When You’re Here, You’re Not Family

You’ve likely heard a boss or manager say ‘we’re a family’ at work. What does evoking family language in the workplace mean, and how can it be used to convey a false sense of conviviality?

Today, I’m sharing another one of my previously published stories from Standart, a magazine about coffee culture. In November 2020, I made an Instagram post articulating an idea that I and many of my colleagues have felt about using family language at work. You know what I’m talking about: bosses referring to workers as “one big happy family” as a way raise expectations and extract more time/effort from employees while not extending the kindness and support we might expect of family in times of need or duress (like time off or pay raises).

In the Instagram post, I said ‘We Are Not A Family,’ a play on the motto from the Italian fast-casual chain the Olive Garden. The post is one of the most-liked posts on my feed, and I even made shirts with the phrase, designed by my colleague and friend, Cooper Foszcz. And in true Standart form, my editor let me get weird and explore the implications of family language at work.

This story was originally published in the Fall 2023 edition of the magazine. It’s a long one, but I hope you enjoy!

Photo by Michaela on Unsplash

On March 29, 2023, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz appeared before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), having been called to testify in a hearing named No Company is Above the Law: The Need to End Illegal Union Busting at Starbucks.

At the time of the hearing, over 280 Starbucks locations across the US had voted to unionize. However, not a single one had got past an initial vote, and hundreds of news stories detailed the company’s alleged union-busting and stalling techniques that included shutting down stores, cutting hours, offering benefits to non-unionized workers, and walking out of contract-negotiation meetings with union groups. The point of the hearing was not to offer punitive recommendations but to give senators the opportunity to put direct questions to Schultz about these allegations.

Each member of the HELP Committee had six minutes to question Schultz. Some, like Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, did not ask a single question, instead calling the hearing a mockery and making seemingly unconnected statements like ‘Many would argue we [in the US] have too much food. It’s extraordinary how wealthy we are!’

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In general, the tenor of questions was determined along party lines, with Democrats scrutinizing Schultz’s decisions in the context of the fact that Starbucks workers issued almost 20 percent of all union petitions in the US in 2022, and Republican senators praising the CEO for building a successful business, or even lauding his generosity.

Amid the grandstanding and obfuscation, one senator’s comments stuck out. Mike Braun, a Republican from Indiana, was somewhat more critical of Schultz that his party colleagues, but not because he critically interrogated the CEO; instead, he spoke of his own experiences as a small business owner: ‘The best avoidance of a union is to treat your employees like family, pay good wages, [and] have good benefits. You do that [and] you’re probably never going to have a union knocking on your door.’

I don’t want to claim that I’m exactly sure what Braun meant with his suggestion, but the words got me thinking; it’s not the first time that the use of the word’ family’ to describe workers has bugged me, like an itch that needs to be scratched. It had struck me many times in the previous months and years that the use of ‘family language’—typically, this refers to bosses, managers, and owners either describing a workplace or staff group as a ‘family’, or encouraging it among team members—had become increasingly prevalent, and not always in a positive sense.

Of course, I was aware that an employer can treat employees in a way that invites a comparison to a family without specifically calling the team a ‘family,’ and that the use of the term ‘family’ doesn’t necessarily imply that a team is being treated as one; but I was sufficiently provoked to explore this theme of family language further, and to explore why it bothered me so much.

Canvassing the’ gram: Baristas of the world, respond!

To gather some information about how prevalent such language is in the contemporary café workplace, where else could I turn but Instagram to ask baristas if they had ever been referred to as a ‘family’ at work, and if that kind of language shaped the culture of their workplace. I received a deluge of responses, with many baristas reporting that the use of phrases like ‘we’re a family here’ felt manipulative, one-sided, and an inaccurate portrayal of the real working dynamics.

‘Family-first-type language [is] used frequently, [and it implies] weird familial expectations of employees,’ said Alex (the names of baristas were changed for this story) who’s worked for a large chain for a decade. ‘Phrasing like “one team, one purpose” soon morphed into “one family, one purpose.” The wording create[s] a sense of commitment to the team but also solidifie[s] the idea that if you’re letting us down, then you’re letting your family down. Who wants to let down their family?’

