And, they also tolerate a lot more meanness and uncouthness than a company. You don’t get fired for not following an employee handbook or code of conduct. In a family you get away with a lot.
At work a minor transgression will get most non top managers fired due to lots of reasons but mostly liability and fragility from other “family” (colleagues).
Your spouse can always initiate a divorce if your performance is lacking and fails to improve. Divorce on such grounds is quite common, I would guess.
But this reminds me of the owner of Ritual coffee who had to “ban” and fire her husband from her shop because someone upset at where he parked (to do work for his wife) called him the “N-word”. And he enraged asked, did you just call me “n-word?”
So it wasn’t his doing, but a perp, but answering the perp in kind got him blacklisted by the “community[1] and professionally by his own wife.
[1]meaning busybodies who likely never patronized them store but felt they had to show their virtue. Never did they go after the instigator though. No, it was the guy defending himself.
Anyways, using the "we're family" idea in a company is bad because everyone's familial history and experience is different. For some "we're family" means regardless of how abusive the parents are, the children are to always submit, stay, and support them. For some, "we're family" means we don't tolerate laziness and lack of getting chores done and there are consequences for such. In other families that laziness is just tolerated.
If a company wants to "be family" they better make sure everyone has a clear understanding of what that means or dig into the familial history and experience of all hires (I wouldn't recommend this).
The better analogy for a company is "we're a team". People typically have a better understanding of how teams work.
It created a completely different dynamic in the company where no one feared for their jobs if they had issues.