Your Work Friends Are Faking It

bonding exercise, like it's to work specific ritual. I feel like, I mean, I would do karaoke with anybody, but it's especially common among work people because you have to drink a little bit in order to feel comfortable enough. And then you're becoming so vulnerable by putting yourself out there and singing in front of people, and you can't help but be friends at the end. Right, And but we say that, and yet our dear friend Sam Robert left for another job sometime back, and I don't know, are

we really friends now that he's in another job? Yeah, I felt like we were friends when he left, But now that it's been a few weeks. Who knows work friendships are are fraught like that. Well, there's a there's a reason for it. Would you like to know what that is? Yes, there's something called the proximity principle, which suggests that basically, you are most likely to be close

with people who are physically near you. So like somebody who sits next to you at work, is there's a higher likelihood that you'll become friends with them than even somebody who sits like on another floor at your job. And certainly, and that that's a bigger predictor of friendships than anything else, like even how much you have in common with somebody, or you know, some other bonding factor

in your relationship. I found that to be very true on a very micro level here at Bloomberg because we just moved desks and I was close to the person I was sitting next to, and now it's like we barely even work together. Yeah, I've had that experience. Their relationships have of mine have fundamentally changed after that person and me no longer sitting together. It's really sad, I know.

So it's like it's also sad because it's like, God, you thought you were friends with this person, like every day you, you went for your coffee break together and you share little jokes about things you overheard, and it felt like this great friendship and then it's just gone, Like as soon as you don't have the super easy convenience of turning and talking to that person whenever you

feel like it, there's like nothing there. It's not only that you're thrown into this box with people that you might not ever be friends with, but also work relationships are complicated because we work with these people a lot, and you might have a lot and come with them because you are interested in the same professional things, but you also need to be calculating and you want to get something out of them, and or you might be

competitive with them. So it's this weird relationship that you have with It's easy to mistake work friendships for real friendships, or it's easy to treat them like you with other kinds of friendships in your life. But there's a whole other layer to it, right, Yeah, there is research showing that people are more apt to treat their personal acquaintances

better than their close colleagues. So in the study, they had people imagine that a personal acquaintance took them out for dinner and then imagine that a work friend took them out for dinner and the people were more likely to reciprocate with the personal acquaintance. That's crazy. So like, even in this thought experiment, like who do we become

when we're at work? I don't think that I'm like this cold hearted person, But apparently, like when we think about our work friends, were just not treating them the same way we with the people in our lives. I think it's just as complicated, these complicated feelings we have. UM, which is a phenomenon known as the front of me for enemy. It sounds like such a new term. Oh, but there's a history. I going into the history of

the words. Apparently it first showed up back in nine three with what the headline of a story that I love, how's about calling the Russians are frenemies? And for you listeners out there, it's housed with a Z and front of me is spelled f R I e N instead of f R E N, which is the modern spelling. Okay, I love the people were spelling things with a Z in that sounds like a headline from now that could be a I don't know, UM. So it kind of

proves that our relationships have always been pretty complicated. I think there's been room to talk about these complicated, nuanced friend ships, but they certainly do seem very prevalent in the office, and it makes you wonder if everybody in the office who you think is your real friend is actually a friend of me. And I mean everything we've

just talked about suggests that, yes. But our guest today studies working relationships and she's found that it's a lot more complicated than that, and even that these fraud relationships might be good for us. Our guest today is Jessica Methought. She's an assistant professor of Human Resource Management at Rutgers, where she studies work relationships. Thanks for coming on, Thank you for having me. So you study all types of friendships, Can you break down the different kinds of relationships we

have at work? Yeah? Absolutely. We started to look at the research that is really really prevalent on positive and negative relationships, and they tended to pit them against each other to say that they were on opposite ends of a continuum that a relationship is either positive or negative. And we started to kind of reflect on this and think about relationships that didn't necessarily fall into either one of those buckets for us, either at work or at home.

