Is Having a Work “Best Friend” a Viable Retention Solution?

November 27, 2023
Richard Finnegan
Articles

The G12 is the core of Gallup’s approach to measuring employee engagement, asking employees to rate just 12 highly researched items on a five-point scale. And one of those 12 is “I have a best friend at work”. Gallup then provides organizations with their own engagement metrics against their established benchmarks.

Gallup’s G12 Employee Engagement Metrics Surprised Me

I confess to initially scoffing years ago regarding one of Gallup’s G12 engagement measurements that considers whether employees have a “best friend” at work. I whiffed on seeing the correlation between this Gallup data and an organization’s level of employee engagement. These are code words for saying I stupidly thought I knew more than Gallup.

Turnover versus Employee Engagement

My interest though is turnover versus engagement, a choice made long ago because employee retention is more tangible and more essential as employees are either in their chairs or they are not. No engagement happens without humans coming to work first…and for several reasons engagement seems like a fuzzy metric to me. But now comes data regarding employees working from their own chairs, virtually, and whether they have a best friend at work…and how that impacts turnover. And the results aren’t good according to a Wall Street Journal report on Gallup’s recent research.[i]

“Best Friend” Impacts Employee Engagement

Among nearly 4,000 hybrid workers surveyed by Gallup, 17% said they had a “best friend” at work, down from 22% who said they did in 2019.

Yet the data also suggests that the connection between having a best work friend and feeling committed to a job has grown stronger during the post-pandemic years—meaning workers who don’t have a best friend at work are more likely leave.

Gallup’s own report goes deeper, telling us the decrease in employees’ having a best friend at work has resulted in fewer employees recommending their workplace to others, that those employees have worse job satisfaction, and for our purposes they are more likely to leave. And that employees’ having a best friend at work correlates positively to profitability, safety, inventory control, and…as you can predict…retention.[ii]

Summarizing this data into on sentence regarding turnover reads like this:

Virtual employees are less likely to have a best friend at work and this predicts they are more likely to leave.

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Further Reading: Are Work From Home Employees Invisible?

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The More Remote We Become Means Less Potential for “Work Best Friend”

Let’s step back from these numbers and think rationally. Couldn’t we predict that many virtual employees would struggle to develop close relationships with work peers, especially those millions of new hires during “The Great Resignation” period who might never interact with their peers in person? Consider the likelihood that newly-hired virtual peers can develop these best-friend descriptors that Gallup writes about:

Someone you can rely on through thick and thin.
Someone who has your back and genuinely cares.
That you keep one another informed and work together to familiarize yourselves with new technologies and processes.

Employee Retention is in Danger

There is a retention danger here. Months ago, I drafted but never published a blog entry that said there is absolutely nothing good about virtual work regarding retention. That every argument for virtual work can be reversed to become an argument against employee retention. For example…

Good that you can recruit virtual employees from anywhere, bad that your competitors for talent have exponentially multiplied and can steal them.
Good that your virtual employees can develop better work/life balance, bad that they can get that same benefit from thousands more employers.
Good that virtual employees reduce your commercial real estate costs, bad that their turnover and reduced engagement will cost you multiples more.

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Further Reading: Does Microsoft’s Work-From-Home Warning Apply to Your Company, Too?

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Here are Four Retention Solutions

Gallup offers three solutions which are (1) promote intentionality starting with leaders, (2) create interactive opportunities for friendships to blossom, and (3) communicate often.

Let me offer a fourth solution which is hold your leaders accountable to a retention goal. My career-changing experience that led to my developing employee retention solutions forever went like this:

As an HR executive for a bank, the CEO gave me an order to cut turnover.
Rather than put in place exit surveys, salary surveys, engagement surveys, or solutions like the three that Gallup suggests above, we told branch managers they had a goal to cut turnover and we would report their progress each month.
Within 90 days turnover had fallen by 19% and we had saved over $4 million.

I said above that engagement is a fuzzy metric because we don’t measure it frequently and we never hold leaders accountable for it. Add my solution to Gallup’s three solutions and engagement will go up and turnover will go down. Promise.

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