Thank You for Being My Friend. . . At Work

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In life, friends come in many buckets: school friends, teammates, neighbors. And then there is the work friend: the co-worker who understands how you spend eight hours of your day, the person who you seek out for coffee breaks to commiserate and who shares the workplace lingo. Work friends often remain just friends at work, but sometimes you start hanging out away from work and introduce them to your other friends and family. The importance of the work friend cannot be underestimated: a recent survey found that 70% of workers cited having friends at work as a critical component of a satisfying work place, and workers who report having a work friend are more likely to stay with their company. We’ll talk about friendships at work, the thrill of making your first work friend, and how to form work friendships in this pandemic-inflected world. Guests: Julie Beck, senior editor, The Atlantic - Beck has written extensively about friendships as part of The Atlantic's "Friendship Files." Her most recent piece is titled "The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship" Emma Goldberg, reporter, New York Times - Goldberg covers the future of work for the New York Times. She wrote the article "The Magic of Your First Work Friends" Dr. Marisa Franco, psychologist and friendship expert; author, her forthcoming book is titled "Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help you Make -- and Keep -- Friends" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport.
0:05.3	You can fly back in time and visit SFO's Aviation Museum and Library to learn about the history of commercial aviation.
0:12.3	No boarding pass needed. Learn more at flysafo.com slash museum.
0:17.0	Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scale ups,, online, in-person, and on the go.
0:39.3	Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you.
0:41.7	Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.
0:48.4	From KQED.
0:53.7	Thank you. From KQMD in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:02.0	In life, friends come in many buckets.
1:04.2	Old school friends, people you watch the Warriors with, neighbors, and then there's the work friend.
1:09.2	The coworker who understands how you spend
1:11.3	eight long hours of your day. Luis and accounting, Maya on the third floor, Gary the line cook.
1:17.7	They are the person you seek out for coffee breaks, whether it's to celebrate or commiserate.
1:22.1	But the pandemic has put a kink in a lot of workplaces. The hybrid work environment, is that really
1:27.0	what we're calling it?
1:27.9	And shrunken social circles of the pandemic certainly have made it harder for some kinds
1:32.1	of work friendships to thrive. Today we'll get your stories of work friends past and present
1:36.6	and celebrate the unique nature of the work friend. That's all coming up next. Welcome to Forum. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. My first real job was as a telemarketer
1:58.1	selling software to manage material safety data sheets.
2:02.3	Yeah, I don't really remember what those are either, but that's what we did.
2:05.8	I was 15, and our boss required that we call him Jimbo, even though his name was just Jim.
2:12.7	Each Wednesday, we had a group outing to a hot dog stand called the Weiner Wagon,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KQED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KQED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.