Work Friendships

Navigating personal-professional connections in the workplace

August 19, 2025

What’s one of the most underestimated elements of workplace success? Is it working hard, or knowing all the right connections or having pure talent? These elements are important, but there’s another one to add to this list: work friendships.

Work friendships can help you in so many ways. Your friendships are there to help you survive long weeks, solve tricky problems, and make even the roughest projects bearable. They are a source of relief from stressful situations and a sounding board for the occasional rant. They can be a real lifeline.

But there’s also a potential for work friendships to become complicated. Sometimes they absorb more time and attention than you’d like, they can blur boundaries between professional life and personal life, and they can be difficult to move on from if things go south.

Here, we’ll explore all aspects of work friendships: what they are, why they matter and how to navigate them flawlessly.

What Is a Work Friendship?

A work friendship is a relationship that goes beyond the casual and obligatory “Good Morning” or “How was your weekend?” It’s a relationship with a colleague that develops beyond the work tasks and project related timelines and milestones. The proximity, frequency and amount of time you’re together creates an environment where you start to develop deeper mutual bonds built on trust, respect, and shared experiences. You notice that you have more in common than just the job. Unlike purely professional relationships, work friendships have emotional depth. You confide, support, laugh, vent, and celebrate your achievements together.

You’re probably already familiar with some of the signs that you have a work friend, or a relationship with a colleague is entering the friend territory:

They check in on you after a tough meeting, or you’re eager to learn about how one of their important meetings went.
You trust their feedback and value their perspective, and you proactively seek out their input.
Even when you don’t see eye-to-eye, you disagree respectfully and can still have lunch together.
There’s not a sense of competition that you may have with other peers, and you are genuinely happy when the other has a win.

These friendships aren’t based on status. There’s something deeper that brings you together. It’s the right combination of the time you spend together, shared goals, openness to imperfections and proximity.

Why Do Work Friendships Matter?

Some days at work are great, but some days seem to drag on forever. If you’re working on a big project with a deadline, sometimes the day truly never ends, and you’re wondering how late you’ll be home. Even if you love your job, work can be draining. Having a friend by your side can help you get through a rough patch and add some personality to what could become a daily grind.

There are a lot of benefits to having 1 or 2 strong work friendships:

Greater engagement and interest in your work and your company
Willingness to collaborate with a broader range of colleagues
Stronger ability to withstand organizational changes
Avoiding burn out, or minimizing the impact of high stress periods

A good work friend will undoubtedly serve as a trusted sounding board during challenging career decisions, and he or she can be counted on to maintain confidentiality. They can be a refuge from office politics, and a motivator to hype you up for a tough conversation. They may even be the person who gives you the nudge to go for that promotion.

Do Work Friendships Last?

It’s possible that what appears initially to be a casual work acquaintance could result in a long-term or lifelong friendship. As you move through life’s various changes, such as new jobs, relocations, new interests, you might remain in close contact with your work friend.

This doesn’t happen all the time. When it does, you’re lucky. Treasure these connections.

These long-term friends are created from a solid foundation. Whether the friendship started from a shared win or from a common “work enemy”, these experiences create a strong bond.

If either one of you moves to a new job, you’ll want to make the effort to nurture your friendship. Be proactive about sharing career milestones, bounce ideas or issues off one another and be there for each other during tough times. These friendships can be among the best parts of your entire career.

There are times, however, when you have to end what you thought was a strong work friendship. Sometimes it reaches the point of a breakup. This can happen if your friend crosses a boundary, pressures you to do something you’re not comfortable with or leverages your friendship in an unethical way. The dynamic of the friendship may have shifted, and your heart is no longer in it.

That’s when it is time to back away. You can gracefully create space between you and your friend and keep your relationship strictly work-related and professional. Your focus on your work and your business objectives will be clear signs that the friendship is no longer progressing.

Call to Action: Recognize and Nurture Work Friendships

In every job, every team, every organization, the people make it work. The quality of your work life often depends on the quality of your relationships at work. You’ll have some relationships that are strictly business, but others that develop into something more meaningful.

Not every workplace is conducive to developing quality work friendships, although employers increasingly recognize the impact of a supportive workplace on employee engagement. While there remain vestiges of old school politics, cliques and strict rules, this type of workplace is (thankfully) starting to vanish.

Smart managers today recognize when work friendships are forming, and they do what they can to encourage these deeper connections.

You don’t need to be friends with everyone. You’ll certainly find some people that you truly connect with, and that’s a big win. Treating your colleagues with respect, a collaborative spirit, and kindness will help build professional relationships that may eventually evolve into work friendships.

If you have the right work culture and the right type of colleagues, you may be fortunate to build friendships across teams, departments and even organization levels. You’ll build valuable interpersonal and leadership skills while at the same time strengthening your emotional intelligence. These strengths will help propel you both inside and outside of work.

BONUS: What To Do About Work Friendships When You Leave a Job

A change in your job doesn’t have to mean an end to your work friendships at that workplace. It’s likely that leaving a job will clarify the nature and depth of those relationships.

You’ll have some work friends at your old employer who will fade quickly. In this case the friendship was dependent upon the physical location and the daily routine or shared work goals. Because our friendships typically rely on proximity and shared interests, it’s common for many work friendships to end naturally when one of the friends leaves a job.

But you will also have friendships from your old employer that remain strong. They stay not only as professional connections, but also personal ones. These are the friends you’ll keep in contact with. You’ll share some details of your new job with them, and even go to them for third-party advice when you need it. And you will be there for them in the same way.

To anticipate what might happen with your work friends, do this self-check by asking yourself about your work friends:

Who do you want to stay connected with?
Who added value to your life by offering good advice, ideas, connections?
With whom did you feel the friendship was most natural, and more like your friendships outside of work?
Who would you look to support you in your next career step? Whom would you like to continue to support?

The answers will give you clarity about where to focus your efforts to maintain your work friendships at your old work while you build new friendships at your new job.