Others went further, describing the use of family language as a tactic to avoid giving employees adequate working conditions. ‘I worked for a coffee roaster for about a year and a half. I assumed the role of production assistant, assistant café manager, and wholesale manager, while making $12 an hour,¹’ reported Taylor. ‘My boss kept promising a raise would come, but since “we are all family,” I [was told] I just needed to contribute and prove myself first.’

Admittedly, I entered this article with my own ideas about how family language made me feel—I’ve heard it at work from leaders who never lived up to the expectations I felt they should have met, and, anecdotally, I knew that others felt the same (I’ve sold over 200 shirts with the slogan ‘We Are Not A Family’ emblazoned on the front). But I wondered if my views and ideas on this topic were self-selective. Was I just hearing the stories I wanted to hear?

The baristas, however, agreed that team-as-family owners and managers tended to show precious little of the care one might reasonably expect from family members in such situations. ‘I was working at a “we’re a family” coffee shop when the manager’s brother died,’ Jordan, a barista in Portland, Oregon, told me. ‘In the following weeks, she displayed mounting emotional distress. The owner fired her the day before Thanksgiving as she was on her way out the door to go see her actual family.’

The use of family language in contexts connected to the workplace isn’t new. One famous example is Olive Garden, a fast-casual Italian restaurant with over 900 locations across the globe. The chain debuted its iconic marketing slogan in 1998: ‘When you’re here, you’re family.’ While there were certainly employers and bosses who took to calling their workers’ family’ before this, Olive Garden’s slogan solidified the use of family language to convey a sense of conviviality, closeness, and care.

In an example like that of Olive Garden, where family language is encouraged between employees and customers, the nature of the relationship between consumer and business remains clear—it’s transactional: Even if your servers are warm and friendly, you still have to pay for your food and leave. The internal dynamics of workplaces, however, are also built around transactional relationships: Employees show up and provide labor, and employers pay for that labor; but the use of family language among staff has much more serious implications and messier outcomes.

The fact that so many baristas responded to my Instagram query with messages that ranged from heartfelt, sincere stories of workplace abuse to memes mocking happy family-creating bosses and workplaces prompts the question: Why does this language get used, and what do employers mean (read: expect) when they announce that a team is a family?

According to Senator Braun, if owners treat employees like family members, the employees won’t be motivated to (and wouldn’t even need to) unionize. Well, language and action are different things, and while family language in the workplace might be annoying to many, it’s only a real problem if actions fail to match the rhetoric, or—worse—it’s one of the tools employers deploy to manipulate and abuse their workers. 

Blurred boundaries

Gloria Chan Packer caused a stir in her 2022 TED Talk in which she charted the growing popularity of phrases such as ‘we’re a family’ over the last decade, a development that emerged at the same time as tech companies began to garner attention for offering ‘fun’ workplace perks like free meals, freeform workplaces that eschewed desks, and chauffeured buses to transport employees to and from work. Cynical observers noted that these perks could equally be seen as deviously manipulative traps to encourage workers to spend as much time in the workplace as possible.

In her talk, which was aptly titled ‘Work Is Not Your Family,’ Packer—the founder of Recalibrate, a workplace mental health and wellness service provider—doesn’t pull her punches. The use of family language at work, in her opinion, constitutes a ‘betrayal of our boundaries.’ She defines the latter as ‘our ability to identify, communicate, and take action on our needs’, and says that boundaries become difficult to assert when we’re implored to ignore our rights to make way for others.

‘We land into a workplace and we hear [the term] “We’re like family,” and our brain [interprets that as] “Give it everything, no matter what,”’ Packer declares, and this encourages workers to downplay their own needs in the service of a larger team, goal, or mission. This can work for a while—until it doesn’t. ‘We sacrifice our boundaries, our time, our relationships, and we start living life in these big swings of overworking to burnout.’

