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Thought Leader: Tom Rath on Friendships at Work – A Strategic Lever for Increasing Engagement Created by

Karen Elmhirst

Content

Read this interview if you’re interested in answers to the following questions:
· How do employees typically rate the time they spend with their boss?
· Why is friendship such a big factor in employee engagement?
· What other aspects of our lives and work are affected by the quality of our relationships?
· What can HR professionals do to help foster productive relationships at work?
<div>Synopsis:</div>
“Did you know that people who have a “best friend” at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their work? They also have fewer accidents, more engaged customers, and are more likely to innovate and share new ideas,” says Tom Rath. Tom Rath and his colleagues at The Gallup Organization have studied the topic of friendship and engagement extensively. Read this article to learn what role relationships play at work and the benefits they provide and how organizations can help foster friendships.
<div>Expert Bio:</div>
Tom Rath is co-author of the #1 New York Times and #1 Business Week bestseller, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595620036/hrcom" target="new">How Full is Your Bucket?</a> - A book that draws on decades of research to explore the differences between leading an enthusiastic life and a miserable one. With more than 500,000 copies in print within its first year of publication, this international bestseller is now available in more than 10 languages. Tom has been with the Gallup Organization for 12 years and currently leads Gallup’s Workplace and Leadership Consulting Worldwide. He also serves on the board of <a href="http://VHL.org">VHL.org</a>, an organization dedicated to cancer research and patient support. 
Tom earned his bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Michigan, a masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing a degree at John Hopkins University. He lives in Washington, DC. Tom’s second book <a target="new" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595620079/hrcom">Vital Friends – The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without</a> is an examination of the friendships that make work and home life more positive and productive. It was published in August 2006 and it will be the focus of our interview today.
To access the archive of this interview, please click <a href="/SITEFORUM;jsessionid=102A694EC25FD392FCF30A1DEBA430CB?t=/contentManager/onStory&i=1116423256281&l=0&e=UTF-8&active=no&ParentID=0&sort=Price&StoryID=1160679854964">here</a>.
View upcoming Thought Leaders webcasts <a href="/SITEFORUM;jsessionid=102A694EC25FD392FCF30A1DEBA430CB?t=/contentManager/selectCatalog&i=1116423256281&l=0&e=UTF-8&active=no&intro=1&sort=Price&ParentID=1119974649899">here</a>.


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KE: Tom, why don’t we begin by having you tell us what prompted you to write this book?
TR: There were really two primary factors. One is that working for Gallup, we spend a lot of time speaking with leading psychologists and sociologists around the world and about the only thing I can ever get them to agree on is the fact that social relationships are probably the single best predictor of our day-to-day happiness. If there is one thing that really makes us feel better, it is the quality of our friendships. About 10 years ago, Gallup started to make an extension to see how important our friendships are in the workplace. That is the second major reason I had a lot of interest in this topic because we now have about 10 years of data suggesting that friendships are essential on the job as well.
KE: In my work, I am seeing more emphasis being placed on training and development for intact teams: leadership teams, project teams, as opposed to just working with individuals. Do you think we are starting to share your realization that big potential lays within relationships in the workplace?
TR: You know, it’s a really good point. If you think about the way our education starts at a very young age and how it continues into the workplace, we spend so much time focusing on how to build each individual’s knowledge base. In grade school it was, how do you get better at writing and arithmetic? Then you move into the professional world and you have to self-develop.
Of course maybe if you are lucky, you do have some team sessions and talk about teams, but often the focus is still on each person, instead of on how we build the connections between two people. A lot of our research shows that all of the great innovations that occur within an organization and big wins and victories with clients or employees, usually take place at the intersection between two people, or at least at the intersection between a series of people.
KE: I love the quote you include in your book, taken from a speech that Roosevelt prepared at the end of his life and never delivered. Why don’t you share that with us?
TR: At the end of World War II there were a lot of tensions on the home front and he was thinking about what could help people to reconcile and he said, “Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships.” I have studied a little bit of history about Roosevelt and his friendship with Winston Churchill in particular. It was one of the great relationships that helped shape the overall political landscape of the world several generations ago.
