How work best friends could help put an end to the ‘Great

When Abigail Lee joined the skincare start-up, Ren, she was straight out of university and had just moved to London.

Lee told CNBC that she was a fan of the brand having tried its products at a counter in upscale British store Harrods a few years previously. While studying, she sought an internship at Ren, which turned into a full-time role. As the firm was small, it was easy to make connections, Lee said. “You [didn’t] have to wait to go to the water [cooler] to speak to somebody, it was just the culture that the two founders built … [a] family-type of culture, really, it breaks down those barriers.”

Soon, she had befriended a Spanish colleague, Eva, the firm’s head of customer service, and the two became close. “She’s 10 or 12 years older than me … and I would say I was much more serious about things. And she taught me how to laugh at myself.” Although the two would occasionally clash in meetings, “[we’d] then get up and go to Waitrose to go for lunch …  The space that the founders created was the platform, and then the rest was up to us,” Lee said.

When Ren was sold to Unilever in 2015, Lee decided it was time to leave — having spent seven years at the firm. Did her friendships keep her in the role over that time? “There were elements [of that], because just going to work and spending time with people that make you laugh and be happy, they care about you, they champion you — it’s such a luxury,” she said. She and Eva continue to be good friends, 13 years after they met.

Lee is not alone. Having close friendships in the workplace is something consultant Bruce Daisley says can help retain staff, and it’s a topic he explored earlier this month in his newsletter Make Work Better. “One of the things that helps forge these friendships is a sense of shared experience. Things we do with other people just feel more significant,” he wrote of the relationships people develop.

Gallup research suggests that having a best friend at work links directly to how much employees put into their roles. “For example, women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged (63%) compared with the women who say otherwise (29%),” the company said in an online post in 2018.

Daisley, a former vice president at Twitter, said he is close friends with people he met in his first role in ad sales in the 1990s, including Pinterest executive Nick Hewat and Dara Nasr, who runs Twitter in the U.K. And having a “best friend” at work could go some way to stemming the tide of the so-called “Great Resignation” — a record 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in August, per the U.S. Labor Department.

However, those relationships are much harder to maintain when many people are still working at home, he said.

One organization Daisley spoke to had been proud of its familiar, empathetic culture, but had struggled to maintain it as people increasingly worked away…