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I want you to think about the last time you were together with your entire extended family. I mean, with all of your great aunts, oodles of cousins and kids who grow up so fast you struggle to attribute them to their parents. It’s most likely around Christmastime, or to celebrate one of those big birthday milestones than end with a zero.
Around long tables set with plastic plates and glasses, you may have experienced several of the best aspects that come with family, like belonging, respect, empathy and a shared sense of history.
You can’t choose your family that you are born into, but you can – and should – choose the right workplace that works for you.Credit: iStock
It’s for all those reasons that many companies love to refer to themselves and their employees as one big, happy family. “Join our family,” a typical job advertisement might read, explaining that everyone’s treated equally just like in a real family unit.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but a workplace is not a family, and trying to sell your business’s culture as though it is can actually be more harmful than beneficial.
For all the wonderful parts of a family, there are also hidden ones that can lie underneath the surface. Take long-held grudges, power dynamics or decades of emotional baggage that just love to poke through the surface during moments of high tension. Is that really how you want your office to operate?
One workplace that knows this is Netflix, the behemoth that amazingly reinvented itself from DVDs to streaming in a way that businesses like Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia and others never could.
Companies that view themselves like sports teams, where each player knows exactly what their position is, appear to perform better.
One of the ways that they did this was by dropping the illusion that a company is all about the good vibes. “We never thought of ourselves as a family,” wrote co-founder Marc Randolph last year. “Just think for a moment: when was the last time you fired someone from your family?”
Businesses need to have hard conversations around prickly topics like missing targets, performance management, redundancies, annual leave and other hard subjects. These things only get more complicated if there’s an expectation that everyone needs to be treated like a family member.