KE: And that is really what your book is about, the science of human relationships. Why don’t you give us the 30-second summary of your research process?
TR: I would be glad to. One thing I joke about is that at Gallup, we have more data than we know what to do with. In the last five to ten years at Gallup we have studied 10 million people. In particular, with relevance to the friendship topic, we have asked the same 12 questions. One of those questions is about having a best friend at work and we will talk a little more about that. We have kept the question text the exact same across 100 countries and over 100,000 work groups and I believe that includes at least 500 organizations, so we have amassed quite a bit of data on this specific topic.
KE: And to Roosevelt’s point, let’s look at what science has discovered about the power of relationships in our lives and let’s start with a matter of more personal interest; the connection between relationships and diet and exercise.
TR: That is something that jumped out as a surprise as we were looking at the value of friendships. I started by asking a group of colleagues to respond to a questionnaire with a lot of random thoughts in there about beliefs, all the way from beliefs in religion to diet and exercise and physical health. What surprised me, and we have since looked at this from a random sampling of over 1,000 people in the general population, is that if your best friend has a very health diet, you are five times as likely to have a very healthy diet yourself. Of course, that is influenced by a variety of factors; you might eat from the same refrigerator, you might go on walks together. But that being said, it would be pretty easy to predict someone’s health by looking at their best friend or significant other.
KE: As I recall, there was also a connection with the amount that you exercised based on your friendships.
TR: Right, we found the same connections with overall health and diet and exercise.
There was some great work conducted where they bring couples in and create small wounds on their arms, just superficial wounds, and put a suction cup over it to measure how quickly people healed. If you are getting along with your significant other, that group heals twice as fast from those small wounds. So they have actually found a direct biological link between friendships and overall quality of our lives.
KE: Interesting. Is it the quantity of friendships or the quality that makes the most difference?
TR: I was really curious about that as we started to look at the value of friendships and we knew that having one best friend at work seemed to make some type of difference. 
We modeled some of the data and looked at what happens when you have one best friend versus two or three, four, five, six, seven, or eight. We did see another major spike in the data when you have three very close friends at work. When people have at least three very close friends at work, they were, I believe it’s about 50% more likely to be engaged in their jobs and then interestingly enough, 96% more likely to be extremely satisfied with their life in general. Some people might get hung up on the balance thing, of course, but it looks like if you have more close friendships at work, you actually enjoy your non-work life even more too. So it is not an either/or choice necessarily when it comes to relationships.
KE: Having three close friends at work doesn’t sound like an impossible task, in most cultures anyway.
TR: No it’s not, it just takes the right investment.
When you think of our non-work lives, a lot of research suggests that as long as you have at least three or four close social connections, you are much more likely to make it through serious challenges. For instance, people who have severe heart disease live a lot longer if they have at least four close friendships. 
KE: Later on we are going to talk a little about friendship and marriage. But let’s get now to a discussion of friendships at work. The Gallup Organization and your Q12 assessment measures employee engagement. One of the 12 questions is: Do you have a best friend at work? Why is that question so closely linked to engagement?
TR: About 10 years ago, we were testing different variations of that word and there is not a company that we speak with where they don’t raise a flag when we suggest asking the question about having a best friend at work because it seems so extreme. In many cases, executives don’t want that question being asked of their workers, but yet when we were testing the questions, I have a good friend at work versus I have a friend at work or I have a best friend at work, it was a question about having a best friend at work that really made the difference. We found that people who have a best friend at work overall are seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs as people who don’t have a best friend at work.
So it increases the odds of being engaged, meaning very productive and into your work and having a good time, seven fold. On the flip side, when people don’t have a best friend at work, there is only a one in 12 chance of their being engaged at work. So it’s a pretty lonely place to be. I asked people about their favorite jobs and companies that they have worked for. They usually don’t point back to the company or the brand or the product, they point back to the closest friends they had there so it makes sense in that regard as well. 
