Only two in 10 U.S. employees currently say they have a best friend at work, according to Gallup’s long-running Q12 employee engagement research. That number sounds small until you see what it predicts. Gallup has been asking American workers “I have a best friend at work” for decades as one of 12 core items in its engagement survey, and the results consistently show that this one relationship, not salary, not title, not benefits, is one of the strongest levers companies have over whether people stay, perform, and actually like their jobs.
Gallup’s data shows that women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged in their jobs, 63%, compared with women who disagree, at 29%. Engaged employees in Gallup’s framework aren’t just satisfied; they’re the ones driving innovation, sticking around, and putting in discretionary effort nobody’s paying them extra for. A single friendship is doing more analytical work than most perk packages.
What Companies Would Gain if More People Had One
Gallup modeled what would happen if organizations could move the needle from two in 10 employees having a best friend at work to six in 10. The projected gains were substantial: 36% fewer safety incidents, 7% more engaged customers, and 12% higher profit. Those aren’t soft, feel-good numbers. They’re the kind of figures that show up in a quarterly earnings call, generated by nothing more than employees genuinely liking one specific coworker.
The mechanism isn’t mysterious once you think about it. Employees with a work best friend are more likely to engage customers and internal partners, get more done in less time, support a safer workplace with fewer accidents, and share ideas rather than sit on them, according to Gallup’s analysis of the data. A close work friendship functions as informal quality control: people who trust a coworker are more likely to flag a mistake, ask an awkward question, or push back on a bad decision before it becomes an expensive one.
The Pandemic Made This Relationship More Important, Not Less
You’d expect remote work and hybrid schedules to have weakened workplace friendships. Gallup’s data shows the opposite happened. Between 2019 and 2022, the share of employees who strongly agree they have a best friend at work climbed from 39% to 44%, even as huge portions of the workforce spent less time physically in an office. Over that same window, the share of employees who said they did not strongly agree they intended to stay at their company dropped from 26% to 21%, meaning the retention link between friendship and staying put actually strengthened during one of the most disruptive periods in modern work history.
That timing lines up with separate research from MIT Sloan Management Review, which analyzed 34 million employee profiles and more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews from companies that make up roughly a quarter of the U.S. private-sector workforce. That study found toxic workplace culture was roughly 10 times more predictive of who quit during the Great Resignation than compensation was. Pay matters, but the data keeps landing in the same place: how people feel about the humans they work alongside outweighs how much is in the paycheck when it comes to whether they walk out the door.
Why This Hits Women Especially Hard
Gallup’s research also found that two-thirds of women say the social aspect of a job is a major reason they work at all, not just a nice byproduct of it. Women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are less likely to be actively job-hunting, more likely to rate their own performance as excellent, and more likely to take the kind of risks that drive innovation. Yet Gallup also found women in the workforce are less likely than women outside it to say they’re thriving in social well-being, 38% versus 45%, suggesting that for a lot of women, work is competing with, rather than supplying, the social connection they need.
None of this means a paycheck doesn’t matter. It means that treating workplace friendship as a soft, optional nice-to-have misreads what Gallup’s decades of engagement data actually show. A company that pays well but leaves employees isolated is fighting an uphill battle against a relationship it isn’t even trying to build. The employees who stay, perform, and speak up aren’t necessarily the highest paid ones. Often, they’re the ones who have someone at the next desk they’d actually call a friend.
