I Don’t Want to Be Like a Family with My Co-Workers

Like a family, eh? So let us see who from my office turns up and does my daily groceries, takes care of my kids and cleans my house if/when I am suffering from a sickness - doesn't even have to be a prolonged case, a few weeks would do. God forbid if it is prolonged - if the law of the land permits, the head of our "family" (a.k.a my boss) would, in varying levels of directness/corporate-speak, let me know what an "incredibly difficult decision" it has been to "part ways" before kicking me out of the firm. You know who are the people I can most expect to be actually there for me? My actual family.

I know that all the families are not same and there are instances where one finds colleagues who go to great lengths to support each other while the dysfunctional family actually weighs things down. But that is not the norm (atleast not in the culture I am from). So if people of a firm use terms like "family", they better back it up. Otherwise, just shut up and give each other the space that grown-ups deserve.

I work at a big corporate and we use a national workplace survey that asks if you have a best friend at the office. It’s one of the measures or organization health.

I see the survey results across a pretty big portion of the organization so I understand my answer is one of the lonely few. I always answer ‘no’ because I really don’t have a best friend at work.

A best friend is someone you like, enjoy loads of spending time with and maybe most importantly can trust with just about anything. It happens that I don’t really have true friends at work but I have people I care for and would be there for if they needed. That doesn’t make us friends, it makes us decent people.

I try to keep a healthy level of separation between work life and home life. I don’t want to know office gossip because I want to be able to continue looking at my colleagues as professionals. I also want the diversification that should I ever leave the company my whole life won’t be blown up because it was attached to the company.

The workplace described in the article absolutely sounds like a hostile environment. The asker’s bosses are using “family” as an excuse to justify working longer hours. Families don’t do that.

That said: Personally, I do want my coworkers and I to be something akin to a family. If I’m going to spend around a third of my life working, I want to do it with a group of people I like and care about.

I worked for several companies like this early in my career. Every seemingly healthy job eventually became awkward and toxic.

Nowadays I work for a consulting firm. There are several cons to being a consultant, but one of my favourite things about this scheme is that employees only care about my work.

To these people I'm the "X technology guy" who's there to take care of some projects. To my actual employer I'm the "X technology guy" they meet once in a while to discuss project progress.

I find that I'm respected as a professional now, people value my work and seek me out for professional reasons instead of going for a beer after work. I clock in, get things done, and clock out. That's it.

Team building exercises and helping others with their projects is hardly what makes co-workers "family". I've worked full time for my company for 38 years. I've helped people with their homework to get through school, celebrated marriages, babysat, visited them in the hospital, celebrated holidays, supported them through cancer, looked after their house while they were away, hired their kids, threw retirement parties, and unfortunately attended seven funerals. That's when co-workers become family. I don't think it's very common in companies any longer.

Of the problems the advice-seeker’s company has, odds are that simply being a non-profit is the root cause. My wife has worked for several (large and small), and it is distressing how many of them are run as almost anti-profits, resistant to common good business practices out of some weird misunderstanding of what “non-profit” means. It’s been depressing watching so much money and good intentions wasted at these places on boondoggles; I’m not saying that all for-profit businesses are perfect by any means but they at least understand that obviously losing money is generally bad, whereas she’s seen even some quite well-known non-profits be actively resistant to things like trying analyze and optimize the impact of the money they spend. This atmosphere has then given rise to all kinds of weird second-order effects. Unfortunately, that may be the only place they feel they can work on their passion issue, but if not, getting out entirely is their best bet.

Sports Team.

Reed Hastings (CEO) has the view I like. Companies should be like professional sports team. If you don’t perform, you get cut.

The problem with the “family” analogy is that it implies unconditional love even when someone repeatedly fails. Or having that family member who’s a free loader and it’s ok.

Work should be about performing your best to achieve a collective goal and the sports analogy provides just that.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/09/netflix-co-ceo-reed-hastings...

One place I worked did the whole "family" thing... right up until they unceremoneously laid me off without warning to save their bottom line.

I always considered the team I was in, in Singapore a 'family'. By family we would always help each other out, and work together to ensure the team's projects finished and there was never bad blood between any of the co-workers, /try/ to go to lunch together (due to religion / diet restrictions we would often change lunch up to cater for everyone)

But it was never about working late (which i actively discouraged, to the point i yelled at the guy who sat across from me one evening because he kept staying late, and he had a family with 2 kids at home). We worked together, succeeded together, failed together. Never threw anyone under the bus, took responsibility together.

