Think back to the first friends you made.
School, most likely. University. Those early jobs. Places you didn’t choose so much as land in.
What those places had in common wasn’t that everyone was particularly warm or socially gifted. They were structured to create repeated, low-stakes contact. The same building, the same people, again and again, with reasons to interact.
Names had to be exchanged. You had to make something, build something, then do it again the next day. Most of your closest friendships formed that way. The ones that followed you out of the building too.
One in five Brits say they met their best friends at work (HR Grapevine, 2024). Forty-five per cent met their romantic partners there (HR News, 2024). The people we work alongside shape our personal lives, but they also shape the business around them.
Employees with best friends at work are more productive, more engaged, more likely to stay, and more likely to flag a problem before it becomes one. Gallup has been publishing this research for over two decades.
Most organisations read it, nodded, and moved on.
We assume friendship is organic. Hire decent people and the rest sorts itself out. But that assumption ignores the very conditions that made connection possible in the first place.
Researchers call it the mere exposure effect. Familiarity builds comfort, comfort builds trust and trust, eventually, becomes friendship.
But remote and hybrid working has made this harder. Many people only communicate digitally now, the constant ping of Teams or Slack becoming a source of noise rather than connection.
Many view work as transactional or prefer to keep their personal lives separate. None of which is wrong. But it does mean that when people do come into the office, the conditions for connection matter more than ever.
The office used to do this automatically. Shared kitchens. Corridors that forced you past other teams. A printer in an alcove that became, inexplicably, a social hub. None of it was designed with culture in mind. It just worked because proximity did the heavy lifting.
Then we designed the office. We made it efficient. We separated departments and gave everyone their own everything.
We removed the conditions that made accidental connection possible.
Forming new friendships takes effort. The workspace has a responsibility to accommodate that, to encourage it, and activate it. In practice, making friends at work means shared amenities that pull people together rather than keep them apart. Centralised social spaces that feel distinctly non-work. Paths that connect teams rather than route around them. Linger spaces with no agenda. And where possible, fewer physical barriers: transparent partitions or open sightlines that let people remain visible to each other without being crowded.
Friendships are sustained through consistency. Small rituals: eating lunch nearby, bumping into someone in a corridor, becoming slowly integrated into each other’s days. It feels effortless. Usually, it isn’t. The office has just been designed to make it look that way.
When Eight Financial came to us for new headquarters, the brief was about client experience and professional environment. Those things mattered and we delivered them. But as we worked through the design, something else came into focus.
The layout needed to do more than impress visitors. It needed to work for the people inside it every day. So alongside the advisory offices and client-facing spaces, we designed breakout areas and informal meeting spaces with a specific purpose: to create opportunities for interaction that weren’t on anyone’s agenda.
Not collaboration in the meeting-room sense. Something quieter than that. The kind of contact that builds familiarity over weeks and months. The kind that, eventually, becomes the thing that holds a team together.
The completed headquarters supports what Eight Financial does operationally. But it also does something less visible: it gives people reasons to be near each other. That part rarely appears in a brief. It tends to show up later, in how a team feels.
Most workplace briefs don’t mention friendship. They mention collaboration, productivity, utilisation and wellbeing. The art of making friends at work sits somewhere underneath, invisible, but doing a significant amount of work. And at some point, someone has to own that. Most leaders find that uncomfortable to sit with. Because if it’s true, and the research suggests it is, no amount of away days or culture decks will fix it.
Research suggests it takes between 50 and 200 hours of shared time for a genuine friendship to form (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2018). That sounds like a lot, until you remember that an office sees people for roughly 1,500 hours a year. The hours are there. The question is whether the space is creating the conditions to use them.
A breakout room that’s always booked isn’t a social space. A kitchen at the end of a corridor nobody uses isn’t a collision point. A hot-desking layout with no logic means people sit next to someone different every day and never get past small talk.
These aren’t culture problems. They’re design problems. And they have design solutions.
If you’re reviewing your space – whether that’s a refurbishment, a relocation or understanding why a recent change didn’t land – it’s worth asking a question that many forget:
Is this office designed to help people find each other?
Not in a forced, organised way. Nobody wants friendship scheduled into their calendar. But in a subtler sense: are there spaces people naturally drift to? Routes that mix teams rather than separate them? Or moments in the working day when the agenda drops away?
The businesses getting the most from their people aren’t always the ones with the best perks or the highest salaries. They’re the ones who figured out that culture isn’t something you declare, it’s something you design for.
And that doesn’t always require a bigger budget or a bigger building. It just requires someone deciding it’s worth doing. It always is.
