Sunday, August 4th is International Friendship Day, an occasion founded by Hallmark in 1919 in an effort to sell greeting cards. The idea was for people to take one day to honor their friends just as they would their fathers and mothers. Finding instant popularity in the U.S., the holiday was embraced by other countries, even after Hallmark’s card sales dried up. The Beatles released “With a Little Help from My Friends” as a single to commemorate the occasion in 1967, and in 1998 no less than Winnie the Pooh was designated the holiday’s official ambassador. Studies have shown that friends are a great form of stress relief. And when someone has healthy friendships in the office, they are more likely to come to work happy and stay there.
Comparably took this opportunity to look at our friendships at work, to find out who we have most loyalty to among those we know on the job, and then to see how much time most of us are spending outside work with the work friends we cherish the most.
Respondents were asked:
- Do you have a close friend at work?
- To whom do you feel most loyal at work?
- How often do you socialize with team members outside of work?
The results:
More than half say they have a close friend at work
- Women were 5% more likely than men to say they had at least one close friend among their coworkers. This may come down to a simple semantics issue, with women – often more encouraged by society than men to be effusive – more freely applying the term “close friend,” and men playing it closer to the vest.
- When responses are broken up by ethnicity of the employee, responses fall in between the averages of all male and female employees. Only African-Americans fell below 51% (the average for male employees) and only by a small margin. Hispanic/Latinos were most positive here, followed closely by Asian/Pacific Islanders and Caucasians.
- The youngest and the oldest employees are the most likely to attest to having a close friend at work. This may imply that early jobs we take in our lives are more likely to be jobs where good friends already work, or where there are shared social commonalities. After the 26-30 age group – when folks start getting married, having kids, and focusing on career climbing, instead of social activities – responses drop steadily until hitting their lowest point for the 56-60 group. Responses then rise again for workers nearing the end of their careers.
- Broken down by work departments, the Executive and HR departments are the most positive in response to the “close friend” question. The less customer-facing departments like IT, Engineering, and Customer Support tend towards less positive responses, but this kind of opinion spread between the higher-ups and those “in the trenches” is common.
- When department responses are broken down by gender, we see that women are – in nearly every job title – more likely to say they had a close friend at work. Only in the Executive, Finance, and Sales department did men say they had a close friend at work more often than women. It may be that male camaraderie is more essential to the cultures of those departments.
One-third of all employees say they are most loyal to their coworker peers
- For all employees, the runner-up choice was boss or manager, which lagged behind the coworkers option by 10 percentage points. Least loyalty was reserved for an employee’s direct reports, proving further that middle management has a hard time in the classic corporate structure. Fifteen percent said they were most loyal to the company’s mission or vision – perhaps an admirable stand. Fourteen percent said they were most loyal to nobody, which despite being seemingly impossible, is also perhaps not so admirable.
- Men and women aligned closely on their top choice of coworkers for this question. Both sexes also mostly agreed on the order of the runners-up. Women had the least loyalty towards their direct reports, and men had that group and “no one” tied for last place.
- Employees of all ethnicities chose their coworkers as the group deserving of most loyalty. Caucasians were the most positive about coworkers, with 37% of respondents choosing that option. Hispanic/Latinos were close to that, with 33% choosing coworkers. All chose either direct reports or “no one” (or both) as least worthy of loyalty.
- In nearly all departments the breakdown was similar, with coworkers as the most popular answer and either “no one” or direct reports as the least – but in certain departments, there are interesting variations. For the Executives, the most loyalty was reserved for coworkers and for the company’s mission/vision, in a tie. In Human Resources, a different option tied with coworkers – the option of boss or manager. Admin employees chose boss or manager above coworkers. And the biggest leads for the coworkers option are seen in IT and Engineering – “in the trenches” jobs where dedication to your close coworkers is essential and common, and can far outweigh dedication to the company.
One out of four workers get together outside of work at least once a month
- The “never” option actually tied with the “once a month” option for all employees, when it came to socializing with coworkers outside work. While this may seem like a bleak statistic to quote on International Friendship Day, its important to remember that – for many – the majority of our relationships with our friends at work take place on the job. Many still maintain a divide between their friends at work and their friends outside work.
- Women chose “never” slightly more often than men on this question. For both sexes, getting together with work friends more than once a week seems to be unheard of.
- When responses are broken up by ethnicity of the employee, “once a month” and “never” remain the most popular answers. Almost one-third of African-American employees responded “never.” The most social respondents were Asian/Pacific Islanders, 28% of whom say they made time for friends outside of work at least once a month.
- The most social departments are HR, Product, Business Development, and Executives. Human Resources is the most positive individual group on the “socializing outside of work” question in the survey, which makes sense when one realizes their jobs so heavily involve a sense of company culture.
- As the below graphs make starkly clear, employees tend to socialize with coworkers outside of work less and less as they get older and farther along in their careers. This makes some sense when we consider that the older we get, the more our families take up our lives, and the less time we have for fun nights out with any Unfortunately, these numbers also ratify the idea that we tend to become more isolated as we age, and more set in our ways – and therefore less open to new friendships. (All the more reason for celebrating International Friendship Day.)
Methodology
- Questions were in Yes/No and multiple-choice format. A total of three survey questions were included. Each survey was initiated between July 2018 through July 2019. Results are as of July 23, 2019. A total of 45,284 responses were used.
- Do you have a close friend at work?
- To whom do you feel most loyal at work?
- How often do you socialize with team members outside of work?
- People of all ages, educational backgrounds, ethnicities and experience levels were included.
- Employees hail from small, mid-size, and large companies (VC-funded, privately-held, and public.)
About Comparably
Comparably is an online career destination for compensation and workplace culture data with a mission to make work dramatically more transparent and rewarding. Employees can anonymously and publically rate their company culture and access salary data through the lens of specific demographics, including gender, ethnicity, age, location, years of experience, company size, title/department, and education. With the most comprehensive and structured data in the industry, it has accumulated 10 million ratings and hundreds of thousands of salary records by employees at 50,000 U.S. companies, from startups to Fortune 50 businesses. The company’s data-driven approach has quickly made it a trusted media resource for salary and workplace culture, and one of the fastest-growing SaaS solutions for employer branding. For more information, go to Comparably.com. For workplace culture and salary studies, including Comparably’s annual Best Places to Work and Best CEOs awards, go to Comparably.com/blog.
