American English has a set of words for friendships that belong to the job.
Work friend. This is a friend at work, and not necessarily anywhere else.
Work wife and work husband. This is a close partner at the office, with no romance.
Work bestie. This is a best friend at work.
Former coworker. This is often said of someone who was once a daily contact.
A new member of an American team hears the same phrases in the first hour.
Welcome aboard!
Great to have you on the team.
Nice to meet you.
Call me Mike. A Michael says this right after he is introduced.
Hey guys. This is the usual opening of a team email or meeting.
How’s it going?
When the project ends, the phrases change.
Let’s keep in touch.
Don’t be a stranger.
Let’s connect on LinkedIn.
In 1950 David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published The Lonely Crowd. It described a new American character that they called other-directed. “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed.” One of the book’s headings reads “From the Invisible Hand to the Glad Hand.”
Nearly fifty years later the writer Wilfred McClay looked back at the book. In the world it described, “popularity and ‘social skills’ were more important than the pursuit of excellence or fidelity to inner standards of behavior.” The book has sold “many hundreds of thousands of copies.”
Alison Green writes the workplace advice column Ask a Manager. In November 2025 a reader wrote about a close friendship with a former coworker. “I can let the friendship naturally fade, but I feel guilty,” the reader wrote.
Green answered: “It’s actually very normal for work friendships to fade once you’re no longer colleagues.” She gave the reason. When you no longer have work in common, “there often isn’t enough of a connection to keep the relationship going.”
Donut is an app for Slack, the office chat program. It comes from a company in New York. Its first product, Intros, “connects via Slack teammates who didn’t already know each other.” The company describes its mission as helping “connect teams serendipitously for virtual coffee, peer learning, DEI discussions, and more.”
In October 2020 Donut told TechCrunch that it had made “4 million connections across 12,000 companies.”
“Good Morning. My name is Kim, and I’ll be serving you this morning.” K. Garrity and D. Degelman tested this greeting at a Charlie Brown’s restaurant in Southern California. Their study appeared in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 1990. Introducing herself by name brought the server much higher tips.
The study was small. It used one server and 42 dining parties over two days. A study published in 2016 went further. The servers “introduced themselves by name and then invited customers to do likewise.” Then they used the customers’ names. Their tips rose by 6 percent.
In Two Truths and a Lie, each player makes three statements about himself or herself. Two are true and one is false. The others guess which one is the lie. A guide for teachers calls it “a guessing game to loosen up middle and high school students at the start of school.” Players form groups, “preferably with people they do not know well.”
The origin of the game is unclear. A statistics blog at Columbia University looked into the question. Google’s Ngram Viewer “puts its first recorded use of the term in 1981.”
New employees at Google are called Nooglers. Each one wore a propeller hat when joining the company. In the early days the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced every new employee personally.
Doug Edwards, an early employee who suggested the hat, explained its purpose. Sergey wanted new people to be “easily identified” after the introduction, “and current Googlers could make them feel welcome.” The Computer History Museum keeps one in its collection.
In 2012 Minnesota Public Radio ran a story on newcomers to the Twin Cities under the headline “Newcomers say it’s ‘nice,’ but not warm.” Todd Klingel, president of the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce, passed on a newcomer’s line: “Minnesotans are friendly. They just don’t want any more friends.”
Ken Charles, a vice president at General Mills, put it in working hours. “That gets you the 9 to 5,” he said. “The harder part is the 5 to 9.”
In the chapter of Democracy in America titled “How Democracy Renders the Habitual Intercourse of the Americans Simple and Easy,” Alexis de Tocqueville describes Americans who meet by chance. “If they meet by accident, they neither seek nor avoid intercourse; their manner is therefore natural, frank, and open.”
In the same chapter he notes that Americans who meet abroad become friendly at once, for the simple reason that they are both American.