Packer is describing here patterns she’s seen and experienced time and again in the tech industry—she herself worked 80–100-hour weeks for a corporate firm until she hit a wall in 2017 and had to take a leave of absence. ‘That was devastating for me because work had really become my everything,’ Packer says. For baristas, the details might be different than for tech workers, but the process and outcomes are the same: Many of the folks who answered my Instagram query mentioned failing to ask for raises, missing time with their (actual) family, and ignoring personal preferences to serve the interests of their boss or company—all because their workplace had been framed as a family.

Coffee shops are often termed ‘third places,’ referring to their role as comforting and communitarian spaces separate from one’s home (the first place) and work (the second). For baristas, whose second and third spaces are already one and the same, the use of family language can mean that boundaries are so blurred as to be invisible. Everything spins closer to the center until you’re unsure where work ends and the rest of your life begins.

The best intentions?

In ‘The Toxic Effects of Branding Your Workplace a “Family,”’ an article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review, Joshua A. Luna—a leadership development trainer based in Chicago—examines the issue critically while extending the benefit of the doubt to employers, arguing that most firms and managers don’t use family language with nefarious intent but because they ‘want productive, high-performing employees, which [usually requires] individuals who work well with one another and produce results. Adding a “family” culture and sense of belonging might not sound malicious at first, but when used to foster relationships with the expectations of top-level performance, employees will rarely be set up for success.’

Like Packer, Luna believes that boundary-blurring workplace tactics like family language are a ‘lingering effect from the early 2000s. All those tech startups and all that funding created this almost toxic mentality where workers are told “we’re all in this together,”’ he told me in a follow-up Zoom conversation. ‘These places wanted to create a culture, but this culture became “We’re a family, we’re friends, we hang out together, we work hard, we play hard.”’

Luna’s own motivation to critique the use of family language at work came about because he ‘was tired of hearing it’ and thought that it created unrealistic expectations of what a typical employee’s job entails. ‘When a family member is in need or requires significant commitment on your end, you rarely have to think twice,’ he says in his Harvard Business Review article. ‘Placed into a work setting, loyalty can get misconstrued as expectations form to go above and beyond to do anything to get the job done.’

Both Luna and Packer believe that the creation of an environment in which workers are expected to go beyond the formal confines of their job can lead to burnout, but Packer takes the argument a step further, pointing to research that indicates that people who feel extremely bound to a company are more likely to feel exploited.

And do companies match their rhetoric in moments of crisis like, I don’t know, a global pandemic? The reciprocity family language implies rarely goes beyond the words, Luna made clear in our conversation. ‘Companies create high expectations among their staff: “Hey, we love you working here; we’re gonna support you; we’re gonna make sure you feel awesome every single day. Oh, and now we have to [downsize] because of a virus? You don’t have a job anymore.”’

It’s worth noting that the extensive use of family language in the workplace is to some extent limited to North America, with European working environments tending to display much more respect for workers’ rights. Although I reached out to coffee people around the world to ask for stories and opinions about this subject, nearly all respondents were from the United States (without downplaying the equally bad stories I received from elsewhere). The US has some of the world’s worst labor and worker protection laws, and never was this clearer than during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pew Research Center found that 2.6 million workers in the EU lost their jobs in 2020, an overall 1.3 percent drop in employment from 2019, while 9.6 million US workers lost theirs in the same period, amounting to a 6.5 percent drop.

Throughout the pandemic, many service workers found themselves at extreme, if different ends of a spectrum: Either they were let go unceremoniously from their jobs, or were deemed ‘essential workers’ and asked to continue working as a novel virus swept the world. Few had the opportunity to take paid leave or work from home. The leisure and hospitality sectors lost the most jobs in the early days of the pandemic (nearly 8 million in the US alone, according to the Economic Policy Institute), while those still employed were the most likely to die from COVID: A study from the University of South Florida found that 68 percent of COVID-19-related deaths in the US were workers with ‘low socioeconomic positions’, which they define as individuals employed in ‘labor, service and retail jobs that require on-site attendance and prolonged close contact with others.’