And then we have studied very carefully across this database of 10 million people other measures related to productivity such as customer engagement, safety and real hard outcome measures that economists care about. Essentially what we found is that when people have best friends at work, those numbers rise as well. We have used a technique called Meta analysis to examine that across hundreds of organizations, and it holds up time and time again.
KE: Why “best” friend, versus good friend or just friend?
TR: Essentially we have tested several different wordings and there is something about the word ‘best’ that qualifies the term, so people think about it as a high-quality friendship where there is a lot going on. The term ‘friend’ by itself has lost almost all of its exclusivity now that you might have 400 ‘friends’ on myspace.com. I met a gentleman in passing here in my building a couple of months ago, and he typed me an e-mail a few days later and signed it “your dear friend,” so friend has almost come to mean what we would have called “acquaintance” 10 or 20 years ago.
KE: So by saying ‘best friend’ it eliminates those casual connections and focuses the person on their deeper, trusted relationships?
TR: Right and most importantly, that is what we found statistically separates very productive work groups from work groups that aren’t. You can’t get that separation if you use good friend or friend by itself.
KE: Looking again at your Q12 assessment, is the response to the friendship question highly predictive of engagement?
TR: Yes, time and time again, this is one of the single best predictors. And it is a number that companies can move. We see companies improve drastically on this item and when they do, productivity goes up and they have a safer place to work. I have heard people talk about manufacturing environments where they would jump in and grab a best friend when he was in trouble on the line, but wouldn’t do that for someone who is more of a stranger on the job, so it starts to make sense.
KE: So how many employees have a best friend at work? And what are they more likely to do than other employees?
TR: Well roughly a third of the people in our database right now have a best friend at work. That number has gone up a little bit and we see a slight variation when we look across different countries, but for the most part, it is pretty consistent. People who do have a best friend at work are more likely to be enthusiastic on a day-to-day basis in getting things done and having a good time and building a culture where people want to show up for work. They are telling their friends outside of work what a great place it is to be and it’s kind of opposite of that actively disengaged or negative employee that we have been able to measure and describe whom are literally scaring off colleagues and customers every day.
KE: And at 33% of employees having a best friend at work, it sounds like we have lots of upside potential for organizations to foster more relationships on the job.
TR: It’s almost an untapped area. There are very few organizations that are really thinking strategically about how to build better connections between people.
KE: Please talk to us now about employees’ feelings toward spending time with their bosses. 
TR: The Nobel prize winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, who is one of Gallup’s senior scientists, was conducting experiments with 700 people in Texas where he asked them to reconstruct their day and think about the moments when they had the most satisfaction and enjoyment. So instead of asking you, “Do you like taking care of your children?” he asked you to think about if you were changing a diaper at noon, were you having a good time? So it got a lot more specific about the things we really enjoy on a moment-to-moment basis. Sure enough, at the very top of that list was time with friends.
Sometimes people get a laugh when they see that time with one’s significant other was two spots down from friends. Friends were at the top of the list, followed by relatives. Then, significant other, followed by children. Then, you have customers, co-workers and dead last, was time with the boss (Source: www.bucketbook.com)
When they looked at activities people enjoyed, time with the boss actually came out right below time cleaning the house. I mean there is a pretty big disconnect there right now where people we really don’t like being around are the ones at work and we have so much more fun when we are around friends and have our off time. And that creates lots of problems when you have a division like that.
KE: Given that time with friends is so highly regarded, no wonder it makes such a difference on a person’s level of engagement. It would completely change the complexion of the work experience.
TR: There is one organization that we worked with and they kept saying they have best friends at work. We did not understand that because these were convenience store workers who worked alone on the night shift. It turned out they had made great friendships with some of their customers, and that is a really good thing too. If you can ever get to the point where your organization has employees with very close friendships with your customers, you know you are in the right place.
KE: What if we do have a good relationship with our boss? What kind of difference does that make?
