Why having girlfriends at work is essential

Except for a few, I have fished out all my girlfriends from the workplace. And my husband too, by the way. Hanneke (this cutie), Marte, Asjha, Jet, Daan, Agnès, Harriet, Peggy and so on. In a café, almost everyone is pleasant, but in the workplace, you really get to know someone. For instance, Asjha would do silly dances for me when I was steaming from stress. I was the editor-in-chief of RTL Boulevard and somehow the copier always jammed when I was about to copy the scripts and should have been in the studio a quarter of an hour ago. “Shall I dance a little out of tune for you?”, she would ask when she cheerfully came to wait with me until someone-who-understood-it came to fix the machine. Followed by: “It will be 19:30 soon, slip.” In other words, everything will be fine. And that slip, well, I’ll tell you about that another time.

Marte was calm. She didn’t let herself be easily disturbed. “Oh, you want that guy in the broadcast tomorrow morning instead of tomorrow afternoon? Fine. He just swapped his lectures for his students to be here, but I’ll ask if he can switch it back.” And that was on her first day at work. Or this one. Also brilliant. Marte called the Netherlands Forensic Institute because she was working on a report about cold cases. That was what we called a ‘shelf’ topic that you could always use and for which there was no hard current reason. She got a lady on the phone who, when Marte introduced herself as a crime editor of RTL Boulevard, said: “Ah, you’re calling because the fitting room murder has been solved after twenty years.” Now Marte wasn’t calling for that at all, but something in her told her to respond with ‘yes indeed’. And so it happened. Marte had the scoop and it was on the front page of the Telegraaf the next day. We don’t work together anymore, but when a strong wind blows in my life (like for example here was the case), then I know where to go for calm, wise advice, and especially a good glass of wine and a lot of laughter. I could go on like this for a while. The fact is that it has now been scientifically proven that friendship in the workplace pays off.

So much so that a good relationship at work is equivalent to a bonus of 100,000 euros for us. Moreover, it increases your performance (because you enjoy talking about that one topic in the café in the evening and how you could improve it, you go to work with more pleasure and you find it easier to stick around) and job satisfaction. Friendship mainly arises when you occasionally talk about something that has nothing to do with work. That’s when your bond grows. So if your boss says you shouldn’t chat so much, you know what to say. It saves her/him a hundred thousand bonus and your work only gets better because of it. Like this.