People matter an insane amount to me work-wise. I’m someone who can enjoy doing anything, so often what keeps me in a job is not any burning passion or lucrative salary, but a sense of family.
I’ll use one of my internships as an example. This was a few years back, around the time that I got interested in AI, and I was working on the user research of an AR software prototype. It was a small team of about 7 of us who shared an office. Most of the people I worked with were male engineers, about 10 years older than me, who were generally dedicated to doing this for the rest of their lives. In comparison, I was a girl studying psychology and linguistics who came from an arts background. But I made it a point to ask questions and learn from them, and it was also the culture to all go out for lunch together. Over time I found out that, like me, they loved talking about food, as most Singaporeans do.
It didn’t take long for me to feel like one of them. One of my colleagues invited us all over and made steak for us. And when I had to leave at the end of my summer break, I folded a hundred dumplings and we all had a dumpling party. I felt bad about leaving, and I promised I’d stay in touch and work at their lab full-time once I graduated. But once I left, as one might imagine, I quickly got caught up in many other things in life.
Regardless, when I was working there I never felt any sense of grudge or dullness about work when I woke up everyday. I always looked forward to the camaraderie that the office would bring. And I knew it was always because of the people, and because I could find my place in there as their little sister.
Getting to call your team your ‘family’ always seemed like a good thing to me.
Let’s speed forward to now, where I work in a cocktail bar. It’s a different workplace than the office, but I again got this sense of family when I started. In my first week I learned what teamwork truly meant. Everyone was hyper-connected to what everyone else was doing. We all shared this mental model of what would have to get done, and we’d fill in the gaps for each other. (It’s something I hope to detail in another blog post!) A new party arrives? I glance over at my colleague on the floor, and he’s already getting menus for them. Perfect – that frees me up to grab them water and chips. The host is busy on the phone, so my colleague brings the party to their table and settles them in while I bring around the refreshments.
And when someone isn’t pulling their weight, everyone can feel it. You start realising that you’re running around a lot more than normal, or that things aren’t properly arranged here or there.
Outside of the closeness we feel at work, we’d go out drinking together on our off days, sharing supper after work, sometimes staying back past the last train just to complain about bad guests or talk about our goals. When I first joined there was also a group of us girls, a mix of full-timers and part-timers, and we’d bitch during work and share personal stories with each other. This was that feeling of family that I always longed for.
Then one day, a colleague shared with me that he didn’t like the idea of the team being a ‘family’.
Wait, why?
I need to add that this colleague was normally a light-hearted guy who’d joke and tease us throughout prep and on shift, who always made it a point to look out for everyone.
I gave him the counter-points. Team makes us all feel fulfilled at work. We work together better, and guests can feel the good vibes that we all share. How could it be bad?
He agreed with all this. But he remarked that family gives rise to complacency. How are we supposed to be the best bar in Asia when we start being soft on each other? And also, he disliked that ‘family’ was being used by our bosses as a means to brush away issues like salary and work conditions.
A few weeks later I came across a post on LinkedIn, one I might have scrolled away, but the author mentioned a similar distaste to the term ‘family’ at work. “Your family doesn’t fire you if you’re not performing well.”
Towards the end of 2021, when I was about 10 months into the job, a few of my colleagues were leaving to pursue their next step. Most significant were two people: my bar mentor, and one of the closest part-timers I worked with. I was affected by them leaving.
Beyond that, some of us juniors were starting to talk about our gripes with the company. We spent many nights talking about leaving this job for somewhere better. One colleague needed better pay. Another colleague wanted to return to his previous workplace. I was also floating the idea of migrating back to the UK for work, although I didn’t voice it out at the time.
Returning home I remember feeling sad at everything falling apart, and indignant. What was the company going to do without all of us? Shouldn’t they be trying harder to keep us?
I talked it out with my part-timer friend, and she recalled something she’d been told once: your work friends will never be as close as your actual friends.
It sounded so brutal when I heard it, but I couldn’t deny that it was true. I thought about the internship I took and how the dispersed texts I had with my ex-colleagues slowly faded out. When you leave work, you no longer have that context of shared tasks and responsibilities underlying your conversations.
But, she continued, it’s freeing as well. If you want to leave, you don’t have to feel guilty to the people you’re leaving behind. Because it isn’t family. There are no obligations. And everyone at work should, in theory, be comfortable with old faces leaving and new faces joining, because this is just work.
Just work. Not life.
For one or two years after leaving my internship, whenever I thought about that lab and my ex-colleagues, I always felt a pang of guilt that I’d left them, even though I promised I’d stay. And in all the conversations with my colleagues at the bar, I hesitated to talk about leaving, because I felt guilty for ‘leaving them behind’.
Perhaps holding the team with an open hand, treating each other with the respect and distance that you wouldn’t normally accord family, is what can make you treasure the team even more.
Instead of comparing your team to a family, why not focus on romanticising the team for what it is?
joy wang 
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