And so we did a little bit of legwork and we started to look at any of the work that's been done that doesn't clearly like label these relationships and put them into the positive or negative buckets. And we found research on things like sibling rivalry and ways that people feel about their in laws, and so these started to make us think that we don't necessarily only feel positively or negatively, but we could really feel both. We

could feel ambivalently. Where will simultaneously feel both strongly positively and strongly negatively about someone that we work with, And so we thought that that was a really interesting type of relationship to take a look at. So that's what we might call fre enemies, yeah, exactly, And so that tends to be the label that's put on and when people want to talk about them. It's something that really resonates with people. We understand and can reflect on what

a freenem me means at work in particular. So these are people who you know, we're really close with and we care a lot about and we feel benevolently towards and we know they care a lot about us. But say we go up for the same promotion and they're making headway on us, there's this notion or this feeling of jealousy that we just can't table. In your research, you also talk about what you call in different relationships. Can you explain what that means? So in different relationships

really are just acquaintances. So these are people that we run into every day, that we wave too, that we nod to in the hallway, and we may even know their names, and so they make a small mark on us on a day to day basis, but if we never saw them again, we might not necessarily, you know,

feel too broken up about it. These were also relationships that we just wanted to delve a little bit more deeply into because we we noticed that they are a specially common Yeah, I definitely have a lot of those. I can think of their names first time only at the top of my head. But you found that they

do have an impact on our lives, right, yes. And so you know, as we started combing through some of the research that touches on this notion of in different relationships, you know, we came across research on what's called weak ties in social networks. And so this is kind of the most common way to think about in different relationships, and from that perspective are weak ties helps connect us

to unique and non redundant information. So if these individuals are not part of our core social network, the people in our core network tend to have the same information. We're all talking to each other, we all share the

same information with each other. If we're connected to someone who's not really embedded in that network, they have different perspectives and different pieces of information that can help us with our work or give us a new way to reflect on something that we're doing that we might not necessarily have reached if we just focused on the people

in our core network. It's like get out of your media bubble, right exactly, and you start to kind of talk to people and so, you know, you ask them about their lives and their experiences or just advice that they would give you, and it gives you a different way or a new perspective to think about things. And so that's one of the ways that we saw this really being a benefit these relationships. And you can probably also learn more about even your job or your office

or how your office works. Like the guy who was installing at my colleague standing desk. The other day, I was talking to him and learned all about our whole office policy on standing desk, which is very complicated. Yeah, and none of none of my more intimate colleagues could explain it to me. Well, right, And so they give us kind of this new information and it might not be the most pressing information, but it could be. And so it helps us, you know, do our jobs in

a way that we wouldn't necessarily have thought about. So there's some research that calls them consequential strangers, So we consider them strangers, but they do mean something to us.

They have some consequence in our daily lives, and they also you were saying, they affect our our day to day Yeah, absolutely, And so this is something else that kind of came out of our research and our review of the research that's been done, which is, even if we don't develop or never develop really strong or positive relationships with these people, they give us a sense of embeddedness. They really help contribute to the culture of the work.

They make us feel like we have connections. And the thing about high quality, strong friendships, strong relationships is that they can actually be pretty draining. They take a lot of effort, and so these acquaintances they don't take much effort for us to continue to maintain, and so they're very helpful in making us feel positively. They give us a positive emotion. Someone waves and says hi to you. It makes you feel good, right, You feel connected to

the people at work. But it doesn't take your attention away from the work that you're doing. It doesn't create an interruption, it doesn't cause you to have to repay someone for something that they gave back to you. And so they're really low maintenance relationships. Hearing your talk about friendships and how much energy they take, I can definitely definitely relate to that, and I'm sure freenemies take a particularly large amount of energy. Have you found that there

are any benefits? Are? Like, what are the effects of phenemies at work? When we look at the effects of frenemies outside of the workplace, they tend to seem really harmful, really detrimental. So if these are you know, our friends who we share some kind of volunteer activity or some other activity that we're engaging in with them outside of work, these tend to just drain us so much, right, and so we want to potentially just end those relationships. It's

easier to end relationships outside of work. The unique thing about freenemies in the workplaces that you can't necessarily just dissolve them, right, These are people that you work with, and so there's really this this complication associated with frenemies in the workplace that doesn't translate to this type of

