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“I once worked with a couple who insisted we were all family and I ended up babysitting their children... whilst at work,” says Mara*, 35, a multimedia executive working at a TV production company in London.
“This is a 10-year-old girl who sat on my lap while I was working in the office. The couple insisted that I was family and I had dinner with them. The girl ended up telling her parents that if anything happened to them she wants to live with me!”
Whether you work for a small business or a big corporation, chances are at some point you’ll have heard the boss refer to the workforce as a “family”.
While some employers might invoke the family spirit and treat you as such – meeting your needs, fulfilling theirs, and running the organisation on mutual love and respect – others are not so kind.
Impersonal HR staff and higher-ups (often on higher salaries) may use phrases like to this to spark close-knit camaraderie, when in reality they’re enjoying freedoms not afforded to the average worker.
The ostensibly unifying term can be disingenuous and be manipulated to rinse out more from employees. Most of us would do anything for our loved ones, so if our colleagues become our ‘family’, we’re forced to offer the same generosity – which often results in extra hours put into work.
For Mara, this kind of language led to higher expectations. “I love to feel part of the family, but then I ended up working longer hours because you feel invested in the business because you felt part of the family,” she says.
Not only that, companies which woefully lack diversity can let down their minority staff – and what kind of a family does that?
This rings true for 30-year-old Mehreen, who works in the charity sector.
She tells HuffPost UK: “I felt Isolated. Being one of two people of colour in an all-white office and the only POC in my team, that sense of ‘family’ never really resonated. It was very hierarchical and often times anyone below senior management who had ideas to share were met with pushback or not taken seriously.”
Another feature of the work ‘family’ is expectations of gratitude. We would never expect thanks from our loved ones for membership, and yet this is something that happens in work places.
Mehreen adds: “Being part of the family meant being grateful to be there. There was this unspoken sense of gratitude you had to have just to be part of the family, so that came with a sense of guilt that came when you were off sick, late, tired etc, which was very toxic.
“It felt like there was more value attached to those members of the ‘family’ who sacrificed their home life balance and mental health.”
She remembers a specific time her work place demonstrated it didn’t operate like a real family. “When I bought up the fact that I was seeing a therapist because of personal traumas and needed some time off it was approved, but then I was told I should be grateful with how flexible the company was being to allow this.”
Of course, not all instances of workplace kinship are toxic. Some times, long hours and lengthy careers instil natural solidarity.
“It depends how people use it,” says Eleanor Tweddell, author of Why Losing Your Job Could be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You.
“It’s not so much the word, it’s the way it’s applied. For some businesses it might come from the right place, that they share goals, values, they want you to feel comfortable. But this is quite rare in large organisations where it’s problematic in that most people just want to come to work, do a good job, get paid, not get harassed, and go home on time.”
Being in a ‘family’ also makes it tougher to challenge the daily running of a workplace.
“It’s very straight forward,” adds Tweddell. “The layering of ‘family’ creates an expectation of maybe going the extra mile, tolerating each other no matter what, in this together. An expectation of compromise for greater cause.”
Tweddell mentions that work places don’t run like a family; they’re hierarchal, you can get fired, your performance is monitored, you have to observe professional niceties.
So if your employer uses this type of language and in turn expects more from you, what can you do?
Firstly know your labour rights – are you being asked to take on responsibilities outside your contract? Is your boss being unprofessional? You might want to start by having a word with them if they’re skirting the boundaries of work, or if it’s getting to out of hand, you may need to talk to HR.
Tweddell adds: “If you are enjoying your work, and your organisation does reference family as a guiding value, then it can be as simple as going with it.
“I wouldn’t place a lot of energy on it until it becomes a problem, and then it’s time to report to higher powers or leave the nest.”
Working with authoritarian figures who disguise as our family can have a mental and even physical cost (think: loss of sleep). It might then be time to band together and collectively demand change, or if all else fails, look for new pastures.
*Names have been changed.
Life-Work Balance questions the status quo of work culture, its mental and physical impacts, and radically reimagines how we can change it to work for us.