On Work Relationships
lifeI met up with a former co-worker of mine last night while she was in town, and it got me thinking about work relationships and those I’ve built throughout my career.
Making (new) long, lasting friendships is hard as an adult. Or at least, it is for me. Back when I was in school, it was super easy because there was just so many more opportunities: classes, parties, student organizations. As an adult who doesn’t attend parties every weekend? I have no idea. And so enter, work relationships.
To this day, I maintain a few types of work relationships/friendships.
- Mentors / Managers turned friends: although our friendship cultivated during the time we worked together, the friendship flourished after working together.
- Friendship through trauma: we both hated our jobs, and we trusted each other enough to complain about it during work hours. One of the few reasons we survived the job was because we had each other. We continued our friendship even after one of us left the company.
- Forced relationship: this one is kind of a subset of the one above. It really was just a friendship within the confines of the office, and doesn’t leave the office too often. We both had complaints about work. We worked closely together. We don’t typically like each other but each other is all we got, so we’re in this weird friendship limbo. I’ve accepted this love/hate relationship of sorts.
- Interns / Mentees / Onboarding buddies: I once had been assigned to be someone’s onboarding buddy when they first joined the company. We were required to meet weekly to sync for their first few months of work. 3 years later, we were still meeting weekly and had become friends.
- Same team co-workers: We worked in the same team, liked each other enough to be friends and hang out outside of work.
- Same company, different teams, different departments: No idea how our paths crossed, probably a company function. We realized we had enough things in common to hang out outside of work and become friends.
Work friendships are a big deal to me. I typically like to separate different aspects of my life, like professional and personal, but do acknowledge that sometimes they unintentionally overlap. Although I have never forced a work friendship nor do I specifically look for it, when it does blossom, I try to welcome it with open arms. After all, a lot of my really good friends these days have all started out as some sort of a work friendship.
Side Note(s):
- This post is Day 15 of the WeblogPoMo2024 challenge.
- I refer to some as relationships vs friendships because it’s some sort of relationship, but not quite a friendship.
- Some are referred to in past tense but some actually still exist in my current company.
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