The original article won't load but I disagree. While building your entire social life around work and work friends can be a bit dangerous, I think ERGs have an important role to play in combating loneliness at work.

Work can be a bit isolating when you have a very different background from a lot of your coworkers. Having a group that shares some aspect of your background that you can talk to about that shared perspective with can help a lot.

Companies should go a bit farther than making groups that are built race/religion/gender lines to bridge that gap. I've been at a lot of companies where there was some shared activity that "everybody does" after work - something that not literally everybody actually does. There should be other ways of including those people.

Often something like that can reflect a cultural background or gender (be it "everyone" is in a fantasy football league or "everyone" is competitive about a certain video game or "everyone" goes out drinking on Thursday).

If you're a member of a small group, be it because you're black, female, LGBT, have children (or don't), whatever it might be - it's easy to feel lonely and marginalized and like you don't have a community at the workplace; it helps if the organization promotes a way to feel like you do.

So that it's not just "oh everyone is talking about that thing I don't do again".

My first full-time job out of school was exactly like that. At first I found it lonely as a lot of my peers were a decade or two older than me with kids, and mostly treated the job like a 9-5.

As investment into the company increased, more juniors were hired that had the similar life situations, liked to do similar activities, etc. My attachment to the company became much stronger after that.

My company has an early career professional group for exactly this. Provides a community of younger junior folks.

These relationships can extend far beyond work. I've had dinner at the home of department heads where work related topics barely came up, I've played soccer and became work out buddies with folks. I know others who babysit each others kids and schedule vacations together based off of relationships established through these networks. As time goes on the fact you work for the same company can become just a footnote if you want it to.

That's all fine as long as you are interacting with peers. I would never consider visiting any supervisor socially outside of work, especially at their home, however. Office holiday parties are sort of a gray area, but I skip those too out of principle.

> the fact you work for the same company can become just a footnote if you want it to

... until you have an HR complaint, or need to manage a layoff, etc.

It makes sense. Being in close proximity and constant contact helps with becoming friends. I have cultivated many friendships with people I've met with work and it's made my life so much better.

Too small right now to have ERGs that don't apply to large groups but the soccer team, the basketball team, our running group, and those who cycle tend to form friendships that Grease the wheels of interaction at work, apart from it just being nice to have friends.

These relationship tend to be lost when people switch jobs.