When you are working in the HR department of a company, you often get to compromise with the requests of the management or employees. One of such weird requests can be to hire a close friend or family member of the employees or management. So, what can you do in such a situation, what will happen if you hire a family member in a company? Let's find out

The Positive Aspects of Hiring a Family Member

When you choose to hire a family member, you can expect the following positive things.

Better Employee Management

When someone you know and understand is hired, you will not have to spend much time in deciphering what motivates that person, how will he or she react to incentives, what discipline methods work best with them etc. This knowledge would save you time in understanding the behavior of that person and you will be able to manage the person without much difficulty.

Motivation Factor

Let's assume that you have hired the brother of your business development manager and put them on the same team. This can benefit you a lot. As they are brothers, they will work better and won't take healthy competition as something vicious. The performance of your existing employee may get better thanks to the motivation to perform better than his brother which would mean better productivity and great results for the organization.

Great Understanding

When the family member of any employee or the management is hired, it would lead to stronger teams in most cases. People often gel well with their family members and it can help them to know what their teammate is thinking in a better manner. The chemistry between two relatives can help the company to reap long term rewards especially if they are close-knitted because they would not want to lose their job ever.

The Negative Aspects of Hiring a Family Member

If you are an MBA or have done a certification course in HR, you already know that mixing professional and personal life is not a smart move at times. Here are the bad consequences of hiring a family member in a company.

Special Attention

When you hire a close relative of the people working at stronger positions or the management of the company, the person may expect some special privileges like coming late at the office, working from home without permission, etc. These instances can make the other employees feel devalued and less cared for. So, you must ensure that no special privileges are given to anyone.

Lack of Respect

In cases where the friends or family are hired for the same team, they may not show any respect to the other person. For instance if you have hired a cousin of the Accounts Manager to work under his/her supervision, the fresh hire may not take the boss seriously and make fun of the orders given by the boss. Lack of respect may make your existing employee frustrated and impact his or her performance or it may even ruin the company culture.

Personal Relationships

The biggest side effect of hiring a relative or a friend is that the personal and professional life of two people can mix in which may sour their personal and professional relationships. It may happen that the brothers who used to perform well together may take the competition too seriously and damage the team spirit or their own performance.

Conclusion

The best way to deal with the request of hiring a friend or relative is to make sure that you don't get biased as an HR. You need to hire only that candidate who has the right skills and aptitude for the job and can commit to long term relationship with the company.

To know more about the current HR topics, you can keep following our threads here or enroll in the certification course in HR we provide at the best possible costs. If you want to share your experience about hiring a family member, be sure to comment on this thread and let everyone learn from your experience.

From India, Mumbai
Dear Mr Arvind Gaba,
Hiring family members has more cons than pros. Because of the family members, companies have turned into rehabilitation centres of inept and inefficient persons. The MD or Director just listens to the clique. It fosters nepotism.
Many American companies have become corporations because they relied on merit rather than their family members. In contrast, in India, companies are not business organisation as such but these are business fiefdoms! Whether it is political class or business organisation, finally dynasty rules the roost!
Thanks,

From India, Bangalore
In a very small company where the size is less than 10 employees hiring family members may definitely be a problem because you may not be able to get the job done with 100% commitment. For example we did a study of a proprietor driven printing press 2 years ago. It was quite big with over 20 employees. the proprietor appointed his wife's brother to manage the technical staff and he did not have any experience in that business. Since he was the brother-in-law of the proprietor he was just bossing around. Within a year this company lost 40% of their experienced and skilled work force due to the wrong intervention.
Recently we heard is that this company is on the verge of closing. So here is a case where relatives may not work well if hired

From India, Chennai
There are a lot of aspects of human resource management that can be hardly taught during an MBA session or any human resources training courses. One such thing is workplace bullying. In simple words workplace bullying can be anything from verbal abuse, interruptions and damage that forces a person to stop the work or feel threatened or humiliated. Many HR professionals don't know what workplace bullying is and how can they stop it. If you wish to know both these, you need to keep reading on.
  1. Create Strong Policies

    Many countries including India have no defined laws against workplace bullying so you must make sure that your company has a strict policy against it. It would be good to let the new and old employees know of the policies every now and then. It will ensure that people in your organization are not victimized and those who have been get the courage to speak up. You need to modify and update these policies from time to time too and take strict action against the employees who take them lightly.
  2. Help Employees in Reporting

    Many employees may feel reluctant to share an incident of workplace bullying simply because they fear the bullying person or are embarrassed by the incident. You as an HR must take steps to ensure that the employees have safe communication channels to you so that every incident is reported. If the person who is complaining wishes to not disclose his or her name, you must be able to honor his or her wishes. It would also be smart to take an immediate action against the offender to ensure that people trust the HR for resolving the workplace bullying issue.
  3. Train Employees

    It would also be a great idea to train the employees on the basics of workplace bullying so that they can recognize the pattern and report it as soon as it happens. It would also help if you keep reminding the employees with regard to the consequences of bullying by giving previous examples like how a bully was fired by your company earlier. It will help the people considering being a bully to rethink on the matter and those who are oppressed would learn to speak up against it.
  4. Constantly Support the Victims

    Being bullied is not a pleasant experience. It is an experience that can leave emotional scars on the minds of the people. If any of your employees have been a victim of it then you as an HR must make sure that he or she gets constant support. Efforts must be made to ensure that the entire incident is removed from the mind of the victim by filling the victims' mind with positive new memories such as office parties, informal get together, etc. A victim must always be trained on how to make friends at workplace again because one bullying incident often makes a person hesitant to make friends in the company.

