Best friends good for business

Silvia Amaro and Vivian Derr went to work at a health maintenance organization in Santa Ana, Calif., in the late 1970s and have been best friends ever since.

Best friends Vivian Derr, left, and Silvia Amaro run a health care company.

By Del Jones, USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2004-11-30-best-friends_x.htm

Not good friends. Not close friends. They are among the 29% of employees who say they have a best friend at work, and mounting research indicates that the word "best" makes the difference.

They have a combined 84 years of nursing experience and now manage a fleet of vans that provide health care at schools in low-income pockets of Orange County. "I was ready to retire five years ago, but I’m still here, and the one reason is … Sylvia," Derr says.

Best friendships are good for business. Companies are coming to discover that, yet are at a loss at what to do about it. Group-hug Tuesdays? That idea sends chills down managers’ spines. Diversity proponents worry that they have made too many strides to see it all disintegrate into the office version of high school cliques.

Yet it’s widely accepted that the winning companies during the next generation will be those that have employees eager to come to work and bring with them their hearts, minds, creativity and passion. That kind of worker has been coined in management speak as "engaged," and an industry has sprouted around the elusive quest to find them, convert them and prevent them from slipping into the ranks of the "disengaged" — or worse — the "actively disengaged."

The Gallup Organization has surveyed 5 million workers over 35 years searching for what magic makes some engaged and others not. Much of what it found is not surprising. For example, engaged workers are more likely to receive regular praise and are given an opportunity to do what they do best every day. But what Gallup has uncovered about best friends stands out as novel:

• Among the 3 in 10 workers who strongly agree that they have a best friend at work, 56% are engaged, 33% are not engaged and 11% are actively disengaged to the point of poisoning the atmosphere with their negativity.

• Among the 7 in 10 who do not strongly agree that they have a best friend at work, 8% are engaged, 63% are not engaged and 29% are actively disengaged.

In other words, those who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged. Those who don’t have a best friend have slim 1-in-12 odds of being among the engaged. Worse, the best-friendless stand a one in three chance of being actively disengaged. That means they may threaten sabotage or otherwise become a serious drag on the company’s success. Those who don’t have a best friend can consider themselves far more likely candidates for dismissal.

In a separate study of 161 employees of an unnamed large telecommunications company near San Francisco, Columbia University organizational behavior associate professor Francis Flynn found that workers who do a lot of favors for each other are more productive than those who focus strictly on their own jobs. Favors must be a two-way street, however. Those who do a lot of favors for each other are more productive, but not those who do favors but get little in return. Small favors that are reciprocated build trust that leads to an exchange of bigger favors, Flynn says.

FranklinCovey, a Gallup competitor, also has research indicating that friendships are important but has chosen to concentrate on factors it can influence.

"We don’t feel it is actionable," says Sean Covey, vice president of innovation.

Best friendly skies

Board one Continental jet and the flight attendants will all be in their 20s. Take another, and they’ll all be in their 50s. Continental makes no effort at homogeneity but gives flight attendants flexibility in choosing their schedules. Flight attendants use a "buddy bid," says Sam Risoli, vice president in charge of Continental’s 8,650 flight attendants. Many bid to work the same section of the aircraft.

Convenience-store chain 7-Eleven makes no special effort to schedule friends together. But like many companies, 7-Eleven encourages good employees to refer friends and family as potential hires, says spokeswoman Margaret Chabris.

Tiffany Guarnaccia and Julie Berezin, both 24, work at pay-per-click advertising firm Searchfeed.com in Bridgewater, N.J. When Guarnaccia was preparing for a trade show two months ago and about to miss a deadline, best friend Berezin pitched in with a late night. The business world is cutthroat, Guarnaccia says, and too many co-workers enjoy watching you flounder — especially when a promotion is on the line.

In Guarnaccia’s mind, a best friend is someone who wants you to succeed. Most workers say, "A best friend has my back," says Marcus Buckingham, formerly with Gallup and co-author of best sellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths.

Researchers such as Flynn prefer the word trust, but he suspects trust and friendship are nearly identical.

Gallup says best friendships by themselves do nothing to turn around a noxious workplace. Best friends at a company where opinions aren’t valued would be more likely to unionize, says Gallup consultant Curt Coffman and co-author of First, Break All the Rules.

But in an otherwise healthy environment, best friends often come to the aid of the company and tell each other to "just get over it when things suck at work," says Mandy Jezin, whose best friend is Angela Zappella at DGWB Advertising.

