The Perils of Company as “Family”
Why calling a company “family” drains it of its meaning
Airbnb has always stood out as a company culture success case in the tech industry. They are consistently ranked among the best places to work and they are the focus of countless articles, podcasts, and blog posts among the business/entrepreneurship news circuit.
What sets them apart is their friendly, inclusive, and community approach to company culture. When traditional companies focused on seniority and process and other tech companies focused on competition and performance, Airbnb took the path less traveled by emphasizing values like belongingness, mutual support, and trust.
Take Netflix’s notorious culture memo, for example, titled aptly “Netflix Culture—Seeking Excellence.” They make it explicitly clear numerous times throughout the 3000+ word memo that the company simply isn’t for everyone. In one section, they state rather harshly:
Succeeding on a dream team is about being effective, not about working hard. Sustained “B” performance, despite an “A” for effort, gets a severance package with respect […] Dream teams are not right for everyone.”
Compare this to the values embraced in Airbnb’s memo:
“Champion the Mission: We’re united with our community to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.”
“Be a Host: We’re caring, open, and encouraging to everyone we work with.”
Welcome To The Airfam
Where Netflix’s memo reads like a warning to people, Airbnb’s memo reads like a welcoming children’s book. This warming memo extended to the point of calling the people who worked at the company a “family.”
At the outset, it is easy to admire what Airbnb’s founders were striving toward, for their organization to be “more than a company.” To shed and transcend the conventionally cold and lifeless feelings associated with being an employee at a company or “cog in the machine.” And Airbnb, on some level, did achieve this; so much so that Ethan Mollick, an entrepreneurship professor at Wharton admitted: “Part of the compensation is being a part of this [Airbnb’s] family.”
But despite their idealist intentions, there are problems with this goal. Ironically, a section in Netflix’s culture memo explains precisely why:
“We model ourselves on being a professional sports team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever.”
Don’t worry, I also shivered when I read this. It’s cold and sounds almost inhumane. While this kind of brutal honesty is what Netflix prizes (one that even very traditional companies are too conservative to say out loud), this attitude is precisely what Airbnb strove to dispel. Airbnb aimed to be the very antithesis of this—the opposite of the performance-driven cold dealings of a conventional corporation. It aimed for, as one New York Times article stated, an “earnest idealism”— it aimed for “unconditional love.”
Cheerios: More Than The “Common Oat”
When the Cheerios brand name began “growing stale” in the early 1990s, General Mills ventured on a different marketing strategy to reinvigorate interest and sales in the cereal. Up until then, the brand had been appealing to customers by promoting the cereal’s functional benefits like its wholesome ingredients and health properties. The new direction they decided to take was to advertise through the higher-level ideals of family.
They promoted the cereal not as a “common oat” but as a “member of the family,” and hence “an enduring expression of a mother’s Love [sic] for her family.” Academics and media critics would later take issue with this. In his book Consumed, Benjamin Barber argues that the strategy of invoking the ideals of family to sell cereal,
“… hijacks the sentimental force of authentic emotions and attaches them to products and services whose “functional benefits” are simply irrelevant … associating them with a mother’s love is to hijack love and trivialize mothering.”
Cereal, functionally, has nothing in common with family values or motherhood. Cereal is just dried oats. Now the same could be said about being an employee at a company. What does writing code for an employer have to do with family? Not much, you are just a software engineer on the payroll.
Cheerios was one of many brands at the time turning to “emotional branding” because advertising a product's features wasn’t cutting it anymore. Due to the emergence of mass manufacturing, product differentiation was slimming. Without being able to compete based on functional benefits (quality of ingredients, price, convenience, etc.), they turned to attaching higher-level “feelings” (family, friendship, loyalty) to ordinary products or, now, commodities. Karl Marx called this commodity fetishism and media critic Raymond Williams wrote about the issue as early as 1961:
“It is impossible to look at modern advertising without realizing that the material object being sold is never enough.”
“If we were sensibly materialist, in that part of our living in which we use things, we should find most advertising to be of an insane irrelevance. Beer would be enough for us, without the additional promise that in drinking it we show ourselves to be manly, young in heart or neighbourly.”
“…the objects are not enough but must be validated, if only in fantasy, by association with social and personal meanings…”
Companies have long since turned to the same strategy. The material product benefits are the tangible job benefits: salary, work-life balance, kombucha on tap, ping-pong tables, etc. While the higher-level “feelings” attached are a unique company culture, and/or a company’s grand mission (whether you’re selling mattresses or razors: you are always saving the world it seems). For both Cheerios and Airbnb that “feeling” was family.
The issue is that companies want to have their cake and also eat it. They want all the benefits of what attaching these “feelings” invokes but are unwilling to uphold those values when it’s inconvenient to do so. And of course idea of family is very personal, it means something different to everyone. But underlying it is some minimum level of commitment to the members that make it up. A family that hinges on a growing economy, strong demand for your product, and low interest rates, I would say, is hardly a family at all.
Cry, CEO, Cry
At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, Airbnb faced these very problems and laid off a jarring quarter of its workforce. CEO Brian Chesky (as reported by the New York Times) cried on a call when notifying those who were affected. The profile mentioned that with his voice cracking he said “I have a deep feeling of love for all of you … What we are about is belonging, and at the center of belonging is love.”