TR: People who do say they have a good relationship or friendship with their boss are more engaged and satisfied with their jobs overall. I know it’s kind of taboo in some circles to think about having a very close friendship with your boss, but when we study the greatest managers in the world, they invite their employees into their home and know what is going on in each person’s family life. They really do care about each employee as an individual and have pretty close relationships.
KE: You mention in your book that just 17% of employees report that their manager has made an investment in their relationship in the past three months. 
TR: When we talk to employees, they tell us that for the most part, their managers are actually ignoring them. I always thought it was terrible if your manager was just focusing on what you were doing wrong all the time. But it turns out from our studies that it’s even worse if your manager is not paying any attention. There is a huge chunk of managers out there who just aren’t thinking consciously about how they can build that relationship. 
I think it is a tough thing for an individual employee to initiate a friendship with the boss because it might look like they were kissing up. I think a lot of the responsibility does rest with the manager to think about how they can open up a little bit more, get personal with each of the employees and build real relationships. I don’t know if that has been on the radar screen of the average manager in the last decade.
KE: Have you done any research as to what is getting in the way of managers paying attention?
TR: There is one thing that seems to be getting in the way in a few organizations that I have studied. I interviewed people with a couple of the world’s largest apparel retailers. They actually have policies posted in their back rooms, which encourage employees to report any of their colleagues if they are caught socializing outside of work with someone who isn’t of the same pay grade, essentially.
There are a couple of different people I interviewed. One woman moved to a small town, the company transferred her. She and her husband really did not know anyone in this new town. He worked all the time, she was working, I think as assistant manager with this retailer and she went out to dinner with a manager in a different department. Someone saw them at dinner and reported them to the 1-800 line. A manager from a different store was called in to discipline her and even threaten her employment. 
The point is that there is a lot of well-founded risk involved in relationships that get stronger in the workplace. There was a real important push on that 10-15 years ago. Now, I think there is a chance that companies (and their legal departments maybe, in particular) are over-legislating and only considering the potential risk or down side. They’re not considering or weighing the upside of helping people, or at least, allowing them to build friendships on the job.
KE: I have never heard of that before ¾ a hotline for reporting people who spend time together outside the job. Do you think that is a common policy?
TR: I hadn’t heard of it before myself so I asked a friend of mine who leads an HR group for one of the largest competitors for this company. He said they have the same policy. 
KE: Sounds like some organizations are doing the opposite of what is good for productivity. 
TR: It’s important to acknowledge there are negative consequences of friendships at work. If a relationship gets too close, and the relationship then dissolves or something goes wrong, there is more fallout. Also, there is the possibility of romantic relationships developing with your direct boss or where there is a power element to the relationship, that is a serious problem. Companies really haven’t tried the case on both sides and so in a part of this book we looked into where this stems from in more of a historical context. One thing I did was interview both executives and frontline workers who worked in the old big three auto factories in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, between General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. 
I was just amazed by the positioning of “us versus them,” management versus hourly. The only times I did uncover a few good friendships between people at any rank, the friendship was based around going out to the bar together after work and complaining about how much you hated the boss. We called those “bellyache buddies.” There are some friendships in the workplace that are counterproductive, so it’s important to weigh both sides. 

We find time and time again, what works is when companies think about it in more of an open way and foster the right culture. You can’t force people to have friendships, that would be creepy, to tell people that you want them to have best friends at work. There are little things that companies can do to create the right environment, essentially.
Audience question: “Tom, I really enjoyed reading your book Vital Friends. Have you heard of an organization that conducts formal and successful friendship building activities? What form do those activities take?”
TR: I think there are a lot of consultancies and individual coaches and consultants who help people to think about building better relationships in more of a one-on-one way or through team building sessions. There are not a lot of organizations right now, at least in my experience, who really think consciously about helping employees to have friendships at work. I think one challenge there is that building friendships on the job really takes structuring the right conditions from a management and leadership perspective and figuring out essentially how you can enable employees to make friendships on their own versus it feeling like a clearly stated goal that the employees have been pushed towards.
