Your Work is Not Your Family. It’s an Office.
The air conditioning in the conference room was set to a clinical 22 degrees, but a different kind of chill was settling over the monitors. On screen, the CEO’s face was pixelated but his sincerity felt genuine, which was the worst part. He was fighting back tears. He told us this was the hardest day of his life, that letting 42 people go was like ‘cutting off a limb.’ We were a family, he said, his voice cracking on the final syllable. We were all in this together. The next slide, cued up by an unseen assistant, was titled ‘Aggressive Q3 Growth Targets & Synergistic Realignment.’ The limb, it seemed, was already a phantom.
I’ve heard that speech, or a variation of it, 12 times in my career. And I admit, for a long time, I bought it. Not because I was naive, but because I wanted to. The idea of a workplace family is a powerful sedative. It reframes unpaid overtime as ‘pitching in for your brother.’ It turns a manager’s unreasonable demands into a father figure’s tough love. It transforms a paycheck-a transactional fee for your time and expertise-into an allowance you should be grateful for. It’s a brilliant, insidious piece of rhetorical engineering. It’s also a lie.
It’s also a lie.
When a company tells you you’re a family, they are not offering you unconditional love. They are demanding unconditional loyalty. They are asking for the emotional privileges