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"People told us it would never work," she recalls. "We were warned that we'd end up fighting, and the main issue would be over money."
But there was more at stake for them than a successful real-estate partnership. These two women already shared a friendship dating back more than 20 years and family relationships that were so close they seemed almost intertwined.
"We've shared just about every event in life together," Ratcliff says, naming her marriage (Gaither never has married), the birth of her two children, her daughter's marriage, Gaither's father's death, caring for aging parents and her son's phone call in January saying he had received orders to serve in Baghdad.
They extend their family-type relationship to the women who work for them — and to the clients they have helped buy and sell houses. All are invited to a celebration dinner, the Jubilee, held by Gaither and Ratcliff annually.
What these two have accomplished represents the dreams of many 21st-century workers, according to research. Two-thirds of employees say they want to feel as if their co-workers and supervisors are part of their families. The findings of a 2002 study by the staffing firm Randstad North America and market research consultancy Roper ASW are published in an article on USA Today's Web site.
"You don't leave who you are when you walk through the office door," says Ginny Felstehausen, professor of family and consumer sciences education in Texas Tech's College of Human Sciences. "There is a human need for relationships, and they are likely to form with people who you share the most time with."
A lack of typical support systems such as the family and close-knit neighborhoods have many turning to co-workers to fill those relationship voids, she says.
"People are in their workplace as many, if not more, hours than they are with others with whom they have relationships," Felstehausen says.
According to the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce, the average workday has extended to almost nine hours, compared to the five hours per day spent with family. Research into work and family issues is relatively untouched, according to the 1997 study, but is quickly becoming a hot topic. Felstehausen is in the process of developing a survey for Tech faculty that will include such questions as how people deal with work and family issues and what type of spillover is seen between work and home.
"I think one has as great a bearing on the other," she says.
Felstehausen says she shares a professional as well as personal relationship with many of her co-workers. Together they share everything from teaching objectives to a personal seat license for Red Raider basketball games at the United Spirit Arena.
Those with whom she works, Felstehausen says, provided the emotional support for her after the sudden death of her second husband 10 years ago.
"It was that community of friends, those colleagues, that brought me through and helped me rebuild my life," she says. "In them I found people willing to listen when I needed to talk."
Having a family at work was vital, Felstehausen says, because her biological family — a daughter and a son — as well has her stepchildren all lived several states away.
More recently, she says, she has developed a different relationship with the three women she works with at Tech's Teaching, Learning and Technology Center. Felstehausen holds a dual appointment there as a faculty fellow along with her position in the College of Human Sciences.
During the past year, Felstehausen says, they've celebrated the births of two children and her second granddaughter, who was born in December in Tokyo.
A familial culture in the workplace benefits the business as well. According to a study by the Families and Work Institute, the supportiveness of the workplace is one of the most powerful predictors of productivity, affecting issues such as job satisfaction, commitment to employers and retention.
Researchers also say the emphasis that employees today put on family extends into the workplace, causing workers to put greater emphasis on joining companies with supportive and collegial cultures.
But forming relationships in the workplace can have its pitfalls.
"Anytime you enter into a relationship, you make yourself vulnerable even though they are most often based on a strong sense of respect and ethics," Felstehausen says. "There are situations, however, where someone doesn't adhere to the understood ideals and you get office gossip, which can ruin not only that relationship, but potentially someone's career." | |||||||