And at a time when frontline workers were dying, CEOs were thriving. ‘While millions were jobless due to the pandemic-driven recession in 2020, CEO compensation at the top 350 U.S. firms grew 18.9% to $24.2 million on average,’ the Economic Policy Institute reports. ‘With this, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio rose to 351-to-1, up from 307-to-1 in 2019 and 21-to-1 in 1965.’

At Starbucks, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio is even more egregious: In 2019, The Seattle Times found that then-CEO Kevin Johnson made 1,049 times more than the median Starbucks worker. When Howard Schultz took over as CEO for the third time in 2021 (having initially served as CEO from 1986 to 2000 and then again from 2008 to 2017), some outlets were keen to praise him for only accepting a salary of $1—but don’t get too impressed; he’s currently worth over $4 billion.

Such inequality is itself a problem, but insult is added to injury when CEOs and management teams display little interest in providing genuine benefits and living-wage compensation to their hourly workers, yet are fulsome in their use of family language to encourage the same level of commitment that one might see in the boardroom: We’re all working towards the same objectives, so should all give the same effort.

‘Let’s say I’m an entry-level worker and the CEO is earning a thousand times what I do. That makes us not the same,’ Luna was emphatic in our call. ‘You care about the company more than I do—and there’s nothing wrong with that; there’s nothing wrong with me wanting to just clock in and clock out, but the expectations still from the top are like, “Why aren’t you devoted? Why aren’t you part of the culture?”’

Working for love

It can be difficult to persuade others about the problems caused by family language at work because there’s been very little research on the topic. ‘It was really hard to write an article about this,’ Luna told me. ‘This is still more qualitative than quantitative, but I see these behaviors every single day and talk to people about it all the time.’

A part of the difficulty inherent in nailing down the issue, and therefore working to change it, is that employers don’t have to use specific words like ‘family’ to achieve the same effect. ‘Starbucks calls workers “partners”; Walmart calls them “associates”—these companies do everything in their power not to say “employees,” “workers,” or “staff,”’ Sarah Jaffe, an independent journalist and author of the book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone, told me in a call. ‘They use every freaking euphemism in the book. But [employees are] not partners—not legally. They are not part of the ownership of the company.’

Most people have some reference point for family dynamics, either from their own families or through media depictions of families, which makes family language at work even more effective; we all know the cast of characters involved.

At some point in your life, you’ve probably heard a form of the phrase, ‘If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life’. As part of the research she did for her book, Jaffe talked to workers in sectors such as childcare, retail, and technology to interrogate the idea that we’re supposed to love our jobs and can be expected to be wholeheartedly passionate about work. Family language came up a lot. ‘“We are a family here” implies that at other workplaces, you’re not part of a family, even though it’s so damn common now that everybody gets told that they’re a family. I was shocked … how often computer programmers had been told that their workplace was a family,’ Jaffe told me. ‘This one company branded itself a “fampany”—which is the worst portmanteau ever—and then, of course, it fired one of its workers for union activity.’

Jaffe takes issue with the idea that workers should be expected to love their work, considering it an inherited condition of late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism, and that it can be unfair and manipulative to use family language and the notion of love to extract an unwarranted commitment. ‘Love, after all, is supposed to be an unlimited resource that lives within us,’ she writes in Work Won’t Love You Back. ‘If the workplace is a family, shouldn’t we naturally love it,’ without needing to be told? All too often, however, the use of family language is intended to obscure grueling conditions and unequal wages and deflect blame for dissatisfaction with work onto individuals. If we don’t love our workplace, the attitude insinuates, it’s a failure of our own making. 

And then there are further layers to this injustice. Family language is ‘an interesting question because it is, in some ways, an admission that the family is a place where work happens,’ Jaffe told me. The fact that domestic labor like child rearing and cooking for the family is often unpaid has been attracting more attention in recent years, and the family is a useful stand-in for a place that cares about you and that you care about. And of course, managers and owners are much more interested in you caring about the firm than them ever actually caring about you.’

