Few issues are more controversial or confusing than the connection between friendships in the workplace and employee productivity. It's not surprising, therefore, that no other element of great managing attracts lightning like the Tenth, measured by the statement "I have a best friend at work."

When a company's executives receive their first briefing on employee engagement results from Gallup, the presenter typically asks if any of them has a question about the statements asked of their workers. Invariably, one of the business leaders asks, "Why do you ask that 'best friend' question?" Sometimes their tone of voice communicates real curiosity. Sometimes it carries a tone of derision. Physicians bristle at it; it offends their clinical perspective. Attorneys scoff; "irrelevant," they object. Accountants consider it too far removed from the financial statements.

When Gallup first published the Tenth Element in its place among the other 12, a good share of the press coverage betrayed surprise that such an apparently strange question was predictive of performance. "A best friend at work?" wrote a Washington Post columnist. "What is this? High school?" Time magazine called it a "more subtle variable" than many of the other 12. The Chicago Tribune warned managers to be careful: "Friendships at work can lead to jealousy, envy and sloth."

Clearly, the conversational form of the statement seems to invite skepticism. How does one define "a best friend"? Wouldn't it be easier to rate a statement about trust or about the harmony of intra-office relationships? The problem is that complicated and formal questions often fail to get at the heart of the issue. "Standard survey questions about trust do not appear to measure trust," but rather trustworthiness, concluded a National Bureau of Economic Research paper. "This means that most work using these survey questions needs to be somewhat reinterpreted."

Executive skeptics

On executive row, reactions were more caustic and skeptical than those in the press. One company cancelled a 12 Elements survey because it had just sent out a memo discouraging friendships. Others asked if the survey could be administered with just 11 of the 12 statements. That such a simple and, indeed, business-related question would prove to be so provocative shows how deeply a "Theory X," leave-your-personal-life-at-the-door philosophy still pervades the business world.

One company requested that a Gallup expert face its legal team's interrogations about the Tenth Element. The group's scores showed they had modest levels of friendship, with one attorney scoring friendships at work as low as possible (anonymously, of course). "Disregard for a moment whether you feel someone ought to be able to answer 'strongly agree' to this element," said the researcher. "If you strongly disagree with this statement, you are lonely at work. Someone here is trying to tell you he or she is isolated and miserable."

After the legal team's grilling, the expert was contacted by one of the lawyers. "I am the one person you were talking about," he said. "You were right. I feel no connection here. I have no one to confide in. I'm working on getting a job somewhere else."

Gallup itself would have dropped the statement if not for one stubborn fact: It predicts performance. Something about a deep sense of affiliation with the people in an employee's team drives him to do positive things for the business he otherwise would not do.

Early research that identified the 12 Elements revealed a very different social bond among employees in top-performing teams. Subsequent large-scale, multi-company analyses confirmed that the Tenth Element is a scientifically salient ingredient in obtaining a number of business-relevant outcomes, including profitability, safety, inventory control, and -- most notably -- the emotional connection and loyalty of customers to the organization serving them.

When tested against a number of alterative ways of presenting the statement, "I have a best friend at work" proved to be the wording best able to discriminate between groups in which friendships are sufficiently supportive and those that have only surface relationships that are unable to withstand adversity. Measuring friendships is susceptible to what scientists call "social desirability," the tendency of a respondent to give an answer that casts him in the best light. The same bias makes people sometimes tell pollsters that they read the newspaper when they didn't, say that they voted when they didn't, or report that they didn't watch a lot of TV when, in fact, they and a bag of potato chips were on the couch for two hours the night before.

Simply asking people if they have friends is not enough, as most people prefer to think that others like them or are loath to confess their isolation. It took a quirky twist to the survey question to elicit the type of meaning that makes a measurable difference in organizations.

While the Tenth Element is the most controversial, it is not the toughest on which to achieve strongly positive answers. A little less than one-third strongly agree that they have a best friend at work -- a higher frequency than the Seventh Element (feeling one's opinions count) and about the same as the Fourth (recognition and praise). Maybe executives don't see the need because they tend to have more friendships at work than do front-line employees. It is especially ironic when senior teams gather for off-site retreats during which they golf, fly-fish, play tennis, and socialize, but during the meetings at those retreats question the need to address friendships on their employee survey.

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Article from The Gallup Management Journal