Getting personal

Companies can’t force workers to be best friends. But some try to be a conduit by giving co-workers a glimpse into each other’s values and interests. Many companies sponsor charitable projects that bring like-minded co-workers together. Engineers at one company begin meetings with everyone sharing something personal, Buckingham says.

Brian Le Gette, CEO of Baltimore company 180s, is a believer in workplace friendships. The maker of sunglasses, ear warmers and gloves has a young, active workforce, and the company sponsors employees in Frisbee golf tournaments and a charitable rowing competition called dragon boat races that had 22 co-workers practicing for long hours after work.

Coffman encourages such attempts, but he says companies get more mileage hiring "connectors," or people who say at job interviews that they have dozens of best friends. "It’s like throwing a great party. If you invite a bunch of boring people, they’re not going to dance," Coffman says.

That spells trouble for the many people who say they only have two or three best friends in all the world and the odds of working with them are slim.

Many such as New Orleans chefs Joy Jessup and Matt Floyd say they work with their best friend only because they are married and work together.

Workers define the term "best friend" differently. Derr, for example, says she has about 10 best friends. Amaro has two: Derr and another who dates back to elementary school. Coffman says he has 25 best friends, about 15 of whom work for Gallup.

His wife, Tammy, although personable and successful, says she has many good friends but until recently had no best friends at employer Quest Diagnostics.

She was skeptical that a best friend was important on the job, but when a former acquaintance joined the company, she decided to test the theory and made an effort to develop a best friendship.

Only when she succeeded did it become clear the importance of a workplace best friend, because they were able to build bridges between departments that were at odds, Curt Coffman says.

Coffman says it’s unimportant that workers define "best friend" so differently. What matters is the data, and regardless of how "best friend" is defined, those who say they have at least one at work are far more likely to be engaged.

Companies have spent a lot of money over the years to encourage bonding among top executives. But even among CEOs, some have best friends at work, some don’t. Larry Bossidy, the retired CEO of Honeywell turned co-author ofConfronting Reality, says he has had a lot of friends at work, but never a best friend.

On the other hand, Le Gette says he has four "friends for life," two on the job.

Executive friendships can backfire. Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner, testifying Nov. 15 in a shareholder lawsuit against the company over a $140 million severance package paid to former Disney president Michael Ovitz after just 15 months of service, denied that the two were best friends. Eisner said he was a "good friend," a "reasonable friend. Michael Ovitz had a lot of best friends," Eisner said.

Gallup says there is nothing in its research that suggests that bosses should avoid best friendships with subordinates. However, CEOs are more likely to have friendships with other CEOs, particularly with CEOs competing in the same industry, according to a study by James Westphal of the University of Texas.

Competitors who collude to fix prices would be breaking antitrust laws. But friendship equals trust, and CEOs will be more likely to raise prices if they trust the CEO of a competitor to follow, Westphal says.

Diversity can be issue

There are few drawbacks to best friendships, but one is that it can interfere with hard-fought efforts at diversity. Companies almost universally say that diversity stirs creativity and helps meet the needs of diverse customers. But as flight attendants demonstrate, best friends are more likely to be developed between people of similar age and interests.

That’s not always the case. New Yorker Derr and Texan Amaro, for example, come from dissimilar backgrounds and became close when Derr relied on bilingual Amaro to translate information to Spanish-speaking patients about prescriptions and follow-up visits. But best friends so often look and think alike that diversity proponents worry about a return to the old IBM model of blue suits.

‘Group think’

Guarnaccia and Berezin are the same age. They brainstorm effectively together but admit their relationship is exclusive to the point that others at Searchfeed.com see them as a two-woman clique. Guarnaccia says the friendship, while on the whole productive, makes them vulnerable to a miniversion of "group think."

Creatures of the animal world, including humans, are inclined to group together based on similarities. But that doesn’t make it right for humans, says Luke Visconti, co-founder of DiversityInc, a trade publication about diversity. "The challenge is for management to think inclusively, because it’s not natural to do so," Visconti says.

Women are usually presumed to be more social, and Gallup’s data show that 33% strongly agree that they have a best friend at work vs. 25% of men. However, having a best friend is just as important for men to be engaged workers as it is for women, says Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace/management.

Among those men are Dan Safier and Craig Greenwood, both 40 and from San Francisco. They met in grade school and were best men at each other’s weddings. In 2003, they became co-founders of real estate development firm The Prado Group.

"I drop my kids at the bus at 7:30, and my first call is to Craig," Safier says. "We brainstorm even before I hit the coffee shop, and we hit the ground running."