relationship at home. And so while they're are some detriments, what we see is that when there's this sense of ambivalence, when there's this coexisting positive and negative set of emotions that exist in a relationship, it actually heightens our activation. So it makes us more attuned to what's going on in the workplace. And so what that leads to is better opportunities for learning, more vigilance, more creativity, and so it actually helps with creative thinking and the ability to

do our jobs better. It also leads us to think a lot more deeply about, say, the information that this individual is providing us with. We don't just take it at surface value and assume that it's okay. We really work through is this true, and so kind of give a deeper sense of commitment to and time to the information that they're providing to us because it might not necessarily be accurate. We don't know if they're trying to

help us or trying to hurt us. That does sound really mentally exhausting, is and that's the harmful aspect of it is that it's so they are so de energizing inside of work or outside of work, they are draining. They take so much time and energy. And because you constantly have to be in this heightened state of vigilance, right you're constantly on your toes thinking what is this person going to do? I can't necessarily predict what they're

trying to do or what their goal is. Now, there are some people who are neither friends nor frenemies right there, just they're just genuinely people you don't like. It works, right, How do those relationships affect you compared to freenemies? And that's a really fascinating question, something that we found really interesting because if we just take these relationships at face value, thinking that they're either positive or negative, then we assume

that negative relationships are the worst kind of relationship. Right, These are harmful. But we know what to expect from people we dislike, right, or from people who we don't interact well with or who don't help us with our work and we know are trying to sabotage us. So the fact that we can, our expectations are set. It's actually easier to deal with negative relationships. We know we want to avoid them, right the goal in that interaction

is avoidance. But when we have an ambivalent relationship, we're pulled in these two different directions. We've got mixed feelings about them, and that sense of a mixed feelings of this tension is much more detrimental than purely negative relationships. It's increasingly draining, and you don't necessarily want to simply avoid them. It's this kind of contradicting approach and avoid tendency, and so you have different interactions with them day to day,

and it's really harmful over the longer term. But you can't necessarily avoid your enemies are nemasies know you know, and and definitely even if they are purely enemies, purely negative relationships, you can try your best to try to

avoid them. If you have to work directly with them, that's going to be really harmful, but you might find out something you like about them, So you might find even if you don't like them as a person, or you have very different values that you actually work well together, But that might turn it into an ambivalent relationship even more when you have to when you when you can't avoid your enemies, they end up just turning into your friend, and then you have to spend so much more mental

inner jus. Yes, exactly, And so I think that's something that managers really need to think about and consider when they're trying to, um say, resolve conflicts. When they're forcing people who don't necessarily like each other to work together, thinking that's going to help them overcome this issue, it

might be creating something that's even worse. So in talking about freenemies, I couldn't help but think about our current political administration, and it seems like Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump might be freenemies at this point because you know, Paul Ryan didn't endorse him, and now they have to work very close together and you see this tension and play out. Is it possible that that friend of the

ship um might be good for their creativity together? Well, you know, I think it did lead us to start to see some ways that they were trying to work together, even if it was superficial, But I'm not necessarily sure they're actually frenemies. I think it might be putting on a show. I'm not entirely sure that Paul Ryan actually likes Donald Trump. That's just my personal opinion. But I do think that they are trying to work together. I do think they see the potential for their being able

to collaborate and try to meet the goals of their party. Um. But I'm not necessarily sure that that actually falls into this category of ambivalence or frenemies, because it's this true positivity and negativity that are coexisting, and it's not necessarily just trying to make something work. But that could fall into that category potentially. You know, I think that, like you mentioned, in this political landscape, were probably starting to

see fenemies become a lot more common. So at work, these are you know, individuals who you felt like you were friends with, who you interacted with really well, you support each other, and then you potentially find out, even though you respect them as a professional and as someone who's supported you at work, that maybe they support a

political candidate that you just can't back. That there's no way that you could support this individual, and you start to see that your core values really differ, And so I think that we probably are starting to see the incidents of these freenemies on the rise in this landscape where there's so much divisiveness, where people are starting to find out things about each other where that they wouldn't necessarily have found about found out about otherwise, and it

