Amity or animosity? At work, the dividing line can be very thin indeed.

by Mark Vernon, published in Management Today, September 2005

Do friendships and work mix? The answer, surely, has got to be yes. Else the office would be a desperate place indeed. And yet, whilst everyone wants to gossip with colleagues some of the time, enjoy the camaraderie of the office much of the time, and feel they belong to the team all the time, the friendship which such a pleasant work environment rests on can be a fragile thing.

The trouble is that friendships at work are full of ambiguities. Consider this. You have worked with someone for some time, perhaps several years. You have spent all hours of the day with them - 5 days a week - sharing jokes, worries and triumphs. In short, you like them and even consider yourself quite intimate with them. And then they get a new job. One month later, they are leaving - and a strange thing happens. You barely miss them. Within a couple of days of them gone - maybe even a couple of hours - and (if you're honest) you hardly mind.

One might be justified in asking whether such a friendship was ever worth the name. Or consider this. You are in the supermarket at the weekend and quite unexpectedly spot the person who sits opposite you in the office at the end of the aisle. Why is it that you grab your trolley and head in a seemly but swift manner right in the opposite direction?

Or again: you are at the theatre or cinema, making your way into the auditorium, when you bump into a colleague - and it is embarrassing! This is someone whom you see at least once a week, and now, outside of work, you are not quite sure how to greet them. As you take your seat you ponder: should it have been a nod, a smile, a handshake or perhaps even a (chaste) kiss?

We could go on with other examples of the ambiguities of friendship at work. The petty irritants that blow up out of all proportion. The friendship you proffer when really you loathe the guy's guts. The managers you have to be friendly with because they conduct your appraisal and control your pay packet. And they would all beg the same question: why, when you think about it, are professional friendships so perilous?

Philosophy provides one very good answer. No less an individual than Aristotle noticed these same things as he wandered the workplaces of ancient Greece and Macedonia 2,500 years ago. And he put a word to it: utility.

Your utility is your usefulness. And the trouble with work (for friendship at least) is that you are fundamentally there to be useful. You are there to do something - for a client, for a team, for a boss. Moreover, the utility relationship is two-way. You are at work because it does something for you. You hope that will include factors like providing stimulation or satisfaction, but at the end of the day work is not work without one key utility for the employee, namely the paycheque.

What this means for professional friendship is that they are based mostly on what is done together. Stripping these relationships of their utility takes away their raison d’être. This is what happens when people leave: like a flower cut, any friendship withers. It is not that they were not liked or had nothing in common with you. It is that the thing held in common, work, is gone; and without that, the relationship ceases to have reason or purpose. Similarly, outside of work, people find it hard to know how to relate to one another, apart from reverting to talk about work. They become awkward because the framework within which they usually conduct the relationship is absent.

Even if your relationships at work include a drink at the end of the day or can cope with a casual encounter at the weekend, there will be limits to what they can sustain. This is why team-building away days are so dreaded. The fear is that they overstep the mark by putting people together as if they were non-work friends. (The days are often only saved by the identification of a common enemy - the facilitator or boss - whom as the recipient of mutual animosity creates the illusion of friendship in the group.)

Another way of putting why it is that these utility-friendships can be so flakey is that people are not necessarily friends because of who they are in themselves. Deeper friendships - with best friends, partners, soulmates and the like - are based on loving someone not for what they do but for what they are. Thus Aristotle summed up the difficulty facing professional friendships in this way: 'Those who are friendly with each other because they are useful to each other do not like each other for the person each one in is in themselves. They like each other only insofar as it does them some good. They are friendly because it is beneficial to be so.'

The vital point is to recognise such relationships for what they are, so that they do not get stretched to breaking point. Professional friendships will always be influenced, and possibly determined, by the utility factor.

However, the trouble does not stop there. Aristotle also realised that whilst what lies underneath the ambiguity of work friendships may be readily identified in theory, it is not always easy to discern in practice.

One problem is that utility-friendships can often look and feel like deeper friendships. For example, office camaraderie can be genuinely felt and meant. After all, do not some people organise their working day around the gossip over the photocopier or the clock-like exchange of joking emails? Alternatively, the solidarity that disgruntled colleagues may find in each other can be profound; they may feel they are true confidants. However, the utility principle still holds. These things may humanise the workplace, but take the workplace away, and the friendships will flounder.

Another problem is that work friendships are subject to factors beyond the individuals' control. The things that underlie the friendship can change rapidly and in quite arbitrary ways. It may only take an office reorganisation, which means you simply do not see the other person very much any more. But that could be quite enough to kill a friendship that has not taken root in other ways.

A more destructive issue arises when professional friends do not get the same thing out of the relationship. For example, the workplace can be very competitive - perhaps in the pursuit of promotion, a sense of achievement, or simply getting on with the work in hand. In these circumstances, friends readily come to feel used. And whilst usefulness is always a part of friendship (even best friends will ask each other to do things for them, even if only feed the cat), feeling used in friendship is almost invariably terminal.

This raises another tricky circumstance: when professional friendships go wrong. They say there is nothing like a lover scorned. Well, a colleague who feels betrayed may be equally vindictive. The innuendo and back-biting can hang around like a persistent bad smell, and may even threaten a career. It is for this reason that sociologists of the workplace report that colleagues often pretend to remain friends with others even when they secretly despise them; they’d rather do that than risk animosity. Similarly, self-help books routinely advise avoiding friendships at work and letting no-one become more than an amicable acquaintance.

The good news is that Aristotle did not advise the same. He preferred honesty to avoidance. Know yourself, and the nature of your friendships, and enjoy them for what they are. After all, a common project is an excellent way of bringing people together. On occasion it may even be that a utility-friendship moves on from being based on 'the doing' to 'the being'. Moreover, in today's world, work is one of the best sources of friends ??" as well as one of the most desirable places to have one. Perhaps when genuine good feeling rises above mere benefit and an admiration for character over professional achievement, a virtuous spiral of regard can blossom into a wonderful and robust friendship.