KE: I would think building collaborative environments in the workplace where people get to work across functions and in teams would help foster relationships.
TR: Yes, I think any activity that enables dialogue will help you create better relationships. It is almost that simple, that if you can get people talking, you are halfway there.
Audience question: “Could you offer some advice on how HR professionals can create friendships at work? And how do you tread the line between police person and normal worker? It has always been difficult to make friends at work when you are the person who might be helping to discipline or maybe even firing your friend.” 
TR: I know that is a huge challenge for leaders in HR. I think it could be a very important part of the overall branding and image of any HR department within an organization to also be seen as the group going out proactively trying to do things that build closer relationships while at the same time, working to mitigate risk in pockets as much as you can. I think my overall summary on that question would be to just not make the mistake of managing around the exception. 
I think we have gotten to a point where I know the financial regulations and the giant conversation about harassment in the workplace, which really brought an important topic to light 10 years ago. I think that there is a lot more education and knowledge out there now that’s important but it’s probably the responsibility of human resource departments in general to help companies look at what they can do in a proactive way to build stronger relationships, because it might even be counter intuitive in regards to minimizing risk if you really have better connections between people, because you won’t have the same type of divides when there are any hard times. I have studied work groups who have been able to build great friendships. It’s a lot better to look like a dysfunctional family than no family at all because at least you have the right relationships there.
Audience question: “We are working on an innovation initiative. Do you see benefits to this initiative if we focus consciously on building friendships?”
TR: I think that’s a brilliant point. Any innovation that I have witnessed personally has occurred at the intersection of a great relationship. I think there are probably no ideas out there today that only one person in an entire organization can claim as their own. I think that innovations and creativity really occur in places where there are extremely strong connections, let’s call them your high bandwidth connections.
KE: We talked before this interview about social networks and how some companies are starting to pay attention to those connections that people have developed that are informal. Do you think companies are taking a more active role in mapping and understanding their social networks?
TR: I have seen a lot of companies experimenting with looking at social networks right now. It’s a very tough thing to quantify. I have seen a lot of companies look at the overall connections in the company, but I think the biggest challenge is to not only measure but also increase what’s going on between two dots on a social network. So, how do you make a thicker connection right there, because that’s what matters most when we talk to employees one by one? Of course, you have some people who are extremely extroverted and need to have 20 or 30 or 40 connections but for most people the key to their being engaged on the job is having at least a handful of high bandwidth connections within that social network.
Audience question: “Are there good interview questions to help identify people who easily make or who already have friendships at work now, or how they will develop relationships if they get the job?”
TR: There has been really good work over the last decade on people who are more introverted, more extroverted and that is a decent proxy. We have a tool we call Strength Finder at Gallup that seems to be really good at identifying people who really go out there and are more the connectors that Malcolm Gladwell talked about originally in The Tipping Point. I think people in organizations who do that so well are often undervalued and you might see someone going around from office to office and he or she is just socializing all the time and that might be a problem. In reality, they are bringing out people who might be a little bit more shy. I am more introverted myself and there is a gentleman here in my office who, anytime he walks into my office, brings the whole conversation with him. I am thankful for that because it sure helps me to meet new people around the office every month.
This is a wild thought, but it might even be worth it for organizations who really don’t have quite enough connections, to hire someone in part because you know they are a portable water cooler, who moves down the office and starts conversations.
KE: Isn’t business really just another form of community? Why would we relate to each differently or assume that relationships aren’t important?
TR: I think in the end, that’s what organizations are built on. In small start-up companies, you seem to get that in the culture. It’s like you have a small family starting and then as you get larger and larger and larger I think the challenge increases. The degree of difficulty goes up for leaders and organizations to help build more connections as companies grow because it is not easy to do in a larger environment.
KE: Let’s talk about what some smart companies are doing to help facilitate relationships.
TR: I was amazed by the degree to which architecture matters. When it comes to helping people to make friends on the job, people are three times as likely to have a close-knit workgroup if the physical environment is right. Unfortunately, most people don’t work in an environment like that. Just to paint a picture for a moment of what a great environment looks like, we have done some work with Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics retailer. 