creates these complicated relationships. When I have discovered an unexpected political opinion from somebody that I had assumed thought otherwise, it almost feels like a personal betrayal, even though they didn't do anything to me. They just had an opinion I didn't know about and nothing changed. They had that opinion before when you liked them. So yeah, I'm also wondering, have you found that work relationships or the research on it, can be gendered or changes depending on the gender of

the two people involved. UM So when we look at friendships between enders, right, so a lot of times we think about friendships being between individuals of the same gender,

and so the effects are gendered. When supervisors are evaluating to women who are friends, they tend to get more negative performance evaluations than two men because women tend to be seen as social butterflies, and so that UM that interaction tends to be seen as non work related, even if that's not necessarily true, and so we could see that effect occurring, but we could use a lot more research on it to kind of nail down whether that's

actually happening. And then one of the other complicating issues is cross gendered friendships. So when a man and a woman are close friends, then what kind of complication does that create? And so it takes a lot of energy to manage that kind of relationship, to portray it and to signal to others that it is purely a friendship. And so there's research on work spouses which is really interesting.

You know, I have this person who's really close to me at work, but you know, I have my my personal life and my spouse at home, and that starts to get a little complicated as well. Well. That's playing out in the political sphere right too. We have the vice president saying that he wouldn't privately go out to dinner with a woman, which suggests that there are still these widely held beliefs among some people that women and

men can't have just a neutral relationship. Absolutely, and I think that that continues, right So this is something that even when we see it unfold in the workplace, people start to gossip about it. Right, even if it is neutral, it starts to garner gossip and people start to assume that things are happening when two individuals go to lunch every day with each other or they go to happy hour with each other, and so we definitely need to be cognizant of the impression that that's giving as well.

One final question that we're trying to tackle is do you think that work friendships are real friendships? So in my research, what we've found is that we can ask this question quite differently. And so there's been some really great research which by Gallup where they ask a question do you have a best friend at work? And so they'd actually started asking that question by saying do you have a friend at work? But the problem is is that people say that everyone at work is their friends.

They have a very loose definition of what friendship means. But when you ask someone if they have a best friend at work, it's very easy for them to make that distinction. They know if someone is their best friend or a positive acquaintance or just a friendly relation. And so what we tend to see is that people report between one and three best friends at work, and I

think this is actually true. So even if they start off as just a work friend, where this relationship is purely in the work domain, you're spending so much time with your work colleagues, and it's inevitable that this is going to kind of bleed into or blur into your

non work life. You start to go out to happy hour with them when you need to vent about something, You introduce them to your spouse or your partner, and the more you get to know about each other and the more personal information you disclose to each other, the more your work and your life domains start to blend together, and the closer you become where this person really does become a very close personal friend, not necessarily just a work friend. So it's possible. Absolutely, Well, thank you so

much for coming and talking to us. This was great. Thank you so much for having me so. Jessica says that work friendships become real friendships when they crossed the line outside of work, and that happens over time when you invite people for drinks and then they get to know your spouse or partner, and that's definitely been my experience. Yeah, your lives sort of slowly over time move away from just having work in common to having other things in

common as well. But I definitely have friends that I grew closer with them after we stopped working together, after one of us left a job. So that's when you like no longer need something from someone and you still like them. Yeah. Maybe, or you've just you've had enough other experiences together besides work that you have like enough

of the ingredients for real friendship. Because there's so much fodder to talk to people about work when you're working together that it's like you can get lazy about becoming friends in other ways. That's all true, but also maybe it doesn't matter if you're not friends later. Like these friendships, the relationships you haven't work because you spend so much time at work with the same people, especially if you're working on small teams, they feel very real and genuine

and fulfilling. Yeah, you can't know if your friendship has the right stuff to last outside of the office. There are plenty of people that I at past jobs thought, yeah, sure, I'll be friends with that person, Like I love the idea of continuing to hang out with them. In theory, if we are no longer working together, and it just never came together. There was no you know, ill will

