Reasons Why Office Colleagues Should Only Be 9 To 5 Friends

Avoid mixing your personal professional lives.

It is quite natural to make close friends in your office. After all, you spend the most of your time in your office. However, it is not always the best idea to make your office colleagues your best friends. A lot of complications may arise if your start mixing your personal and professional lives. You need to keep your work and everything and everyone related to your work back in your workplace. This will help you avoid lot of unnecessary conflicts and stress in your personal space. Here are a few reasons why your office colleagues are better off as your 9 to 5 friends.

You Have Shared Aspirations

There is a lot of room for jealousy and foul play if you get too close with your office colleagues. It’s absolutely necessary to maintain an amicable relationship with your office colleagues but getting too close with them may get in the way of your ambition. Working in the same sector and the same office space, you and your office colleagues will have similar ambitions and urges regarding your career. Being too close friends with them will not change that in either of you. So, if someone does better than the other there might be some rivalry cooking up. You may even feel obligated to hold back from moving ahead of your peers because you wouldn’t want to make them feel alone in it.

Higher Chances Of Rumours

The harsh truth is you may have the best interests in your heart for your office best friends but it may not be the same for them. Being best friends with your office colleagues would most definitely mean that you would share your personal life and secrets with them. This creates massive room for rumours. There’s also room for misunderstandings and misinterpretations. You may have shared an anecdote on one note but it may be taken out of context and shared around the office differently. Avoid being blindsided by not mixing your personal life and your professional life.

Harms The Work Life Balance

Don’t bring your work home. Having best friends from work equally resembles bringing your work home. There will be a chance that everything you talk about with them while relaxing with them will be about your office and that’s frustrating. Keep your work life and your personal life separated to stay away from frustration.