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The 5 Friends You Should Have at Your Entry-Level Job

Featured Author:

Tania Khadder

Tania is a writer, editor, blogger, and TV enthusiast. She likes indie rock, good food, vodka gimlets, and living in San Francisco. She also likes dancing, but of course, not to indie rock. Tania has a BA in Anthropology from UCLA, and an MA in International Journalism from City University in London. After being laid off from their jobs in November, Tania and a friend launched Unemploymentality.com where she wrote about all things unemployment. When she isn’t writing, she’s spending time with friends and family, obsessively surfing the web, or much to everyone’s annoyance, doing both simultaneously.

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You spend most of your day at work, right? Why not make some friends while you’re there?

You won’t just have more fun — you’ll work better. Gallup research shows that developing close friendships at work boosts employee satisfaction by almost 50%.

And while we don’t always choose our friends with career success in mind (company happy hour, ahem), there are some people in the workplace whose friendship can actually make us perform better on the job. Whether or not you want to spend time with them after work, it would behoove you to develop at least a pleasant rapport with them.

Here’s our top five:

1. The IT Manager
When your computer freezes, your emails disappear, or you can’t for the life of you remember your password, there’s only one person to turn to: the IT manager.

They may or may not be someone you’d actually hang out with outside of work, but make sure they’re your buddy on the job.

Between making sure your computer won’t crash just before a big deadline and having the power to see everything you’ve ever done on the Internet, this is someone whose good side you definitely want to stay on.

And this means more than just smiling when you ask them for help. Be friendly even when you’re not having a Windows crisis! Strike up conversations in the kitchen, find out where they’re from, ask them what they’re doing over the weekend. Be their friend and when the company orders a new MacBook Pro — and they get to choose who gets it — you’ll be at the top of the list.

2. The Veteran
Chances are there’s someone at your company who’s been there longer than you. She was there when the company still offered free snacks, for goodness sake. She knows the processes inside out. She’s connected to all the right people. She’s your go-to gal for any question you have that you’d rather not ask your own manager. Sounds great, right?