The idea that we must love our job pops up across industries, but the perceived need to perform our love, according to Jaffe, is largely unique to service and retail work—jobs that are mostly undertaken by women and marginalized groups. ‘The real difference between [retail and] manufacturing jobs … [is] the requirement of that “service with a smile,”’ she writes. ‘Retail workers, unlike manufacturing workers, have to appear to love their work.’

That could be why family language feels more insidious in service and barista jobs, Jaffe told me, due to ‘the expectation that you will be emotionally invested in your job and visible to customers. That’s a really important part of what coffee shops are selling—a place not only to buy coffee that is good, but also a place to hang out.’

A family affair

This background naturally gives rise to some important questions: If your workplace is a family, who occupies which role, and how are the various roles delineated?

Luna devotes a fair amount of space in his Harvard Business Review article to this problem. ‘If you’re promoting a family culture, does that make the employer the parents and the employees the children? Not everyone has a good relationship with their parents or siblings and emotions from family dynamics can easily bleed into professional relationships.’ Most people, however, have some reference point for family dynamics, either from their own families or through media depictions of families, which makes family language at work even more effective; we all know the cast of characters involved.

Even if we grow up with absent parents, we understand culturally that it’s parents who are in charge and who get to make decisions without reproach, and the equivalent in the workplace is bosses or upper management dictating day-to-day tasks. ‘These dynamics can also leave employees feeling unempowered … to stand up for themselves and take on work that falls outside of their comfort zone.’

In workplaces where family language is common, it can be difficult to recognize paternalistic behaviors like micromanaging or excessive expectations as toxic or unfair because we’re used to seeing parents act in such ways. As children, we’re taught not to question the authority of adults and to be grateful for what they’ve given us, and translated into the workplace, this can mean bosses expecting workers to be grateful for low salaries or poor workplace conditions, and to take on tasks that fall outside job descriptions without pushback. Many of us grew up with a parent figure who told us that we were ungrateful when we were given something, or misbehaving when we were told to do something because they said so. Jaffe agreed with me. ‘It’s a relationship we’re used to. You don’t get to make decisions for yourself when you’re a kid, so what is it saying to workers if they’re given the role of children? It’s saying, “You’re a child; I know what you need and what you need to be doing, and what will make you act like a good grown-up.” It’s probably not an accident that this is really rampant in service-industry jobs.’

If we strain to look at the best possible effect of the use of family language at work, perhaps it could be said to inspire employees to go beyond individual benefit and do more for others, but I think that is outshined by the possible (and probably usual) consequence: It can serve as a deliberately isolating tactic to deter collective action.

‘Turning our love away from other people and onto the workplace serves to undermine solidarity,’ Jaffe makes it clear in her book, an assertion that is borne out by the all-too-common union-busting actions to which coffee is no stranger. The idea of love and family language in the workplace implies collective responsibility—we’re all connected through hierarchical structures that dictate who is allowed to boss whom, and ‘the solution for [a] failure to love … back is to move on or to try harder. It is not to organize with your coworkers to demand better.'

Since 2020, however, we’ve seen some indications that the tide might be starting to turn. The fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic devastation prompted many workers—rather than their bosses or superiors—to recognize just how awful their working conditions were. In the 2022 fiscal year, the US National Labor Relations Board reported that union petitions had increased by 53 percent, with over 20 percent of those filings coming from Starbucks employees. Terms like ‘quiet quitting’, or refusing to do anything other than exactly what you were hired to do, have become increasingly commonplace, and memes about workplaces damning workers with faint praise by ‘rewarding’ them with pizza are being shared more than ever.

Such objections and jokes are not merely complaints, but important ways of speaking the truth about working conditions, and family language is, to many, already on the chopping block. ‘We had these yearly training workshops over a couple of days at headquarters, and they referred to these training days as “family reunions,” one barista wrote to me. ‘The 2020 one happened right before COVID shut stuff down and I remember the owner saying he was so happy we just had the family reunion to see everyone in person. When we unionized, we wrote in our contract that they couldn’t use the word “family” to describe training events, and they took it out.’

