By Madeline Kronfeld
Online Career Tips Contributor
It’s inevitable. You work alongside someone for a significant amount of time and your conversations turn from business-related to personal. Getting to know your co-workers can actually help you work together better. For example, if you know that someone needs their morning coffee to function then you might not want to schedule an 8:00 a.m. meeting.
Can you imagine sitting next to someone for months or even years without knowing a single personal detail about them? Office life would be so boring! My co-worker likes cats so if I run across a funny video or image, I send it her way for a mid-day laugh and in turn, she sends me links to the latest celebrity gossip.
Of course, working in social media gives us access to these kinds of things but if you don’t have time during the day to source pictures of cute animals then plan a lunch outing or a post-work get together to unwind from the day and talk about anything but work.
Being able to share a story about your weekend or talk about a TV show you started watching makes for a much more enjoyable work day. I’m still great friends with a former co-worker and it’s all because we had lunch one afternoon and realized how much we have in common. If that lunch hadn’t happened, I’d have one less friend.
The danger of being too buddy-buddy with your co-workers is that you neglect your actual tasks and your career suffers as a consequence. However, as a working professional, you should know where and when to draw the line and get back to business.
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