Our team was super productive, delivered a lot of good work, rarely ever caused production issues as the features were well tested... compared to the other teams. Knew the domain and the code really well. Then covid hit and management decimated the team overnight. I was absolutely gutted, made me so sick to my stomach I couldn't work for a week.

Co-workers being a 'family' in a business will never work with upper management being included.

We have a company wide meeting every other week literally called the "family meeting". My team members are so different from each that there is generally zero chit chat on slack, all day, every day - required questions/answers only. Family? This is just HR trying to show their worth with their latest simpleton ideas, just as the tech side has silly ideas like scrum, etc. We've recently started getting company wide emails with a big "Kudos" banner when somebody you don't know has done something that means nothing to you. Because we're a tight-knit family. Is this combo cargo culting meets gaslighting? You will be family - look into my eyes - you will be family. It's somewhat patronising, and I'm not sure it even makes sense with recent HR diversity pushes - we put in oil, then water, now mix like they're the same sort of things; a simplistic metaphor, but it sums up my team. We're there to do the work - maybe HR should give the Fantastic Four movies a rest.

Maybe I didn’t read it close enough, but workplaces that want their employees to be “family” are destructive to the actual families they have at home.

I actually attribute my divorce in part to my ex wife’s workplace making her truly believe that they were her “family”.

Everything there became more important than us. She called them her family and it was hurtful to our’s. I could write an article myself on this, but wanted to put it out there.

When work crosses the “family” boundary, it’s going a step too far.

We are coworkers. We get the job done 40 hours a week (should be 30). We go home to our families.

I’ve worked in a company like that. Leaving was the best decision I ever made, you can’t explain emotional intelligence to people.

Three issues here.

One, "like a family" is a process, not an atomic label. It's not something you can just stick anywhere. Families are dynamic and a lot of work, frankly. Humans are messy.

Two, even if the label meant something, it doesn't mean the same thing to each person that uses it. Sounds like some of these folks are jerks. This might be because of an idea of what family means that's much darker than other people's. Also there are a lot of jerks in the world. The writer doesn't seem to like a lot of people they work with either. That's all fine and well. Families choose many times to disengage and only be together during certain special events. The question is whether or not these kinds of families are what the slogan means. Who knows? Sounds more like a crutch used by management than a real concept that everybody can grok.

Three, the author is playing right along. It looks to me like they're doing this passive-aggressive thing where the actively don't want to be like whatever this "family" label means to others at work and they also don't want to spend time with those folks. That's what they should say, to others. You just don't flip around a vague slogan and get something more useful. By translating it into the already vague "family" moniker, they're cheating themselves out of the opportunity to grow. "I don't like you people. You make me work too much, you're a bunch of assholes and I'm leaving." is a painful thing to say, and I'd wait until I have another job to say it, but rephrasing it as "I don't want to be like a family..." is just couching it in the same bullshit everybody is using. If you want to be that way, fine, just realize that you're doing the same thing as you feel is being done to you, i.e. using vague language to dodge difficult conversations.

Never ceases to amaze me how talented people so often fail to understand their worth and put up with this nonsense.

There do seem to be a lot of companies that didn't recognize the other side of the coin. When you take away pensions and replace them with a 401k, make layoffs a normal thing, and so on, you're saying "we are taking a risk-averse approach to our relationship with employees".

Why then, are they surprised at the reaction of employees and still expect things like loyalty, "family", etc?

A long time ago i worked for a medium sized company where the boss constantly claimed that 'we are a family'...

It turned out he was right with his 'family' claim, albeit more in a 'The Godfather' sense

And of course the mysterious "fit" decision in the hiring process shows this. Chances are more independent thinkers that don't want to beer bash with the crowd or that has actual social boundaries won't want to participate in the reindeer games the author describes.

Clearly I carry a burning torch for the issue of age discrimination in tech as a 50-something - but seriously what 35 year old veep wants a 50 year old with more tenure than them working for them in their group? Family? We care about work-life balance? yeah sure bubba.

It's a well known fact that it's a red flag and you should move on to different direction if they mention they're like a family. Employment is a business relation based on a contract agreement of both parties. That's it.