Setting the boundaries

But like all cultural touchpoints, it’s difficult to say that this is a movement with traction, rather than a temporary period in which questions of worker empowerment and challenges to workplace structures are being voiced; in ten years, will this perspective be even more powerful, or will family language be back and more entrenched than ever? ‘All this corporate-speak might go away, but what’s more interesting is exploring why it emerges,’ according to the psychometrician Nikita Mikhailov, who tries to understand, rather than judge, such contentious issues. 

Bosses who employ family language are, in Mikhailov’s opinion, “Often people who are low on the trait of agreeableness trying to appear more agreeable in their language, and therefore it can come out a little bit ingenious and a bit cringey.’ Mikhailov finds it exciting to witness the current reconfiguration of workplace dynamics. ‘Because of COVID, we are going through a mass renegotiation of the psychological contract between employee and employer. People are reviewing their values and setting boundaries between work and home and not willing to work over time for no additional pay. And that people using term to describe this “quiet quitting “and this needs to be “solved”  just goes to show how toxic things have become,’ but a consensus is developing that workers can’t ‘be expected to give everything and get nothing in return.’

I remember bristling when I first heard the term ‘family’ applied to the workplace, but couldn’t understand why it made me feel uncomfortable. The pandemic has since played a crucial role in bringing to the fore workplace dynamics and cultural norms that were once difficult to articulate. ‘The pandemic made working conditions worse real quick,’ Jaffe told me. ‘It’s obvious a workplace is not a family if owners are laying workers off … [or] if I can’t take a paid sick day to go see my mom when she’s in hospital. Real working conditions are the thing that shake people out of thinking they have to love their job.’

Mikhailov offers a simple piece of advice in this regard: ‘Your workplace [does not have the right to] take what you are not willing to give, be it time or effort.’ For leaders, he recommends proactively asking and, most importantly, listening to their colleagues 'even what they have to say might not be that positive to begin with — as the wonderful psychologist Esther Perel says, "Behind every criticism, there is a wish.” For some reason, companies would much rather pay tens of thousands of dollars to consultancies and consultants that have not worked a day in their organizations, to tell them how they need to interact with their colleagues, rather than asking the individuals as to what they need.’

He also encourages owners and managers to leave their echo chambers and ask for direct and honest feedback. 

‘There’s an assumption that terms like “leadership,” and “culture” are objective, but they’re not. I think the key thing to consider when talking about leadership or family language is that everyone has their own perspective and view on those terms. And though some individuals might resonate with family language in organizations, and some might find it a bit cringe, and that's okay, but it is important to get all the voices in the room. And when we talk about things such as leadership development, what is really important is where you get feedback from on the progress of that development. Do you only get this feedback from people that agree with you and  your annual reviews? Or do you invite real-time feedback from your colleagues? And even more of a wild idea, maybe you can ask them, “How can I help?” he says.

Another recommendation of Luna remained in my mind long after our call had ended: Always set clear boundaries in the workplace. ‘The more upfront you can be with expectations, the better,’ he told me. ‘A company might think, “Am I going to lose employees by implementing archaic structures and rules?” but I think it should happen much more than it does. The more you can standardize, the better.’

Perhaps the best piece of advice I can give is to say that having received so many responses from baristas who have reported these frustrations, I know that you’re not alone. And it’s one thing to see memes making fun of bosses who throw pizza parties or articles about ‘quiet quitting’ in the news—and entirely different to look at your colleagues and coworkers and know that they are in the same boat as you. Take a step back, look around, and see your workplace for what it is. They can’t take more from you than they’re willing to give.

1. The federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25 and has been since 2009. While arriving at a figure for a liveable wage is difficult owing to the country’s size and variability, in Madison, Wisconsin—the city in which the author lives and the US’s 80th largest—the living wage for a single person living alone with no children is $17.49 at time of writing (August 2023), according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.