The average person spends over 81,000 hours of their life at work. Yet most organisations invest almost no deliberate effort in the quality of the relationships formed within that time — despite the evidence showing those relationships directly determine how engaged, productive, and loyal employees become.
Gallup research consistently identifies relationship quality with a manager and peer connection as among the top predictors of employee engagement. HR.com’s 2025 State of Employee Productivity and Engagement report ranked supervisor relationships as the third most important driver of engagement, behind only culture and compensation. And a University of Kansas study found it takes approximately 50 hours of shared time to move from acquaintance to casual colleague, meaning relationship-building at work is not accidental. It is a function of time, intentionality, and environment.
Whether you are an individual contributor wanting to strengthen professional connections, a manager trying to build a more cohesive team, or an HR leader designing systems that make relationships easier to form, this guide covers the why, the what, and most importantly the how. For the broader context on what strong workplace relationships unlock, the employee engagement guide is an essential companion reading.
| Quick answer: Building work relationships means intentionally investing in the professional connections with colleagues, managers, and cross-functional peers that determine how effectively you collaborate, how supported you feel, and how long you stay. Research shows employees with strong workplace relationships are more productive, less stressed, and significantly more likely to remain with their organisation. |
Why Building Work Relationships Is a Business Imperative, Not Just a Nice-to-Have
| Employees with a best friend at work are twice as likely to be fully engaged and 91% of employees say they want closer relationships with colleagues.Sources: Gallup; Springworks remote employee engagement research |
The business case for strong workplace relationships extends far beyond employee happiness, though that alone is worth pursuing. Here is what the research actually shows about what quality relationships deliver at an organisational level:
• Higher engagement and productivity. A Harvard Business Review analysis found that leaders who prioritise workplace relationships have employees who are more productive, more loyal, and more enthusiastic. The relationship between interpersonal connection and discretionary effort is causal, not coincidental people work harder for people they genuinely like and trust.
• Lower turnover and attrition. Teams in the top 20% for connectedness show 59% less employee turnover than their disconnected counterparts. This has a direct financial impact, given that replacing an employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. The employee retention data shows that relationship quality with immediate peers and managers is a stronger retention predictor than compensation alone.
• Greater innovation and knowledge-sharing. When employees trust their colleagues enough to share half-formed ideas without fear of judgment, innovation accelerates. Studies show that mutual trust between coworkers improves knowledge transfer, reduces redundant work, and increases the quality of collaborative problem-solving.
• Better mental health and resilience. Social connection at work is a clinically recognised buffer against workplace stress. Employees who feel genuinely connected to colleagues are significantly less likely to experience burnout, a pattern the Springworks quiet burnout research documents in detail. The protective effect of strong relationships is particularly pronounced in high-pressure roles.
• Reduced conflict and faster resolution. People who have established mutual respect and trust before a disagreement arises resolve it significantly faster and with less collateral damage than those who only interact transactionally. Relationship investment before conflict is one of the most overlooked forms of conflict prevention.
The 4 Types of Work Relationships Worth Investing In
Not all workplace relationships serve the same function. Understanding the different types helps you invest your time where it has the highest impact.
• Manager–employee relationships. The single most influential relationship in determining engagement, performance, and retention. Research consistently shows the quality of this relationship accounts for up to 70% of team engagement variance.
• Peer relationships. Day-to-day collaboration, information sharing, and emotional support all flow primarily through peer connections. These are the relationships that determine whether work feels enjoyable or draining.
• Cross-functional relationships. Connections beyond your immediate team prevent silos, accelerate project delivery, and are increasingly important in matrix organisations where influence matters more than authority.
• Mentoring and sponsorship relationships. Longitudinal professional relationships that provide career guidance, advocacy, and perspective that peers often cannot offer. These are among the highest-leverage investments for long-term career development.
11 Research-Backed Strategies for Building Stronger Work Relationships
1. Invest Consistent, Deliberate Time, Not Just Shared Proximity
The University of Kansas research cuts through a common misconception: relationships at work are not built simply by sitting near someone. They require shared, engaged time. The path from acquaintance to trusted colleague takes roughly 50 hours of genuine interaction. This does not happen accidentally in back-to-back meetings; it requires deliberate investment in conversations that go beyond task status updates.
Practically: schedule regular 1-on-1s with key colleagues that have a standing personal check-in component. Block time for informal conversations. Treat connection as a legitimate work activity, not a distraction from it.