I was interviewing with a company and was genuinely interested in the position until they mentioned they were like a family. Sent them a not interested email after the meeting.

And neither do I, at least with all of them. I have had some work friends who were close. Have I stayed in touch with any of them? Out of five jobs in ten years, there are two I still consider true friends, the kind you call when you are in a jam.

While I'm griping about such things, let's talk about bosses day and company outings and gifts for fellow employees for $reasons. If I work for you, I do it because you offered me a paycheck. I feel no responsibility to buy you a gift. I don't want gifts from you. We have a contract or similar agreement - I work, you pay. Gifts either direction, company trips, whatever feel like a sham and muddy that agreement of I work, you pay. To other employees when I was one - do your work, avoid drama, and I'll like you. Keep the gifts out of it and don't try getting into my wallet because Sally has worked here for ten years. If I work closely enough with Sally to know she is good at her job, I'll let her know. If I don't work that closely with her, what more do I need than politeness? /soapbox

I have asked my HR and team not to use the family analogy. We are team and support each other as team mates. We do help people when they are sick etc. Ultimately we are trying to achieve a shared goal and I want to company to help people to achieve their personal goals at the same time.

I manage using the book first break all the rules and 5 dysfunctions of a team.

First break all the rules uses these 12 employee sat questions

I know what is expected of me at work.

I have the materials and equipment to do my work right.

At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.

In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.

My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.

There is someone at work who encourages my development.

At work, my opinions seem to count.

The mission/purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.

My associates (fellow employees) are committed to doing quality work.

I have a best friend at work.

In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.

In the last year, I have had opportunities to learn and grow.

The precedent for building obedience by describing your organization as a “family” goes back a very long way.

The most notorious example is probably The Family International, a cult founded in California in 1968:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_International

I don’t refer to companies or other organizations as families, or even “like a family.” There are better metaphors when you aren’t trying to manipulate people, and not describing your workplace as a family also avoids provoking the trauma for those employees who have issues with their family of origin.

If you describe a company as being like a family, are you giving managers permission to cast themselves as authority figures over employees they will treat like children?

It’s safest to steer clear of describing companies as families, with employees as members. Pitfalls abound.

Its horribly manipulative to force others to behave as a family members. Like pure hell.

Our former GM came from IBM. Work is work; a transaction. Under our then VP of eng, he internalized that humans are social animals and work gives us an opportunity to connect with people.

For the article, I agree the term "family" is inappropriate. I also think that outside of normal hours get togethers should never be required. Schedule team building during work hours.

As for the author, I think they may be at the wrong job for them. The teams prioritize helping over their own deadlines. He can get on board and be a team player or, if that is orthogonal to their work style, they should find a better match for work.

Well, if you have nothing else to offer, one way or another you have to find loyal fools with a helper syndrome.

After all, you're are not a patriarch, as was common for thousands of years, who could just tell his family what to do or not to do, and they obeyed without question.

Or even sell your own children into slavery.

This manipulative stuff is a bit disgusting and annoying, but it pays.

At least it is a sneaky method to filter your prefered type of underling, but still look like a grand soul.

So, a double win.

Of course if you're into family fetish with a bit of sadistic gaslighting, it is even a triple win.

A lot of people even like it that way.

So it's a win-win, isn' it?

This makes me laugh. My firmly tongue in cheek take:

The whole family thing is just management hypocrisy.

I mean very few families take Grandma out back to be shot so they can save enough food for the head of the family to have a new private jet.

“Sorry kids, you’re not getting any presents this year but Daddy’s getting 300% more presents than last year. So every cloud has a silver lining eh?”

Better to be more like Ron Swanson and be a contractor.

We are not friends. You pay me to do a job and I do it well in return.

You don’t bullshit me and I don’t get upset when you want to stop paying me for whatever reason.

I recall advice once that you should think of co-workers as teammates rather than family.

- A family should accept you no matter what

- A team requires you to make the cut

Both have comradery, the latter accounts for contributions to the group

Why would anyone want this? I just want a workplace.

Corporate collectivism is gross.

>When pressed, HR and her supervisor mentioned her absence from department-bonding activities.

At an old job HR said that employees who unfriended a co-worker were guilty of harassment. I never heard that officially but I do believe it having worked there so long and how management acted.

