When you start a new job do not just assume that everyone is going to become a good friend of yours. You can avoid a lot of confusion and hurt feelings this way. You should always behave in such a way that allows mutual respect and also keeps a wall between your professional and personal life. Only a few are allowed to break through this wall! This will help you immensely during difficult days at the office and will help you avoid major office drama. If you are truly compatible with someone, a friendship can still eventually evolve, but that should be a great bonus not an expectation.
Here is exactly how to identify if a coworker is a friend too.
You don’t lie about your free time
When discussing what they have planned for the evening, or reviewing what they did on their weekend, colleagues keep it simple, conventional and deliver whatever piece of information will encourage the fewest follow-up questions.
“This evening? Oh, not much, got some chores to do!” is what a colleague would tell you. On the other hand, a friend who’s also a coworker would give you precise details on how they spent the weekend with their significant other, what they ate, what they said, and sometimes even what they wore!
You acknowledge their existence out of work
There are some colleagues, that will go to extreme lengths to avoid bumping into you outside of work. However, with a coworker that is actually a friend, you plan stuff together! You spend days on the weekend together. They come to your place and you go to theirs.
You share personal information about yourself
You also start having inside jokes, you hate on the same coworkers, and love the same ones. Not just that, you know really personal stuff about each other. Things like who they live with, family problems and what their favorite things are. It no longer becomes that you just mutually agree on the fact that Nancy from the finance department has a body odor problem.
Finally, the friendship actually lasts, even if one of you leaves
We all utterly burn bridges behind us with certain coworkers when we leave a job, not on purpose but life happens and you accidentally ghost former colleagues you promised to keep in touch with. The test here is whether it truly lasts. I strongly believe that much of it lies within how you describe them. For example, If you bump into an ex coworker with your partner you either go like “This is Rana, we used to work together” or “THIS IS RANA, we’re friends from our days at the agency, Mad Times! Hey, remember Ahmed my office crush? He has kids now!”