I remember the 10 a.m. coffee run. Three of us would walk to the place on the corner, grab drinks, and wander back. The whole thing took maybe 20 minutes. Nobody scheduled it.
Those 20 minutes were where I got to know people. A throwaway comment about a rough morning. A shared complaint about a client. A question that turned into lunch, that turned into, a few months later, one of my closest friendships.
That’s mostly gone now.
A Gallup survey found that only 20% of US employees say they have a best friend at work.
Only 20%.
Mark C. Crowley, writing in Fast Company, puts it plainly: no one has office friends anymore. His piece traces how remote and hybrid work quietly dismantled the one place most adults used to build real relationships.
I think remote work is one of the worst things to happen to adult friendships. I know that’s a strong take.
When work stops giving you that social structure, you have to build it yourself. That’s part of what I explored in The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. You can create conditions for connection. But it takes real effort when your job isn’t doing it for you anymore.
What We Lost When We Left the Office
The office used to give you something automatic: proximity.
Not meetings. Not Slack channels. The stuff between the meetings. Coffee runs. Hallway chats that ran long. Lunch with whoever was free. Waiting by the elevator and ending up talking for 20 minutes about something that had nothing to do with work.
That’s where friendships form. Not in scheduled 1-on-1s.
Remote and hybrid work didn’t just change where we sit. It made every interaction intentional and transactional. You message someone because you need something. You hop on a call to get it done. The ambient contact is gone.
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, an economist at Oxford, has studied why people quit their jobs. His finding: they leave because they don’t feel like they belong. Not bad managers. Not bad pay. Belonging.
And belonging doesn’t come from Slack. It comes from thousands of small moments you never planned.
There’s research on how long it takes to form a friendship. Around 30 hours to get to casual friend status. Around 300 hours to get close. I wrote about this in my piece on making friends after 30. Those hours used to accumulate passively at the office. Nobody tracked them. They just happened. Now they don’t.
The Numbers That Should Scare Your Boss
This isn’t just a feelings issue. There’s a real business case.
Employees who have close friendships at work are 43% more committed to their jobs. And 27% more satisfied. That’s from Gallup, and the numbers have held up across multiple surveys.
Deloitte’s 2020 research found that belonging is the top driver of workplace well-being. Higher than compensation. Higher than career growth.
Robert Waldinger, who runs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, puts it simply: good relationships are the biggest factor in how happy and healthy people are over their lifetimes. It’s one of the longest-running studies on human happiness ever done, and that’s what it keeps finding.
Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at UC Riverside, found that small daily connections boost happiness more than most people realize.
I think people who love their jobs usually love their coworkers, not the work itself. Good relationships are often the job.
If you want to go deeper on the health side of this, I pulled together the research in my post about why in-person friendships matter for your health.
Why People in Their Twenties Should Work in an Office
If you’re in your twenties, work in an office. At least for a few years.
I know this isn’t popular. Remote work is comfortable. You skip the commute, sleep later, and do your job from your couch. But you’re trading short-term comfort for long-term social poverty.
The office gives you what I’d call IRL Surface Area. Accidental conversations. Shared lunches. Repeated proximity with people you didn’t choose. That’s how friendships actually form.
You can’t schedule that. You can’t replicate it on Zoom.
And if you can swing it, move to a big city for at least a year. I think everyone should spend at least a year in NYC in their twenties. Big cities force density. You ride the subway next to strangers. You walk to lunch. You run into people. You’re in the mix in a way that a suburban home office never allows.
Remote work from a quiet apartment in a small town is the opposite of that. You’re optimizing for isolation without realizing it.
Yes, remote work has real benefits. Flexibility is great. But don’t trade away the years when it’s easiest to build friendships for a slightly more comfortable commute. You’ll spend decades trying to replace what you gave up.
I wrote more about why this broader trend matters in my piece on the friendship recession and where it’s headed.
What to Do If You Work from Home
Remote work is real and it’s not going away. So what do you actually do?
Make one in-person coffee happen each week. Not a lunch, not a dinner. Just a 45-minute coffee with one person from your network. In person. Put it on the same day each week if you can. Repetition is the whole point.
Host something small. A happy hour. A dinner. A potluck. You don’t need an occasion. You just need a reason to get people in the same room. I wrote specifically about how to host a friendship gathering as a starting point. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
Find a coworking space or a regular third place. Go at the same time every week. The repetition is the point. Proximity plus time is the formula for friendship. A coworking space, a coffee shop, a library, a gym — any place you go consistently, at the same time, around the same people.
Pick up the phone instead of sending another Slack message. Not a text. An actual call. Most people say yes when you ask. The bar for this is way lower than we think.
Making friends as an adult is genuinely hard. But it’s not mysterious. The steps are pretty simple. We’re just out of practice.
What We Have to Do Now
We used to build friendships at work without thinking about it. The office did the work for us. Now it doesn’t, and most of us haven’t figured out what to do about that.
Crowley’s piece in Fast Company is worth reading if you want the employer-side view. And The 2-Hour Cocktail Party is where I’d point you if you want a step-by-step system for building your social life on your own terms.
You have to be intentional now. That’s just where we are.