I had my status cut from full-time to part-time and posted it on my secured, friends only, locked-down as much as possible Facebook account. The next morning my manager called me 5 minutes after my work day began asking me to remove that comment ("or else" I assumed). He read to me verbatim what I had written, the time, even some of the comments to it so he obviously had a print-out or screen shot (doubtful HR could figure that out). I suspended my Facebook account until I was abruptly laid off four years later by the aggressive abusive manager I had complained about 8 years earlier.

This is the same organization that cut the janitorial staff from three shifts to two day shifts and cut staff from a dozen to one person per shift. the same place that complained when you didn't submit your anonymous employee survey.

Keep work and friends separate. HR works for the company not you. You trade your time for their money there is no culture.

I am currently in the same situation. I joined a reputed service based company after graduating last year. This is what I am doing in the projet. 1. Deliver the work on time. 2. Helping my team members. I wasnt saying NO initially. 3. Understanding requirements. 4. Production deployment.

Things I dont want to do. 1. Delivering other team members work. 2. Connect on call with team members more than 5 times for the same issue. 3. Explaining the requirements to team members who intentionaly did not listen carefully during the call and later messaging Hey what was the new requirement?. 4. Picking up gossip calls from team leader. I did not wanted to do this, but team leader keeps pushing.

Yesterday I asked my team lead that how all this is affecting me both mentally and physically.

Guess what. He sent an email involving upper management and ordered me to carry on.

F*k them and the project. I resigned. And I am happy that after 2 months I will be parting ways with the company and will have some peace of mind.

I’ve noticed that it’s a strong signal whether a company does team building stuff during work hours outside of them. If they want you to show up Saturday or after hours, it’s a red flag. Holiday parties seem to be the only exception to it being a red flag. But even then you’d better not be expected to show up.

I have so many examples, good and bad.

I started working for a civil engineering firm in high school. Best job I ever had. Sent around the country to set up and train CAD systems. The adults had adopted me. Then I started college (working part time), got sick, somehow lapsed my paperwork. This company backdated my insurance premiums (fraud), paid my bills, to make sure I got a life saving bone marrow transplant. No strings.

OC references Zoom scavenger hunt and being a team player. Heh. Worked at a startup. Really intense. Coworkers that you both love and hate at the same time. We had a big shot boss that would punish us for a job well done with group events. Box seats at football games, open bar at jazz concerns. I demurred from a Las Vegas excursion. Oh boy. You'd've thought I killed the boss' prize puppy. Didn't repeat that mistake.

I’ve known some coworkers for 15+ years. I’d say I’m friends/friendly with all of them, but I never have and never would want to do anything with any of them outside of work. I choose the friends I want to hang out with outside of work. I don’t choose my coworkers.

A "like a family" feeling isn't going to happen while one or more members of that family have total power over wages and employment of the rest. My relationship with my boss and my fellow workers isn't like that of a family, unless my Dad was paying me to work 40hrs a week and could kick me out of the house any time

The only way you'll get anything close to a family feel is something like worker democracy / worker co-ops. Bosses need to stop trying to force a culture onto a workplace and actually treat their employees like people.

The biggest red flag at a work place is being welcomed "to the family". The second biggest red flag at a work place is being told at induction that "we work as a team over here".

It's patronizing and implying that you have no idea what you're on about and they're here to set the record straight. And "we're family" and "we work as a team" usually means you're the one upholding all the obligations and responsibilities that come with that whilst having none of the benefits nor any authority.

Companies look at all sort of ways to manipulate workers into giving up value without adequate remuneration. Preying on family values is particularly disgusting. It's an immediate red flag for me.

Absence of healthy boundaries has nothing to do with "family".

I love my job and my coworkers are nice, smart people who are good colleagues and whose company I enjoy. But I've already got my family, and they're not it. That corpo-speak is complete BS - it's both incredibly insincere and incredibly condescending. Like I don't know how to be nice to people unless they're my family, and I'm so stupid that there's no other way of telling me "be nice" or "let's work together towards a commonly beneficial goal".

I worked on a team that felt 'like a family' once, and it was by far the best period of time in my career. I really don't think you can intentionally create that environment, though. It just happened due to the personalities involved. I couldn't have hired for it, either, since my first impressions of two of those personalities were negative.

