We are like family here. You have probably heard that on a number of occasions at your workplace. On the surface, it comes off as a beautiful idea, comforting even, in a world where we spend more time with colleagues than with the people we actually love. And for a while, it feels true (it must, because living in that bubble is easier than confronting the alternative). You laugh over lunch and share knowing glances in meetings, complain about the same impossible deadlines, and slowly, almost without noticing, you begin to let your guard down in ways that feel natural and deserved. Work stops feeling like just work, and starts to feel like a community.
But is it as it seems? Beneath that warmth is there a truth that most people only learn when it is far too late to protect themselves. That the workplace is not built for friendship, at least not in the way we understand it outside those office walls. That it is built for performance, competition and survival within systems that are constantly shifting, often without warning and rarely with sentiment. What about the friendships we develop here? You might be wondering. All I am thinking is that, how can you form genuine friendships in a space that is highly limited and distorts the very nature of the environment in which they exist?
The danger is not in being friendly, because warmth and kindness will carry you far in any professional setting, but in mistaking proximity for loyalty and shared experience for genuine emotional investment. It is easy to confuse the person who sits next to you every day, who knows your coffee order and your frustrations with management, with someone who will stand by you when things fall apart. Que in office husbands and wives. Just because you go to lunch together everyday does not make them your ride or die. Many of these liaisons have been the death of genuine relationships, only to realise later on that your office wife was in fact, not the pillar of strength you thought her to be. Workplaces have a way of revealing where priorities truly lie. Think you know her well enough? Wait till she gets that promotion; suddenly the dynamic shifts.
Mistakes happen (as they are bound to in such an environment) and conversations that once felt safe become carefully worded exchanges. Before long, the information that you shared in confidentiality begins to travel faster than trust can keep up with, and only then do you start to realize that not everything shared in confidence remains there.
And then there is the moment that clarifies everything, the one that strips away the illusion with an honesty that no meeting or team building exercise ever could. You can be the most popular person in your workplace, the one everyone greets first and whose absence is immediately noticed. You could be woven into the very fabric of the office culture, and yet if you are laid off today, if your email is deactivated and your desk quietly reassigned, the silence that follows will tell you more about the nature of those relationships than any farewell message ever could. Because the truth, uncomfortable as it may be, is that most of those connections are held together by the structure of the workplace itself, and once that structure disappears, so too does the frequency and existence of the relationship. A week passes, and the calls do not come.
Remember former PS Bitange Ndemo and how at one point he thought he was on top of the world, untouchable? Well. at that point he was on top of the world. He became untellable (haambiliki) grew an ego from here to timbuktu and, you know, everything else that comes with power and money. And then one day, he was fired without warning. His world came crushing down and these were his exact words;
“The day I left office, my phone literally ceased to ring. My “friends” had moved on. I found myself checking my phone to establish if I had inadvertently put it off. The phone was fine. Prior to my departure from office, receiving 30 calls an hour was not unusual. Although most calls were work-related, there were many social calls from many old and new friends, people you would expect to keep in touch with even when you left high office. Strangely, such calls cease until you establish a new kind of relevance.”
This is not to say that meaningful friendships cannot emerge from professional spaces, because they can, and sometimes they do in ways that are genuine and lasting. But those are the exceptions and not the rule – usually defined by something that extends beyond shared projects and office routines. They survive distance, change and even separation from the workplace itself, which is perhaps the clearest test of all. If a relationship cannot exist without the office, then it was never truly independent of it.
There is also a quiet risk in oversharing, in allowing the blurred lines of workplace familiarity to convince you that every thought or frustration, every personal detail is safe in that environment. What feels like harmless venting today can become tomorrow’s whispered conversation, not necessarily out of malice, but because workplaces are ecosystems of information, and information moves. People are human. They have ambitions, insecurities and pressures of their own, and sometimes the very person you trusted with your honesty is handling their own path in a system that rewards positioning as much as it does performance.
Perhaps the most useful way to think about it is not in extremes, not in the rigid belief that colleagues must never become friends, but in the more practical understanding that the workplace requires a different kind of relationship altogether. One that is warm but measured, open but not exposed, engaging but grounded in the awareness of where you are and what the environment demands of you. You can laugh and connect, heck, you can even care, but you must also remember to protect the parts of yourself that belong outside of that space.
Because in the end, the workplace is a place you pass through, even if you stay for years, while true friendship is something that follows you. Something that exists independently of roles and shared calendars. Therefore, knowing the difference is being wise enough to understand that not every connection is meant to carry the same weight, no matter how real it may feel in the moment.