between us, but the ship didn't last. But it doesn't mean that those weren't good friendships when we were working together, and they're honestly probably friend of me ships. I can't imagine having totally good or totally bad feelings about somebody in general, but or at work, right. So the lesson is, don't drive yourself crazy wondering whether your work friendships are

real friendships. Try not to invest too much mental energy and outwitting your friendemies, but also just enjoy the nice relationships you have with people, and if they last, they last. If they don't, it doesn't mean you weren't friends to begin with. So sweet and now it's time per half Big Takes, Happy fake Takes. We got a really great call in half Big Take from Kelly in Las Vegas, and you two can call into our hotline at two and two six months seven zero one six six and

here's Kelly high game plans. I'm really tired of vanity license plates. You know, I'm on my way to work and I'm stuck behind someone in a red light with some stupid pun and my brain automatically starts to try to figure it out. And why are you stealing my brain power? You don't get to do that. You know, I'm a professional. My work gets built out at hundred dollars an hour, and you you don't get my brain

power for free. Okay, thanks a lot. People who get vanity plates, they don't really consider how it might make other people feel. I know, they don't think about what it puts Kelly through. She's got her brain power is expensive, and she's spending it on figuring out vanity blades. And you and I obviously never thought about this because we don't drive. Thank you, Kelly. All right, frantiska, what is your not quite fully formed idea? I have such an on topic half big take that I've been dying to

do for a long time. I'm super psyched that acquaintance ships, acquaintances. I like acquaintances a lot. I think I'm super psyched that those uh relationships are actually really important and good and underrated because I've always felt that way. And I kind of hate it when people decry small talk because

they just think it's not genuine. And so I have a half big take about small talk, which is that now, taking it as given that small talk is important and valuable and real and we all need to do it, we should get a little bit better about small talk because there's a timing issue with small talk. So I

have one of these acquaintances. Okay, he's one of the security guards downstairs, and I walked by him in the morning, and I always get really tense right before we have our high moment in the morning because I know there's gonna be a timing issue where I'm going to say hi or good morning, and he'll say good morning, and then just as I'm getting out of range, he'll shout like a follow up question at me, like or say like have a great day, but it's I'm too far away,

it's too late for me to turn around and respond. So my half big take is be good at small talk, value small talk, and make sure you have your timing right. What is your half big take this week? I am so passionate about this week's half big take. I've been so excited ever since I thought about it. My half big take is that people need to get over their aversion to fish smell like you know, tuna fish. People

say it smells bad. You can't bring in to work or the other day you had fish for lunch, and this is why this came up, and it was you're sheepish about it because people are so rude, and it's like, grow up, grow up fish. Food smells like food. It smells like food. Also, I think it's unless it's really it makes people feel so guilty about the things they

like to eat. And I think I'm so passionate about this because I had an incident in high school where somebody made fun of me for the sandwich I brought because it had catch up on it and you're not supposed to put catch up on chicken sandwich apparently, and I felt like very ostracized and weird. And yeah, I don't like to be food shamed. And it's just like we're adults and fishes of food we all eat and fish is really good for you and delicias, so everyone

needs to chill out. Yeah, people, It's like people don't want to smell, Like there would be fine smelling it if they were the one eating it, but for some reason, you don't want to smell food someone else is eating. And it's like we have to eat our food in the office, and everyone does it. So it's just about accepting that the office is an okay place to eat. I think you can't hide that you're eating you know what, forget it. I'm eating tuna sandwiches and hard boiled eggs

E tofu every day for lunch. Honestly, Thank you, Delicious, You're welcome, and this has been half big takes, half baked takes. Thanks for listening to another episode of game Plan. You can find me on Twitter. I'm at ours Greenfield, I'm at Francesca today and call us leave a message with your half by take or anything you like at two and to six seven zero one six six. If you like this show, please head on over to I Too wherever you listen to your podcast to rate and

review and subscribe. We've just got a new review and I freaked out. It's an awesome review. Thank you reviewer. This podcast was produced by This Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. Head of podcast is Alec mcaine and we will see you next Weekful we can ride together, making with each other happy. So bye bye bye