I am all for work friendships. They really support one’s feeling of belonging at a place where most spend at least 40 hours a week.
I have made friendships at work I was certain would be lifelong, but some weren't. I've made others I assumed would dissolve the moment we stopped sharing a Slack channel, and those turned out to be the people standing next to me during some of the hardest chapters of my personal life. I've had friendships I knew from the jump would last, and they did. I've also had ones I knew would evaporate, and they did too, right on schedule.
What took me longer to learn is that the ones that didn't outlast the mutual signatories on the paycheck weren't necessarily a failure. They served a real purpose during their seasons.
The problem is a workplace culture that doesn't know how to tell the difference—and it is doing real damage to people.
The "Family" Problem
Somewhere along the way, someone decided that calling a company a family was a good idea. It wasn't and still isn’t.
"We are family" is a line that should stay with Sister Sledge but is instead a favorite of leadership and recruiters trying to convince people to join—rarely uttered by the team members in the trenches. Holding the work family narrative inflates the emotional contract, whether intentionally or not. It takes an economic relationship built on shared goals and mutual utility and reframes it as something unconditional. Families don't lay you off or restructure you out. Functional families don't go quiet when you need them
most.
When the relationship ends—and it will, one way or another—too many former team members don't feel like they simply moved on from a job. They feel abandoned like they lost something they were promised. I have been seeing this day in and day out in my LinkedIn feed alone, especially for those who have built a life with one or two companies.
That gap between what was implied and what is real is where a lot of unnecessary grief lives.
How Work Friendships Form
Work friendships are born from shared struggle—a brutal product launch, a terrible manager, an impossible deadline, a leadership team that couldn't find north with a compass—or a shared goal, a shared victory, or a shared developmental interest. You survive and thrive in a situation together, and that survival creates real closeness: late nights, inside humor, the unspoken glances during a meeting that could have been an email.
That relationship is genuine. I want to be clear about that. The friendships that form in those conditions are not fake because they are situational. Familiarity is not the same thing as durability though, and it is not the same thing as reciprocity. The shared struggle is often the connective tissue. But when that ends—one of you leaves, gets laid off, or the team restructures—you find out what you had and what it will become in the next season.
Some of it holds. The job was simply the catalyst. Those friendships extend into your actual life: your kids, your losses, the concerts you enjoy together. They are real, durable, and worth everything you put into them.
Then there are the ones that fade. Not because anyone failed anyone. When you remove the common thread, there is simply nothing to talk about. The friendship revealed itself: it was always about the work, and now there is no work to discuss.
Sometimes the fade reveals that the friendship was asymmetric in ways you couldn't see until a real moment of need. You were present for someone's hard chapter. You showed up. When your hard chapter came, they were absent, not out of malice, but absent, nonetheless. The once shared struggle had created the impression of depth that wasn't there once the common denominator disappeared. That first realization can sting, but it is a lesson hard learned, not an indictment of anyone.
The Common Kinds of Work Friendships
In my experience, work friendships sort themselves into roughly four types. The trouble starts when people can't tell which one they're in:
- Seasonal friendships: Real while the season lasts. The shared context is the entirerelationship. When it ends, both people quietly move on, and that is fine. No
one owes anyone continuation of something that no longer serves them. - Latent friendships: They taper off, then re-emerge when there's another shared experience—a layoff, a shared industry, a moment of mutual unemployment, or simply running into one another after a long absence. Then they taper again—or not.
- Load-bearing friendships: The job was the introduction, but something deeper was always there. These survive the end of the working relationship because they were never really about the work. Work was just what sparked the connection.
- Asymmetric friendships: These can bethe hardest to see coming and overcome. One person was a friend across contexts, work and personal both. The other was only a friend inside the work context, and when the professional currency dried up, so did they. You don't always know which one you're in until you need something real and get silence instead.
What This Means if You Just Got Displaced
If you are reading this because you were just laid off, or because your team restructured and took your people with it, here is what I want you to know: the friends who show up now are telling you something, and so are the ones who don't.
Neither outcome is a verdict on the friendship you had. A work friendship that fades when the work ends was still a real friendship that served a real purpose. Rather than grieve or grow bitter about the loss, celebrate that the friendship that was honest about what it was and how it served you during its season.
The loss you feel right now is real. But some of what you're grieving was always going to end here—and that means you didn't really lose it. It just ran its course.
Let the fleeting friendships move on but pay attention to who stays. And for the love of Pete, stop calling your teammates your family. They were your teammates, your collaborators, your foxhole companions at their best. It is just not a family nor should it be.