Healthy Business Boundaries

For family-owned businesses, ingraining a “family culture” can blur lines and limits for employees, and contribute to burnout.

Article Originally Published January 17, 2022 in Garden Center Magazine Leslie F. Halleck

As we turn the corner into the spring season, the perennial question of how to prevent employee burnout and keep staff morale elevated is yet again at the forefront of our thoughts. Rather than jump into a list of regurgitated recommendations, I think I should be clear that it doesn’t feel like we are starting this year from a place of prevention when it comes to burnout. Burnout is already in full effect for your employees, given how the last couple of pandemic years have played out. It’s likely you are heading into spring with employees who are already very tired mentally, emotionally and physically. You may also be starting it with fewer employees overall, which only increases the collateral stress on your existing staff.

Therefore, let me reframe the question: How do you best support and motivate employees who are already burned out to help them help you through a hectic spring season? A suggestion that immediately comes to mind for me is to respect their personal lives, privacy and time. Or risk losing them. The pandemic has created a big shift in how the workforce views its commitments to its employers, what they have been getting in return for that commitment and how they want to prioritize their own value moving forward. Building better boundaries between work and home life is high up on the employee and new-recruit priority list.

Overpromised, underpaid

If I were applying for jobs today, there are a few red flags that might send me running for the hills. One of them is company statements such as “We are a family” or “Come join our family.” Why? Beyond already having a family and not needing another one, you are telling me without telling me that there is a high likelihood you’ve built a culture of taking advantage of your employees. Hear me out …

A desire to treat your employees as a family might seem like a compassionate approach to doing business. But as we all know, families are complicated and aren’t always warm and fuzzy, or functional. And are you really saying that you’ll take the level of personal care and responsibility for your employees as you would a real family member? If you do, you are the exception. Otherwise, “Welcome to our company family” is often just an over-promised, under-paid offer.

Blurred lines

Company owners and managers often project their own family dynamics and expectations onto their non-familial employees due to a lack of self-awareness and their own codependency and loyalty issues. By forcing your family culture — or artificial work-family culture — onto the workplace, the boundaries between professional and personal get blurred in ways that can be toxic to both your business and your employees.

Many IGCs pride themselves on being family-owned businesses, but that is not the same thing as expecting your employees to be part of your “family” as a gateway to employment. What I’m addressing is the latter. You can both cherish your family-owned business structure and enjoy working with your actual family members in your company, whilst simultaneously maintaining boundaries and respecting your employees’ personal lives and time.

My family or yours?

I get it; we all define family in our own way. We can’t choose our blood families, and not everyone has functional familial relationships. Choosing non-blood relation families and creating our own packs is a natural phenomenon. It’s common, of course, to make friends with people you work with and develop remarkably close bonds with them. But as the business owner or manager, you also have a responsibility not to take advantage of your staff by over-personalizing your relationships.

When you decide your employees or co-workers are your “family” and formally perpetuate that as company culture, there can be a tendency to ignore the fact that staff have lives, nuclear families and priorities outside of the office that have nothing to do with you or your business. Frankly, all of these things are much more important to them than you and your business family. As it should be.

Loyalty or performance?

The emotional attachments often created within a family culture can make employees feel obligated to do work they are not compensated for and create additional emotional baggage and stress that further complicates their personal lives. It can make them feel ostracized if they choose to prioritize their privacy and boundaries. The blurring of these lines also makes it hard for employees to truly “check out” when they are off the clock. Not to mention, feel free to use earned vacation and sick time or take it when it’s best for them, not you, and to do so without explaining why (as is their right).

While family culture might potentially cut down on more obvious outward conflict in the office, it can also result in employees hiding more things from you for fear of personally disappointing you; or worse because they feel comfortable and entitled to get away with whatever it is they are hiding. Or they feel like you owe them for all those extra miles they’ve gone for you. Managers may feel less able to be critical of staff performance or make needed changes. Who wants to hurt their family’s feelings? Not to mention, family culture also opens the door to employees over-sharing personal information or bringing personal drama or problems into the workplace, taking the focus off tasks at hand.

Too many hats

It is understandably easy to develop a “we are a family” approach in small businesses or organizations. Sometimes it feels like a necessity to keep things afloat. But in my experience, that culture is often borne of situations where you simply don’t have enough staff to do the necessary work, and intense multiple-hats-wearing and codependency becomes the norm. Employees then feel emotionally obligated to “go the extra mile” for you because you’re no longer just their boss; you’re their family. That works out great for you as the business owner, I suppose, but you might just be draining the life out of your staff.

Be a nice human

This is not to say you shouldn’t have empathy for your employees’ and co-workers’ personal well-being and goals. It’s not to say you shouldn’t be a good human being at work and in how you run your business — quite the opposite. Often the best way you can help staff with personal success or challenges is to create a healthy workplace culture where they can grow, thrive and feel properly respected and compensated.

Work/life boundaries are necessary to maintain good mental health and profitable performance. Employees need to have a private personal life and persona away from your business. You also should not expect them to overspend their emotional capital on you or their co-workers. With the ongoing pandemic pressures and staffing shortages all of us are facing, I’d say the best thing you can do for staff morale and resilience this spring is to focus on reducing stress by building a culture of respect, empathy and value — versus loyalty. Which is what, I suspect, you’re really trying to do when you say, “Welcome to our family.”