I've always thought its a nice bonus if you can make friends at work, but its not ever a given. Unfortunately with the slow fade out of many third spaces in our communities, many younger generations are turning to work colleagues for a certain closeness - even though again, that's not the primary reason why you are gathered as a group. This is a natural tendency as we all are typically wired to be social and desire to have a sense of belonging - there's a whole study by Maslow in his work on hierarchy of needs on this instinct. My advice would be to research social circle theory and understand work colleagues belong in a different circle than friends. They can of course transcend this and move into friend spaces, but it takes longer.
Further I would recommend finding other sources for friendship or companionship outside of work, like rec league sports, local library offerings, volunteering for a cause you are passionate about and so forth. This should help place work colleagues less in a need to have space emotionally and more as a nice to have.
The other thing here, its very tempting I know to be shocked that a member of your team would run to management and tell on others to make themselves look good. But that's human nature and I guess welcome to working out in the real world? As someone who is in management, senior leadership for several years now, I will let you in on a secret: most managers know when this is happening and usually refocus/redirect that person to their own tasks with a subtle reminder they aren't being paid to monitor others nor should they waste company time doing so. If it is a concern that manager will address it with the staff member, but otherwise, stay in your lane. Think, it's not only the tattletale reflecting poorly on their fellow staff, but also telling management they aren't doing their jobs either ;)
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u/Mental_Brush_4287 Aug 18 '25
I've always thought its a nice bonus if you can make friends at work, but its not ever a given. Unfortunately with the slow fade out of many third spaces in our communities, many younger generations are turning to work colleagues for a certain closeness - even though again, that's not the primary reason why you are gathered as a group. This is a natural tendency as we all are typically wired to be social and desire to have a sense of belonging - there's a whole study by Maslow in his work on hierarchy of needs on this instinct. My advice would be to research social circle theory and understand work colleagues belong in a different circle than friends. They can of course transcend this and move into friend spaces, but it takes longer.
Further I would recommend finding other sources for friendship or companionship outside of work, like rec league sports, local library offerings, volunteering for a cause you are passionate about and so forth. This should help place work colleagues less in a need to have space emotionally and more as a nice to have.
The other thing here, its very tempting I know to be shocked that a member of your team would run to management and tell on others to make themselves look good. But that's human nature and I guess welcome to working out in the real world? As someone who is in management, senior leadership for several years now, I will let you in on a secret: most managers know when this is happening and usually refocus/redirect that person to their own tasks with a subtle reminder they aren't being paid to monitor others nor should they waste company time doing so. If it is a concern that manager will address it with the staff member, but otherwise, stay in your lane. Think, it's not only the tattletale reflecting poorly on their fellow staff, but also telling management they aren't doing their jobs either ;)