I had a chance to visit their corporate headquarters in Minneapolis. They have connected three or four large buildings into one big hub. In the middle it has three storey high ceilings, glass all around and there is the Caribou Coffee, which is the only place where people can go to get coffee. It forces everyone to congregate there. They also have video games and dry cleaning and childcare. It feels like you are in a little city or a sidewalk café in San Francisco, even though you are in the middle of Minneapolis and it is 20 degrees outside. So they have created an environment there that is nothing more than a giant social hub, so people can get to know one another and strike up a conversation.
KE: What have you seen companies do that have dispersed workforces?
TR: When companies have people working at a distance, essentially what we have found is that you need to make that connection face to face ideally, the first time around. I have learned a little bit from studying good executive MBA programs and graduate degree programs which are done at a distance so if you get a group together for some intensive period of time, whether that’s three days or a week or a few weeks, they are usually able to build those connections and then maintain them. One thing companies can do is to help people maintain those connections at a distance. I am in Washington, DC, I work with an editor in New York City, a publisher or chief marketing officer is in Los Angeles and we have a big operations center and I work with a lot of people in Omaha, Nebraska. I work with them on a daily basis talking on the phone regularly because we have already developed such close relationships.
On the weekends we are typing back and forth about college football games and politics and the latest news on the corporate e-mail system and that’s not discouraged in our culture. Lots of things like that are encouraged, where you ask employees to bring their non-work interests into the workplace and that seems to help in every case where I have seen it tried.
KE: I am thinking back to our national conference a few weeks ago when Patrick Lencioni was speaking. He talked about the critical role that trust plays in building relationships and in creating highly functional teams. I think what we are describing really is that basis of trust that needs to be established between people at work so that they can count on each other, support each other and collaborate together.
TR: That is a great point because trust was one big factor underlying all of the friendships we studied. That kind of trust and real closeness within a friendship, more than anything else in the workplace, are what companies care about in terms of the bottom line. It creates speed. So when you know somebody pretty well you can call them and have a conversation for 15 seconds where you get something done that might take 15 minutes if you were explaining it to someone you did not have a relationship with. There is real clear business advantage to building that trust as well.
KE: Do you have any other suggestions for organizations to help foster relationships on the job?
TR: I think one of the challenges that we look at is what can people do to build relationships the minute they start on a job? There was an example we talk about a little bit in the book where a new employee was starting a job where he was very excited about it. For the first week, they asked him to sit in his office and read product manuals and someone would drop off a new manual every now and a manager might say ‘hi.’ Everyday he sat there wondering if someone was going to ask him to eat lunch with him. It goes back to your worst fears in first or second grade. Being in a lunchroom where no one will sit by you.
Unfortunately, only one in four employees had someone to help them make new friends when they started their job. The few people that did have that opportunity were more than twice as likely to be satisfied in their job. So one very important factor is to help new people to get connected right away and make sure that it is someone’s responsibility not just to make sure that they know what their benefits are, but know how to get their paycheck. They know how to log on to the corporate intranet, but also they know who they can talk to around the office and how they can get involved on a social level.
In a unit of Procter & Gamble I interviewed a woman who worked for one work group, where her boss’s rule was that for the first hour when they met new team members, all work topics were off limits. They had to talk about what was going on in their personal lives and their family and general interests. Then, they could get into the work stuff for the rest of the day. 
KE: In your book you also look at friendships in general and the different roles people play in our lives. Let’s look at those roles briefly.
TR: We try to sort out what friendships in our work and personal life would really make a difference. We asked people if this person weren’t around would your life have an attraction dip, if they weren’t around would your achievement at work go down? We sorted out the type of friendships that have really proven to make a difference in life satisfaction and engagement at work. The first one is the builder, who is someone who is really pushing to get more done everyday, like a great coach at athletics or a great manager on the job. 
