Success Hack #7: Make Work the Epicenter of Your Social Life

Do you live by the motto “I’m here to work, not make friends?” It’s increasingly common for people to avoid making friends at work in favor of keeping a professional distance. In 1985, 50% of people had a close friend at work; by 2004 that number had dropped to 30%.

In our recent study on GDP and working hours, we make the argument that the incentives suggest working hours will be increasing, and everybody’s work-life balance is likely to tilt towards work in the future.

We are here to make a radical suggestion. We will argue that there is no such thing as work-life balance anymore, so you should therefore aim to make work the epicenter of your social life to satisfy any need for socialization and improve your odds of success.

Create a Work-Life Imbalance

We hope our suggestion seems radical. Look for any article about “work-life balance” and they take it as a given that the “correct” side of this balance is the side that slants in favor of “life”, not “work”. This may be the first article biased toward “work”. Essentially 100% of all other press is promoting just one side of this issue. If your skepticism is aroused by such overwhelming groupthink, then congratulations on your independence of thought.

We will argue that a great key to success is to create a work-life imbalance in favor of work. Try deliberately to tack on an extra hour or two each day and you’ll be significantly better off than your peers. Specifically, we argue you should aim to make work the epicenter of your social life so you will actually enjoy and take pleasure in these extra hours at work. At the same time, expanding your work network will cause you to simultaneously gain influence around the office.

We really mean go to the extreme here. As your non-work friends inevitably retreat into their private lives, replace them with friends from work. Invite co-workers out for lunch, dinner, drinks, coffee. Engage them casually for thoughts on life, the universe, everything. Aim to make it such that your entire social identity exists within the confines of the office.

The Multiple Benefits from Making Work the Epicenter of Your Social Life

Our framework for considering success hacks focuses on hacks that have convex benefits, diffuse benefits, and are easy to implement. For “diffuse benefits”, we mean that if you put a habit into place, is there a wide variety of positive outcomes that could emerge? If you tried to make work the epicenter of your social life, consider this list of the benefits you may reap:

• You might make a friend.
• You might make many friends.
• You might enjoy going to work more.
• You might prefer working longer hours because you like the company and don’t feel you need to escape work.
• You might achieve a higher social status at work.
• Co-workers, especially new employees, might look up to you in a leadership position.
• You might gain benefits from cultivating a stronger and wider in-office network than your co-workers.
• Work friendships may provide you benefits even years after you’ve left for the next job.
• It is more difficult for your company to lay off a popular employee than an unpopular employee.
• You may be able to leverage friendships into in-office favors, which could help you professionally.

This is the concept of “diffuse benefits” in a nutshell. You may not achieve all of these, but if just a couple of these fall your way, you’ll be better off than you were before.

Few Downsides to Socializing

What if you try to make work the hub for your social life and it backfires completely, such that you realize none of these benefits? Well, you’re exactly where you started, minus whatever the price of your effort. Maybe you can imagine a downside for trying to make friends at work and failing, perhaps a slight ego bruising and a reputational hit? But be honest, what is the actual damage of a reputational hit among people who ended up not being friends anyway?

The problem is not so much if you fail to make work the center of your social life, but if there are actual downsides that could counter the upsides. We read through all the articles aimed at letting antisocial employees justify their behavior. We found these arguments collapsed into three main themes, all of which are fairly weak:

Distraction at work: Essentially, the idea that you only have x hours at work, and any time spent fraternizing will reduce the amount of time to get real work done.

These arguments falsely assume the typical employee is productive for a full 8 hours. In reality, about half of an employee’s day is productive, but people know how to get their baseline work done. Nobody has ever missed a deadline because they were too busy talking about football at the water cooler.

Complex office politics: Lots of arguments here, including resentful co-workers, leaking of info that can be used against you, backstabbing, and office romance issues in the #metoo era.

Indeed, office politics is complex. It’s so complex that it will likely affect you whether or not you are actively engaging in it. A good way to succeed at politics is to have the most friends.

Difficulty being critical: Sometimes it’s necessary to butt heads professionally, and it’s tougher to do so with a friend.

While it’s certainly true that some professional clashing is necessary, is this really a credible argument? You will abstain from making friends in the first place out of fear of hypothetical future abrasiveness?

Convex Benefits

We already went into great length about the myriad benefits which could come if you are able to make work the center of your social life. Some of these benefits deserve special mention for having the added benefit of being “convex,” or producing compounding benefits over time.

Suppose you enjoy socializing at work so much that you willingly spend 15 more minutes per day at the office. Over the course of a year that adds up to an extra 65 hours of exposure to more workplace collisions if not actual productivity. Over time this could amount to something significant.

Suppose your effort yields you one new “friend” per month. At first the value will be a somewhat less isolating work experience. As friends accrue though, you start to reap the benefits of Metcalfe’s Law, as the power of your expanding network increases to an even greater degree.

The idea is to establish and implement a habit that will become stronger the longer it stays in place.

Social Work: How Easy is It To Make Work the Epicenter of Your Social Life?

We generally recommend “success hacks” that are easy, but this one is actually quite difficult. As we noted above, office politics is incredibly complex. Disengaging is the easy move; trying to deal with the conflicting relationships, motivations, and emotions of a horde of people is a big challenge.

One part of this is actually quite easy. Whether you try to or not, your co-workers are likely to become your primary source of interaction in your adult life anyway.

You see, your friends will taper off anyway, so it is already inevitable that your co-workers will become your social life. Why not lean into this trend and take advantage of it!

Final Thoughts: Meritocracy vs. Populism

Many people espouse a desire to avoid office politics in favor of getting their work done. This argument has one serious flaw: people at work are almost always judged on perception and not performance. As much as companies may desire to judge employees strictly on quantitative measures of performance, the reality is that it is too difficult to measure this uniformly.

Even when they can accurately measure performance, it’s usually just one factor among many. It seems weird to think, but there’s real life analogs. The job of a political pundit, one would think, is to make accurate predictions. In reality, they never lose their job when they do it badly, because their job is to make their audience like them, not to foretell the future.

When you understand that employees are judged more on likability than performance, it might explain why the developer who makes half as many code commits as you might get a 20% higher salary. Or why you are able to succeed at one company but struggle at a different company with a different culture. Instead of taking the next online course on machine learning, your career may be better served by making chit chat at the water cooler.

Other Considerations

We reviewed this article ahead of publication, and got some good pushback we wanted to address here.

Introverts

If you are more introverted (a metric you can easily measure using the RezScore grader), you may be reading this article in panic. Of course, introverts still require some social interaction, we are just more picky and choosy about the people with whom we will spend our time. Therefore, everything in this article still applies. Instead of burning your social energy outside of work, target a few people internally and find a place to get some good one-on-one time.

Entrepreneurs / Small Businesses

Do you work for a very small company, or run your own? If you only see the same two human beings every day, is it wise to limit your social life to such a small group? If this is the case, we recommend expanding your social network to a pool of people that overlaps with your sector. Attend industry meetups and start to make friends in this way. Pretty soon, whether you are trying to or not, you’ll find you’re actually bringing in business and you’ll be indispensable to your company’s growth.

For more information, see our comprehensive list of success hacks.

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