What to Do When You Are Missing Your Work BFFs While Working From Home

Why is work the number one place where adults make most of their friends? Because consistency is one of the three relationship requirements, and there's nowhere we're more consistent in our lives than where we're paid to show up regularly. Work is to adults as school is to kids: the best place to interact frequently with the same people.

But what happens to all those work friendships—whose consistency relied upon sharing a breakroom, sitting beside each other, chatting in the hallway, or connecting briefly after meetings—when so many of us are now working remote?

We have to create a new pattern of consistency. The bad news is that one of the things we loved about those friendships is that the consistency was more-or-less automatic for us when we shared a workplace; now it falls on us to initiate connection and set up our own regular interactions. The good news is that if we learn how to create a habit of interaction on our own, these friendships will buffer us from burn-out while working remotely, will feel stronger and closer should we ever work together again, and will be more likely to survive in the eventuality that one of us changes jobs. Proving that we know how to keep up our friendship even when we're not paid to run into each other is one of the most important gifts we can give our work friends!

Work is to adults as school is to kids: the best place to interact frequently with the same people.

So the first step in making sure we stay close, or feel closer, to friends from our job is to figure out how we can keep interacting in an ongoing way even we aren't physically close. If we don't have shared experiences or consistent interaction, then we can't meet the other two relationship requirements (keep reading to find out what those are).

A relationship can only be produced when time together is repeated frequently enough through shared experiences and reliable interactions.

Once we have time together scheduled, it becomes crucial to then be as intentional as possible during that time to add in the other two relationship requirements that make our relationships feel meaningful: Vulnerability and Positivity.

We can only feel close to someone else if we both feel seen, meaning we need to feel like we know each other and have a good sense of what's going on in each other's lives and hearts.

We can spend time together and open up, but we aren't going to want to keep doing it unless it leaves us feeling good. Relationships need more positive emotions than negative emotions to ensure that we enjoy each other and feel accepted by one another.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if we're remote or in-person, as long as we both feel seen (the outcome of vulnerability) in a safe (the outcome of consistency) and satisfying (the outcome of positivity) way. The more we practice these three drivers of a relationship with someone, the closer we'll feel to them.