2. Practise Active Listening, Not Just Polite Waiting
The most universally valued relationship behaviour is also the most commonly faked: genuinely listening. Active listening means engaging with what someone is saying well enough to ask a follow-up question that could only come from actually hearing them not waiting for a gap to make your own point. Research consistently shows that colleagues who feel listened to report higher trust, greater willingness to share information, and stronger commitment to collaborative outcomes.
For managers, active listening is especially critical. The Springworks work culture survey research found that employees who felt genuinely heard by their managers reported stronger team belonging and significantly higher engagement scores than those who did not.
3. Give Recognition Consistently Not Just When Someone Overachieves
| 78% of employees are highly engaged when they feel strongly recognised. Employees recognised regularly are significantly more committed to their team relationships.Source: O.C. Tanner; Gallup |
Recognition is one of the fastest ways to build a positive relationship and one of the most underutilised. Acknowledging someone’s specific contribution, publicly or privately, signals that you notice and value their work. This is not reserved for exceptional performance: recognising the colleague who prepared a meeting well, who helped someone onboard smoothly, or who caught an error before it escalated is exactly the kind of recognition that strengthens relationships day-to-day. The peer-to-peer recognition guide and the employee recognition guide cover how to build this into your team’s culture consistently. Tools like EngageWith make it frictionless — peer shout-outs happen directly within Slack or Microsoft Teams, in the moment.
4. Build Trust Through Follow-Through, Not Declarations
Trust between colleagues is built the same way trust is built in any relationship: through repeated small actions that match what was promised. When you say you will send something by Friday, send it by Friday. When you commit to covering for a colleague, actually do it. When you say something is confidential, keep it confidential. The accumulation of these micro-kept commitments is what transforms a professional acquaintance into a trusted working relationship. The principles explored in the importance of respect in the workplace guide are closely related, because trust and respect are the twin foundations of every durable professional relationship.
5. Create Cross-Team Connection Not Just Within-Team Bonds
Research by Nectar found that 40% of employees feel colleagues in other departments do not support them or have competing agendas. This silo mentality is a structural problem as much as a personal one but individual employees can actively counteract it by investing in relationships beyond their immediate team. Reach out to colleagues in adjacent functions. Volunteer for cross-functional projects. Attend company-wide events with the intention of meeting someone new.
For managers, designing opportunities for cross-functional connection is part of building high-performing teams because the best solutions typically require perspectives from multiple functions, and that only flows freely when the interpersonal relationships already exist.
6. Handle Conflict Directly and Respectfully Before It Calcifies
Unresolved conflict is one of the most reliable relationship destroyers in workplace settings. The longer a tension goes unaddressed, the more it colours every subsequent interaction until the working relationship becomes functional at best and actively hostile at worst. Addressing disagreements early, directly, and with genuine curiosity about the other person’s perspective is a relationship-building skill, not just a conflict-management technique. The conflict management guide provides practical frameworks for having these conversations productively.
7. Show Up for People Beyond the Work
Relationships deepen when people experience that their colleagues care about them as human beings, not just as producers of deliverables. Remembering that a colleague is dealing with a difficult personal situation and asking how they are doing genuinely, not performatively, creates a connection that transactional interactions never do. This does not require deep personal disclosure in both directions. Simple, consistent demonstrations of awareness and care go a long way.
8. Invest in Remote and Hybrid Relationship-Building Intentionally
| 85% of employees believe they could engage more with remote colleagues. Yet 22% of distributed teams meet in person four times a year or less.Sources: Springworks remote work research; Nectar 2025 workplace connection survey |
The casual, unplanned interactions that build relationships naturally in offices, a chat before a meeting starts, a shared lunch, a spontaneous conversation in the corridor, do not happen automatically in remote or hybrid environments. They must be deliberately designed. Regular virtual coffee conversations, intentional non-work channels, and scheduled social moments are not optional extras in distributed teams they are the infrastructure through which relationships form. The guide to building engaged remote work cultures covers how to build this infrastructure systematically. For improving remote employee engagement more broadly, the remote engagement strategies guide is the companion read.
9. Create Psychological Safety for Honest Conversations
Relationships at work only become genuinely close when people feel safe enough to be honest about what is not working, about mistakes they have made, about ideas that might be wrong. Psychological safety is the prerequisite for this depth of connection. Managers create it by acknowledging their own errors, welcoming challenge without defensiveness, and ensuring that people who raise difficult issues are thanked rather than marginalised. The building belonging research from Springworks demonstrates clearly that belonging the deepest form of workplace connection, is built through psychological safety, not just social events.
