YakShaving

This entry is a follow up to Kar’s comment on my last post about Americans having no friends.   Kar alleged that the reason for the lack of friends and bonding opportunities is that work consumes our lives as Americans.   I thought this was interesting so I wanted to explore it more and find out if this was reasonable.  Many signs point to yes in business and social literature.

While I was researching, I found this Fast Company article, Balance is Bunk, that says that work-life balance is overrated, if you actually love your work, it is OK to be addicted to it.  This is a half-truth.   If you truly love your work* and are passionate about it, you become a more fulfilled person and this helps you make friends and improves relationships with your immediate family.   I like to think of one of Guy Kawasaki’s rules about entrepreneurship- strive to focus on making meaning (not making money).  At the same time, its important for people to create rules for self-governance (e.g. "For every X hours I spend on my business or work, I will spend Y hours developing my relationship with my friends/family."). 

* caveat:  You may not always love your work and find it completely fulfilling, but as long as you’re learning (churning?) and making mistakes (and learning from them), you’re still making serious progress.

If we’re spending so much time at work and we don’t have many friends, then are we not considering our colleagues to be friends?  I consider myself pretty lucky to call my teammates friends, but I realize this might not be the case in many other cases where the age disparity between coworkers is a barrier to camraderie.

While I was thinking about this, an idea popped into my head.  Companies like eHarmony are making an absolute killing by employing psychologists to find compatibilities between people for the purpose of  relationships.   What if companies made prospective employeees answer a questionnaire that attempted to find out how they’d interact within a team?  This might be overkill for a position in the mailroom, but other high profile teams might benefit. 

If the largest reason for corporate attrition is the relationship between employees and their direct manager (or lack thereof), couldn’t you design a team that has a high propensity to be friends with each other?  The problem is, I dont know if the team would be more productive or less productive (go out to baseball games in the afternoon instead of "working").  Also, this proposed questionnaire and method of hiring might be a serious HR violation.  Anyway, something to think about more.