TBSP (Too Busy, Summary Please): The help you give a colleague rarely shows up on a scorecard, so it’s often the first thing to slide when the week fills up. Wharton researchers who interviewed about 760 employees at a global firm found people had stopped helping one another, and new hires waited weeks or months for answers. This week: why building relationships at work counts as real work, what the researchers say gets lost, and a few habits that keep helping on the list.
How long would you keep asking a coworker for help before giving up? One new hire in a recent Wharton study kept trying for three months. Building relationships at work tends to feel optional, right up until you’re the one waiting on an answer.
Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and University of Texas communications professor Jasmine Wu interviewed about 760 employees at a global financial services firm. The interviews spanned the U.S., the U.K., and India. What they heard was consistent. People had stopped helping one another. Each person was focused on their own goals, and messages asking for help were easy to ignore or forget.
Relationships Are How Work Gets Done
The researchers call what was lost “relational capital.” Fortune’s Bilin Lin breaks it into three parts. You know whom to ask for help. You feel comfortable asking. And your colleagues are willing to answer.
Think of it as knowing which neighbor owns a ladder. When you know, a quick job stays quick. When you don’t, every small task turns into a trip to the hardware store.
Why Building Relationships at Work Gets Skipped
The study points to a simple culprit. Since the pandemic, supervisors at the firm had been told to focus on individual deliverables. Helping a colleague or onboarding a new hire usually ran on personal goodwill rather than anything in a job description. As Cappelli put it, “A lot of people will think, ‘It’s not in my KPI to do that.’”
The damage compounds. A slow reply makes someone less likely to ask next time, which the authors say “ultimately erodes the relationship further.” Newer employees feel it most, since they haven’t built the relationships veterans can lean on. Cappelli describes the result as a “two-tier workforce.”
To be fair to the research, the authors aren’t calling for an end to remote work. They also note that interviews can’t prove remote work caused the problem, though they believe it contributed.
Helping Is One of the Six Types of Work
The Working Genius model treats this kind of help as one of six types of work every project needs. Enablement is the gift of providing encouragement and assistance once an idea starts moving. Without it, projects stall even when the plan is solid.
Some people get real energy from that kind of work. When the scorecard only counts individual output, those people end up doing essential work nobody sees. Leaving help out of every job description also blurs who is supposed to help whom. That’s the kind of role ambiguity that wears teams down.
Make the Help Visible
A few habits help, whatever your role.
- Answer requests within a day, even if the answer is “I can get to this Thursday.”
- Introduce new colleagues to at least one person outside their own team.
- On office days, plan time with the colleagues you rely on most.
If you manage a team, you can go further. The researchers suggest writing mentoring and colleague support into job descriptions and performance reviews. They also recommend coordinating office days so people who depend on each other overlap, and looking past individual KPIs when deciding who gets promoted.
Building relationships at work is real work, even when no dashboard tracks it. If you got stuck on something today, who would you call first, and when did you last answer one of their questions?
Leave a Reply