Of course, I immediately lost almost all contact with all of them as soon as I left. It may have been illusory, but it was definitely nice.

When the work is over, I prefer to be with my actual family.

To be in a well gelled team with people you really care about is the best kind of working experience, in my view. That's the "family" dynamic.

Still, people need to hold each other accountable up and down the chain at all times. Ideally that's done in a non-judgemental way.

Nothing lasts forever, but perhaps a sign of a positive family-like dynamic is that an ex colleague still wants to come visit the old office for lunch once in a while, and people enjoy seeing them.

I stress to my reports that work is work, and that there are boundaries between the two.

That doesn’t mean lack of kinship and lack of empathy.

Working extra during high-priority projects? Expected.

Downtime and looking the other way to allow recuperation? Also expected.

Getting reassigned or fired because you’re hindering the team or business? Not at all great, but expected as well.

It’s a team, not a family.

This is one part of the Netflix culture I agree on. Companies are more like sports teams than they are families.

The first response to this should be "oh, so you are making me a partner". Family = shared ownership.

Some level of workplace socialization is enjoyable and I’ve made friends that way who I’ve stayed friends with. But nobody ever tells you a workplace is like family unless they’re picking your pocket.

That said, the letter writer is probably not benefiting from being so openly hostile to all social events.

The other way around, working with family, often fails miserably too. It's as if the two modes of life conflict.

Working for family sucks. At least slaves aren't usually expected to show gratitude. Who wants that in their workplace?

Jocko has some good tips about this. https://kdalive.com/learn-leadership-skills-from-jocko/

I spent a bit of time working as an executive delivery boy for a professor that used to say "This is not a business. I always thought of it more as a cheap source of labour, like a family"

I too do not choose to join a cult.

Best bet is to find rather boring lifestyle businesses with dependable b2b revenue streams. Nobody gets too worked up about anything, and there's no kool-aid to be drunk.

A family doesn't fire you when economic circumstances change.

I see too many people whose core identity was the place where they worked. When they got laid off, they became extremely depressed.

If a girl is beautiful and has already boyfriend/relationship then she doesn't want to hang out with other people and wait till clock hits 5 PM. Same can be said about married people but at least they will hang out sometimes. Single people especially guys want to hangout but as soon as all girls are gone, it becomes useless to stay. Personally I prefer we just stay stickily professional. But people do otherwise more often than not

Worked at one place for 16 years. Never been married, but now I know what a divorce feels like.

So yeah, fuck that family bullshit.

Like a Family culture opens grounds for perpetual alimony payments after you're divorced from the family.

Isn't the old saying, you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family?

This. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for finally articulating something I have always felt.

Paywalled articles shouldn’t be allowed here.

But just based on the headline: yes your co-workers are like family in a strict sociological sense. Family therapy techniques are quite useful in business consulting.

My mom took a job at In Defence for Animals years ago. She went through the interview, and settled a measly wage.

A couple of weeks in she asked about her check. All she got back was, "Oh we are all family here, and you are a volunteer."

She being a lover of animals worked another week and left.

The founder of the 501c3 passed a few months ago, but he was always paid well, and owned a lot of assets that look like funds were comingled?

The only jobs where I heard we are all family here, were terrible jobs, and most employees hated when the few well paid employees would pull out the Family card.

Under my breath, I always went to, "Yes we are family here, but the Manson Family?"

I’m exactly the same as the person in the article. I’m introverted and don’t enjoy participating in activities with more than a couple of people. I have no problem doing it - I just don’t like to. It seems gender or race can’t be questioned in the work place but the way I like to socially interact with others can be and used against me (like in the article).

I think managers etc get a bit carried away with the whole family idea thing. It can be used like a weapon to convince people to work longer to help their ‘family members’ with their work. But who gave them too much work in the first place?

Even as a business owner I feel what the author of this article is saying. I once has an affiliate of my company play the "we're all family" card. And like the author, they used that as a tool to cross the line often and also required (mandatory!) attendance at social events. As you can imagine, it was only time before we were under the bus.

A good response when the company starts with the "we're a family" BS, is to reply (with a smile on your face, to be safe) "good, then nobody can ever be fired!". It can be a lighthearted way to point out the absurdity of the concept.

Another HN paywall.