10. Build Routines That Sustain Connection Over Time
Relationships are not built in single interactions even exceptional ones. They are sustained through consistent, repeated contact over time. The most effective relationship-builders are not necessarily the most extroverted people in the room. They are the most consistent: the colleague who always follows up, who keeps track of what you mentioned last time, who shows up reliably in the moments that matter.
For managers, this means building relationship-sustaining routines into your operating rhythm — regular 1-on-1s with a personal component, team rituals that acknowledge milestones and contributions, and structured time for informal connection. Strong time management practices are the mechanism through which these commitments get protected rather than cancelled under pressure.
11. Use Team Building Activities as a Catalyst, Not a Substitute
Structured team building activities serve a genuine purpose: they create shared experiences outside of task contexts, remove status dynamics temporarily, and give colleagues a reason to interact who might not otherwise. But they work best as a catalyst for relationships that are then sustained through the daily behaviours described above not as a once-a-year substitute for building connection at all. The guide to improving teamwork covers how to sequence team-building investments for maximum relationship impact.
Building Work Relationships in Specific Contexts
As a New Employee
The first 90 days at a new organisation are a disproportionately important window for relationship-building. Most people are most receptive to new connections early in a tenure there are fewer established social boundaries, everyone expects you to be asking questions, and you have a natural reason to seek people out. Prioritise breadth first: meet widely across teams before investing deeply in a small cluster. Then identify two or three people who seem to be well-connected and well-respected and invest more deliberately in those relationships.
As a Manager
Your relationship with each direct report is the single most important professional relationship in their working life whether or not either party acknowledges that explicitly. Invest in knowing what each person cares about professionally and personally, what conditions help them do their best work, and what they find meaningful about their role. Strong manager relationships are the foundation on which employee engagement strategies build. Without that foundation, most engagement interventions produce cosmetic results at best.
Across Generational Differences
Today’s workplaces span four generations with meaningfully different communication preferences, relationship expectations, and workplace norms. Gen Z employees typically prefer frequent, direct feedback and digital-first communication. Baby Boomers may place greater value on face-to-face interaction and formal professional boundaries. Bridge these differences through curiosity rather than assumption ask how individuals prefer to communicate and to receive recognition, rather than defaulting to what you personally find most comfortable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are work relationships important for productivity?
Employees who have strong working relationships collaborate more effectively, share information more freely, and resolve problems faster. A Harvard Business Review analysis found that organisations with strong peer relationships have measurably more productive and loyal employees. The mechanism is primarily trust: when people trust their colleagues, they spend less cognitive energy on self-protection and more on the work itself. The Springworks employee productivity research confirms that trust and collaboration are among the most reliable predictors of sustained individual and team output.
How do you build relationships at work if you are introverted?
Introversion is not a barrier to strong professional relationships it is a different relationship-building style. Introverts often build fewer, deeper connections rather than broad social networks, and these deep connections can be highly valuable professionally. Focus on one-on-one conversations rather than group settings, prepare questions before meetings to make it easier to connect, and invest in written communication where you have time to reflect. Consistency matters more than extroversion: follow through reliably and be genuinely present when you do interact.
How long does it take to build a strong work relationship?
University of Kansas research suggests approximately 50 hours of shared time moves two people from acquaintance to casual colleague, and significantly more to develop genuine trust. The pace accelerates when shared experiences are meaningful navigating a difficult project together, supporting a colleague through a challenge, or collaborating on something that matters to both parties versus simply sharing physical proximity.
How do you maintain work relationships in a remote environment?
Remote work requires replacing the incidental contact that builds relationships in offices with deliberate, designed touchpoints. Regular 1-on-1 check-ins with a personal component, virtual social channels, async recognition practices, and intentional in-person gatherings (when possible) are the most effective substitutes. The key principle: connection does not happen automatically at a distance. It must be planned for. The remote work culture guide and the work-life balance guide together provide the framework for sustaining both connection and wellbeing in distributed teams.
Final Thoughts
Building strong work relationships is not soft skills territory it is a high-impact professional practice with measurable effects on productivity, retention, innovation, and wellbeing. The research is unambiguous: connected employees perform better, stay longer, and bring more of themselves to their work. The question is whether organisations and individuals are willing to treat relationship-building as a deliberate investment rather than a pleasant side-effect of spending time in the same building.
