Written by @Nicole Miller February 23, 2023

<aside> <img src="/icons/drafts_green.svg" alt="/icons/drafts_green.svg" width="40px" /> This memo is a deeper dive into our value of “we’re a team, not a family” and explores some of the ways this manifests is our day-to-day work.

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Learning the lesson, the hard way

Many eons ago, I joined a small, scrappy startup that aimed to re-write how work was done, following the footsteps of Netflix, Google, and Gitlab. We were fully remote and globally distributed, well before this was a trend (2011). We made our salaries transparent to the world (2012) and prioritized unique benefits like reimbursing coffee to work out of coffee shops.

And we encouraged calling one another “family,” even grouping in our community members and customers to this broad umbrella.

For many years, this felt idyllic and like the true future of what work should be.

And then a few cracks appeared: team growth and career growth stagnated and individuals felt stuck, but unable to leave. We had performance concerns that drug out over years because we were unable to see past the individual and our attachment to them (and this hurt longer term careers by delaying true progress.) Whenever someone left the company (which was rare,) it caused a deep sense of unease and betrayal, even when the opportunity was better.

We tried to attribute to individual cases or unique circumstances. But I spoke with the entire team of 75 at the time to get a better sense of the root cause.

The TL;DR was that we were setting our teammates up for unhealthy boundaries and unrealistic expectations by encouraging us all to be a “family” and not a “business.”

This blog post here dives a bit deeper into each of those cases. Here are the high-level takeaways:

• You can’t fire your family.
• You don’t “quit” a family (which might cause individuals to stay beyond a healthy point.)
• This blurs the lines between actual family and work family.
• Companies can inadvertently take advantage or manipulate people when using familial terms.
• Not all families are functional or healthy.
• This forces you to rank or put one family above another. (And real family should always be first.)

Attempting to undo years of ingrained terminology

As I began to learn from teammate conversations and culture surveys, I created an internal campaign to change this approach. In 2019, I released this blog post and shared with our team:

Honestly, it didn’t really go over that well. I wrote this from a perspective of “this was my choice to stop referring to teammates as family.” It didn’t get broad acceptance within the company to become a true policy or core value.