Champions are the people who obviously sing your praises and are standing up for you whether you are there or not. Collaborators are people you get to know at work that you have a lot of common interest with. In many cases I have found common interests are some of the best seeds for long-term friendships where you might get to know each other because you are both huge fans of a college football team or some specific type of art.
Companions are the people who are the first ones you go to if you have good news or bad news and they are some of your very closest friends. Connectors are the people who dramatically extend your social network and help you meet more people, know which restaurant you should go to and how to find a doctor, for example. Energizers are just your fun friends. I wondered about that at first, this role of energizer that was emerging from the questions we asked and it is important just to have that fun friend. Our data would suggest that it is a huge deal in terms of your general life satisfaction. You have a friend who might not push you to get more done and might not connect you to a big social network, but you laugh a lot with that friend when you are out with him and that makes a difference.
Mind openers are the people who really expand our horizons and keep us from getting too narrow in our thinking. If you want to lose creativity and innovation to one of the questions asked earlier, one great way would be to hang around with a few mind openers. Navigators are the people who give you lots of good guidance but you might only go to navigator every six to 12 months. They are that sage guru, you really trust their advice and when a big decision is on the line that is the person you go to and summarize real quickly.
Essentially what we found is that there are different people who play all of these roles in each person’s life and the most important component is to think about who does each of these things in your life and to recognize that. Figure out what you do for other people and try not to force one person to fill all eight of these role because no matter how good they are, no manager and no best friend at work is going to fill all eight of those roles at once.
KE: Have you ever done any work to look at which of those roles are most likely to be satisfied with work friendships?
TR: We have looked at which ones are most highly correlated to engagement on the job and we do see some of the roles you might expect. If you had someone who is the mind opener and builder, they might push you to get a little bit more done at work whereas, as I mentioned, an energizer is more likely to just boost you spirits in more of a general sense.
KE: What’s the best gauge of a friendship’s health?
TR: I have looked at some great data from experiments conducted by a scientist. He actually does most of his research on marriages, John Gottman, who was at the University of Washington. Essentially what he found in studying thousand and thousands of couples over the years was that the little day to day interactions are clearly the best predictor of the friendship’s health. Gottman was actually able to predict out of 700 couples, which couples would stay married or end up divorced 10 years later based on watching a 15-minute conversation. 
In 1992 he tape-recorded them on a 15-minute conversation and scored them based on their little interaction in a ratio of five positives to one negative that he used. He followed up 10 years later and his predictions were accurate 94% of the time. I was on a program with him recently and he said when he goes to cocktail parties everyone is running away from him because he can see right into the marriage they are in. But it is amazing the way you can tell how well off a couple is, or two good friends on the job, or a manager and an employee, just by watching them for 10-15 minutes.
KE: Are there other examples of companies that you feel are doing a good job of facilitating relationships?
TR: There are a lot of companies who do little things in pockets. I think having people who are naturally good managers quite honestly drives some of it. If you get the right manager it seems to make an incredible difference. We have recently looked at some data from a Gallup poll and found that if you have a manager who ignores you, they are not focussed on what you are doing right, only what you are doing wrong, the chances of your being actively disengaged in your job are about four in 10. So, there is a 40% chance that you will just be miserable on the job.
If your manager focuses on your problems and what you are doing wrong, things actually get better and there is only a two in 10 chance that you will be really tuned out or disengaged at work. If your manager is focusing on your strengths, we found that there is only a one in 100 chance of being actively disengaged on the job. A real practical strategy that I have observed in some of the best work groups is to help other people focus on the things they are doing well. 
Back to the marriage ratio we just referenced, that was all based on the number of positive versus negative interactions. Of course there are times we need to have tough conversations, but if you can create balance of at least three positives for every one negative in the workplace, according to the work of a couple of our senior scientists, that appears to make a real difference in terms of overall productivity and satisfaction.
If you’ve enjoyed this interview with Tom Rath of The Gallup Organization, we encourage you to read his new book, <a target="new" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595620079/hrcom">Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without</a>. Also, visit Gallup at <a href="http://www.gallup.com">www.gallup.com</a>.

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