{"id":1015,"date":"2026-08-19T17:25:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T16:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/?p=1015"},"modified":"2026-08-19T17:32:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T16:32:00","slug":"your-workplace-is-not-your-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/2026\/08\/19\/your-workplace-is-not-your-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Workplace is not Your Family"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt, a fintech company, hit the headlines earlier this year when he sacked his entire HR department, claiming that they’d been “creating problems that didn’t exist.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It didn’t take long for HR execs the world over to round on him. Their responses were varied, but tended to cluster around the argument that HR wasn’t creating problems but documenting them. In other words, the problems that seemed to vanish had simply ceased to be addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HR inhabits an especially denigrated position in popular culture. On the one hand, they are often seen as the lackeys of management, who pose as the friends of the workers in order to shut down challenges to authority. This is how they are denigrated from the left. From the right, they are a woke vanguard, wasting workplace time on endless initiatives involving DEI, pronouns and cultural sensitivities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So HR is an easy target, with few allies, and Breslow’s drastic initiative therefore was widely acclaimed, and not only on the right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But obviously the criticism he has also received has irked him somewhat, to the point that he agreed to an interview with the Daily Telegraph<\/em><\/a> <\/em>to expound on his actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In it, he makes a different interesting point, somewhat at odds with contemporary corporate culture (and indeed the culture of other employers which may not be fully corporate but which nonetheless emulate many aspects of corporate behaviour, such as educational institutions, charities or indeed state and semi-state bodies.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Addressing his workers somewhat metaphorically via the Telegraph’s pages, he said: “I\u2019m not a camp counsellor. I\u2019m not your social circle leader. I\u2019m your chief executive. I\u2019m your boss. We need to make the business successful. And that\u2019s all I want to hear about.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short and to summarise: “It\u2019s good to get a little personal and understand the human side of one another, but not too much. This is not your family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And nor is it. I’m not sure when the insidious corporate rhetoric of the ‘workplace family’, ‘work wives’ and so on first began to infiltrate contemporary culture, but it is long since established by now. It is in fact commonplace to hear cheery CEOs boast of their ‘family culture’ or how their operation ‘is one big family.’ It’s the kind of thing one hears in job interviews incessantly. Indeed, it sometimes even appears in the copy for the ad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be interesting if someone were to research this emergence alongside the parallel explosion in familial estrangement, I think. I believe they may well be connected. The tragic exponential rise in familial estrangement is usually attributed to the ongoing encroachment of therapy and therapeutic jargon and methods into popular culture. And I don’t doubt that as a point of origin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, to gain the kind of reach that the phenomenon has now attained, whereby huge numbers of families in the West now experience some form of parental, child or other familial alienation, therapy alone cannot be responsible. There simply aren’t enough people able to afford ongoing therapy to account for the scale of the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if a workplace is also a family, then a family is something that you can get sacked from. If a close work colleague is a ‘work wife’ or ‘work husband’, then divorce is nothing more than someone choosing to move on to a better opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This pernicious attempt by corporate owners to rebrand their impersonal, remote, multi-sited behemoths as some kind of neo-tribe functions differently to the Japanese zaibatsus of old, which did actually attempt to foster some loyalty by emulating familial activities. But the office Christmas party (often held in January for cost reasons) or summer picnic or ‘team bonding exercise’ is today a cheap and cheapened mimicry of actual family celebrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if their attempt to muddy the lines between corporate collegiality and family bonds has been in any way successful, it has not worked in the direction they desired. Gen Z do not view companies as families, and they as younger workers are the ones most likely to reaffiliate their loyalties, as they generally have not started families of their own yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, I’d argue that the company =<\/code> family formula is working balefully in the other direction. If a job in a company is inherently precarious, then perhaps so is being part of a family. If walking away from a job for a better opportunity is legitimate, then so is divorce. If some stresses or disagreements are enough reason to quit a job, perhaps it’s also enough reason to quit on your parents, or your sibling or your child too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Corporatism sought to rebrand itself positively in order to emotionally blackmail workers into ever more labour in return for the same or less remuneration. Instead, what they have achieved is the turbo-charging of societal alienation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever you may think of Breslow, at least he recognised the lie. Your workplace is NOT your family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt, a fintech company, hit the headlines earlier this year when he sacked his entire HR department, claiming that they’d been “creating problems that didn’t exist.” It didn’t take long for HR execs the world over to round on him. Their responses were varied, but tended to cluster around the … <\/p>\n

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