Chesky should have understood that the experiment of calling his employees “family” was over the moment those layoff decisions had to be made. Chesky is worth $9.8 billion. Co-founder Joe Gebbia is worth $8.3 billion. The other co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk is worth $8.6 billion. They are all beyond wealthy. Claiming you are a family with that much money, each, and still laying employees off is a disgrace to the idea. Imagine if your (not one but) three billionaire “brothers” refused to help you when you were laid off. All they did was shed tears on a Zoom call, claim how difficult the decision was, and talk about “belongingness” and “love.”
It is, of course, an impossibility and an absurd proposition (somehow) to ask billionaires to continue to pay the salaries of employees they have deemed redundant. From a strictly business standpoint, it makes no sense to pay people who you don’t need. The only case where it would make sense to do something as irrational as continue to pay is if you were a family. But of course, that was always an illusion.
Now that I think of it, I almost prefer Better.com CEO Vishal Garg’s barbarically cold-blooded 3-minute Zoom firing. Better.com made no promises about being a family, it was always firstly a business. It’s much easier to stomach being laid off from a business enterprise, much harder if you believed it was your family. Better.com had also just received a $750M cash infusion from Softbank, but again it’s just business. Even his crisis communications apology was strictly business, where he said he “blundered the execution” as if the layoffs were some kind of chess move in a game.
The thing is, if you choose to attach higher-level “feelings,” you must also be prepared to face higher-level consequences. If you chooset to invoke family, poor performance or a downturn are no longer justifiable realities. Layoffs cease to be business decisions, they become betrayals. Here, the famous line from The Godfather is reversed. If you implicate family: it’s not business, it’s personal.
Can you really call it family if it is contingent on favorable market conditions, strong cash flow, high margins, high liquidity, manageable debt ratios, and the optimistic faith of a bipolar Wall Street? Do family members abandon people when they’re of no use to them anymore? Do family members have performance reviews at the end of the year? To truly honor even the most liberal idea of family is, in reality, a suicidal business strategy.
A Self-Corrective Issue
In his book, Barber warns:
“Putting faux values at the core of identity exacts a price, however. Over time, parasitism drains its objects of their own authenticity and meaning, and leaves the new identities insubstantial and unrewarding.”
Since their layoffs in 2020, it seems (at least outwardly) that they do not use the idea of “family” any longer. Those who bought into the “family” idea are surely disillusioned after being ejected from the company for what they likely believe to be an unfair reason (every layoff feels like an injustice to those affected, no matter the circumstance).
Barber argues that while selling family and motherhood may work in the short term, people are bound to get fed up:
“In the end, consumers will become cynics and disdain both the products attached to Mom and the sweet ideals of motherhood.”
The trend of attaching higher-level meanings to work and reverting back to conventional ideals is likely to move in cycles. From cold corporate to warm anti-corporate and finally to an illusory “balance” that actually just resembles cold corporate. The silver lining is that owing to the short revolutions of the business cycle, this issue is self-correcting. Due to the regular busts of the market, it is unsustainable for any company to promote higher-level ideals for long.
If we look at this through the Hegelian dialectic:
My extremely unsubstantiated theory is that companies will trend toward the cultural model that Netflix, Uber, and Amazon have now. That is, they’ve grown so large they’ve become traditional companies disguised as “unconventional tech companies”. They resemble many of the features of traditional companies but with a “hip” spin on it.
They are corporate in structure and professional in all the traditional ways but you can wear shorts. There is unlimited PTO but you don’t end up using it. They are laser-focused on delivering value to shareholders, but they conceal it with empty PR fluff like a fancy mission statement about serving a higher purpose, and DEI & ESG initiatives.
Give Airbnb Credit
Netflix had it right in outright denying the idea that the company was a family. They thought clearly and articulated the reality with honesty. It is true that companies are closer to professional sports teams than families.
I am not saying that the ideals of belongingness, community, and mutual support are impossible to cultivate in a company or that they aren’t values to strive for. If I had the luxury of choosing, I would pick Airbnb over Netflix any day. I admire and respect the “earnest idealism” Airbnb strove for, but, for a time, I believe it was taken too far.
Young professionals and entrepreneurs love to barb at the barrier that separates personal and professional life. They see it as cold and unnecessary. But this ordeal proves to us its value and why it existed in the first place. There’s a difference between striving toward ideals that may be found in a family, but purposely calling a company a family is unprofessional. Doing so is not a gracious display of love, it not zagging when everyone else zigs—it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a company is.
This criticism is hardly new. Nearly every news outlet has an article written with a similar opinion. We should give Airbnb a lot of credit for giving their employees very generous severance packages, even dedicating a number of their recruiters to helping The Redundant find new jobs. They went and continue to go above and beyond for their employees, so it may actually be unfair to single out Airbnb here. I am sure there are other companies who claim family and fall much shorter. Airbnb got as close as any could get.
I do not believe Chesky (or even Cheerios) had the conniving idea of purposefully exploiting family values to create a more efficient workplace (deception at that scale is reserved for oil companies). It is obvious that it was done out of a genuinely idealistic belief that it could work. And I genuinely hope a variation of it does really work in the future. But for now, Netflix had it right: companies are simply not built to practice unconditional love. The idea of family is sacred and for now, it should be kept as far away from business enterprises as possible.
Thank you for reading. My site is www.markchan.co. I answer every comment and message
