bounce those ideas off of, and again, it makes my life bit better. It makes my life richer to be able to share office space with her. And again, we went from being, I would say, like work friends because we were both getting our CSP in 2019, and that's when we really became closer. And we're going to lunch, you know, once a quarter, like not very often, and we live in different parts of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, so we don't see each other like on the regular.

But we started intentionally spending a little bit more time, became work friends, and then I would say over the past couple of years, we became closer and closer work friends. And now I would go so far as to call her my current work BFF. All right, now let's just talk about what this means in practice. This idea of having a work friend.

So this isn't an argument for forced fun or mandatory team bonding, not at all. Friendship cannot be manufactured. It cannot be, you know, glued together with bubble gum and duct tape on a calendar invite. Although it might be fun, and you might have a good time if you made something out of bubble gum and duct tape.

But friendship itself can make your day, and it can be made more or less likely depending on how we structure our work and our days, so here are a few things worth considering as you play around with the idea of having friends at work. If you're an individual contributor, when was the last time you let a work relationship go beyond Transactional, not networking, but instead taking an actual interest in the other person. So this is where you're striking up a conversation with them that has nothing to do with the project that you're working on. You're finding out what they did over the weekend.

You are asking a follow-up question about a family member or a team that they enjoy. Again, you know, here in Minnesota, it's always Vikings versus the Packers, and of course, the right answer is the Vikings. But there's no shortage of things to talk about, and even you know, Vikings versus Packers could be very, very superficial. Now, if you're not into sports, that's maybe not the thing that you bring up.

But whatever it is that is of genuine interest to you, that's where you're looking to overlap and you're looking to make those connections, and and don't force it. It really should be something that evolves organically, but you do have to take an interest in the other person that goes beyond a transactional work discussion. Now, if you're a remote worker or hybrid worker, it's a bit more challenging because this stuff that I'm talking about, this incidental stuff, it doesn't happen by accident anymore. You can't just, you know, shoot the breeze while you're waiting for the elevator because you're not waiting for the elevator together.

Now, if you want to have that level of connection, that true relationship, you have to be deliberate about it, and that might mean a standing coffee chat with no agenda, or it might mean protecting the first five minutes of a recurring call for something that goes beyond what's on the meeting agenda, or when you hop on to the call a few minutes early, and this person is on the call also a few minutes early. Don't just answer email or do other work. Engage in a quick conversation with them. Find out something about them because it may be that you have something in common.

And you know, I'm not suggesting that you force a relationship with anybody. It's just you're being curious and getting to know the other person a little bit to see if there is a there there and if a relationship would develop naturally. Now, if you're a leader in your organization, ask honestly whether your culture makes workplace friendship possible or accidentally optimizes it out of the equation. If you've got tight schedules, back-to-back meetings, no room for flex and flow, you might just be stripping out the conditions for connection right out of the workday, and that's going to be bad for your employees and bad for business.

Now, the goal here is not to turn every colleague into a work BFF. It's really instead to stop treating relationship building as ancillary or as an afterthought, or engineering it out of the workplace altogether. The thing that happens after the real work is done is the relationship, and it shouldn't have to wait until after the work is done. There should be some spaciousness in the day.

There should be some give and take and curiosity that will build that relationship organically, because for a lot of people, that truly is part of the work and is what's going to make the work more enjoyable. And it doesn't have to just be your most outgoing people. It has nothing to do with whether you're outgoing or shy or anything. You want to just have a place where people feel that they can make connections that go beyond transactional.

Because when you have a work friend, it's so much more enjoyable to go to work. And when you have a work BFF, well, it's downright delightful some days to come into work and for me to know that Sean is going to be here. Okay, let me just give you a quick few takeaways as we wrap this episode. The first one is audit your workplace relationships.

Do any of them cross into real friendship, or they are are they are they all just merely collegial? Now, there's nothing wrong with collegial, but it's worth knowing where you stand. And as you do that audit, if there are one or two people that you're thinking like, hmm, maybe if they live next door, we would be friends. Okay, that's a good that's a good question to ask yourself.

If they live next door, would we be friends? And if so, then maybe you take that first step to ask them to lunch, have a virtual coffee, get to know them a little bit better, see if there's a there there. Number two, protect those inefficient moments: the small talk, the coffee, the personal check-ins before the meeting really starts. These are not wasted time.

This is the infrastructure that friendships get built on. Number three: If you work remotely or hybrid, be deliberate. In incidental connections require intention these days; they don't just happen by accident. So you have to build it in.

Don't just wait for it to happen. Number four: If you lead a team, ask whether your culture and schedule makes friendship available, does it make friendship possible inside of the workday, inside of the work week? Efficiency that strips out all human connection may be costing you more than it's saving you. And then finally, here is your put it to work.

Reach out to one person this week with no agenda, not a networking ask, not a work question, just a connection connection. All right, so this is a topic that I explore in my keynote called the human edge in an AI world, and the idea is that as AI takes on more and more of the transactional work, the distinctly human parts of work become so much more important and so much more valuable. So, if you're thinking about how your organization navigates that intersection of AI efficiency and human connection, I would love to have that conversation. You can reach me at drjanelanderson.com, the website.

In the meantime, you can find the show notes at Janel anderson.com forward slash 286 for episode 286. And as I mentioned before, if this episode is making you think of a work friend or a work BFF right now, go share it with them. If you're listening in one of the podcast players like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you can just copy the link and hit the share button, or just simply hit the share button and then toss in your BFF's contact information, text, email, what have you, or you can just go old school and send them an email with a link to the show notes to this episode. Again, JanelAnderson.com forward slash 286, or you could send them the link over on YouTube, and you can just let them know, Hey, I was thinking about you when I listened to this.

And who knows, it may rekindle an old friendship if you haven't talked to that person in a while. All right, my friends. Hopefully, this gives you some ideas on friendship at work, the importance of friendship at work, and not just the emotional, social benefits of friendship at work, but also the actual true cost of, or the true benefit of workplace friendships to the enterprise, to the organization. It's not just personal.

There are benefits that extend beyond that. All right, my friends. Until next time, take good care.