Has someone bullied you at workplace too? What actions did you take? Do you think workplace bullying must be included in MBA or human resources training courses? Feel free to share your thoughts by commenting on this discussion.

From India, Mumbai
Hare Krishna!
We cannot have absolute rules as to whether a relative be recruited in an Organization or not. If a relative is well qualified & it is made clear by HR that professionalism is expected to be followed, then why not? And if a relative is not qualified at all then it is definitely not advisable to recruit such a person..atleast not in a Supervisory or Managerial role where technical expertise is required.
Janaka Dasa
Group Deputy Manager - HR
Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir Group
Vrindavan

From India, undefined
Hi
Hiring family members is not a good idea unless it's family business.
Pre-set ideas about family members gives lot of benefits to the member than the company.
According to me Personal and professional life should be kept separate.

From India, Mumbai
These days many companies are looking for HR professionals who have undergone advanced payroll training. Students and professional just do this course at times without realizing the actual importance of it. If you are also about to do this course then you might want to know why companies expect you to complete this course and how you can be an asset for the company after completing it in a successful manner.
  1. A Multitasker: This is the key benefit attained by the companies. When their HR person can handle the task of payroll management, they don't need to hire a payroll executive for that role and it saves the company tons of money and stress. Due to the recent recession, every company is looking forward to hiring multitaskers. If you can be one, your job would be more secure and the growth path would be more successful too.
  2. Statutory Compliance: No company wants to be trapped by legal and tax authorities' related matters. They obviously seek to hire an HR who can ensure compliance with all the laws and ensure that all the taxes are filed on time. A person trained in payroll management would ensure it smoothly. The company would never have to reply to a legal notice or taxation related glitches if you do your job right.
  3. Ease of Checking: Most bosses are still very skeptical about the work done by their staff members. When you prepare payroll, chances are, your boss or your management would want to check it to be sure that you are not making a mistake. If you are trained in payroll, you would hardly ever make any mistake which will make the task of checking your work easy on the boss. What more can a manager or company owner want more than an employee whose work is rarely wrong?
  4. Better Record Management: When a person is trained in payroll management, he or she usually makes use of software that keeps the record of every salary paid to each employee. Technology makes record management easier and the company excels at human resource management. Records also help when a person leaves the company or an employee questions the salary being given to him or her.
  5. On-Time Payroll: If you are an expert, you would always ensure that the salaries and bonuses of the employees are released on time. It is a fact that companies that pay their employee fairly and on time generally have more loyal employees as opposed to the companies who don't pay the employees in a timely fashion. When you are managing the salaries of the employees deftly and ensuring better employee loyalty, the company would treasure you and would find it hard to replace you.

So, these are a few benefits of being an HR person with advanced payroll training. If you think that the benefits are worth the efforts and money investment you are putting in, you should go for it. If you have completed this training and wish to share your entire experience then feel free to share your thoughts with us by commenting on this post.

From India, Mumbai
When profitability, good working environment for hired employees, employee loyalty are important factors for organisational growth, then never to hire candidates recommended by politicians or directly appointing family members. They will try to usurp power, try to throw their weight around, create groups of their own chamchas.... As indicated by my other professional members, there are more disadvantages than advantages. You cannot admonish or reprimand such family members, you cannot sack them for lack of performance..... I know one company, where I am advising them, the maternal uncle is the root-cause of all obstacles... who is in charge of an important, crucial manufacturing vertical !
From India
A good performance management process is certainly the backbone of maintaining ideal human resource relationships in a company. If a company doesn’t have such a process in place, it may fail to identify the top performers which may lead to employee frustration and exit. In contrast, if a company fails to adopt a performance management process, it often ends up promoting incompetent people who may one day lead the company and ruin it completely.

The Old Approach

Unfortunately, most of the companies are still focused on getting a performance appraisal done on a yearly basis and promoting or increasing the compensation of an employee on the basis of the results. This must be categorized as an old approach now because there are better options available. There is no need to judge the current and future performance of an employee on the basis of the target achieved by him of her a few months back. The focus should be on mapping the current progress of the employees and that too regularly so that there remains no gap between the employee performance and the ratings they get on paper. How do companies achieve that? Read on to know

iCount or Checkpoint- The Trend of Performance Management

Many Indian IT companies like IBM, Accenture, Infosys, etc. have created a buzz in the HR industry by adopting a new system called iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System. If you are also curious about what it is exactly and how it works then here’s a simple solution for you.

iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System is a performance management system in which the employees get feedback from their reporting managers at least once a month. This allows the employees to know where they are going wrong and what is good about their work. They also get the opportunity to enhance their performance continually which boosts their learning curve and adds to employee engagement factor.

Apart from getting evaluating every month, the employees also get evaluated once a year on generic criteria’s that impact the organization. Top 5 of such criteria are innovation, business results, personal responsibility to teammates, impact on clients and skills. In these entire criterions, the performance of each employee is rated individually on each criterion rather than as a bunch of it. It means that the employee has to excel at each of the criteria to score a good rating.

This new method not only makes the employee work better by letting the employee know where he or she is going wrong, it also benefits the managers. The managers get the opportunity to evaluate which person of his or her team is not performing well and corrects it which enhances the overall performance of a team. So, it’s a win-win for both, the employee and the manager if they work at it seriously.

Why Organizations Need to Try iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System?

If you are a business owner or an HR Manager who has heard a lot about iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System but is not sure whether your organization should go for it or not there here are a few reasons on why you must try it at least once.

Most employers employ young employees these days that need to be constantly motivated and challenged in their jobs. If they get bored, they will simply leave. The iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System keeps them challenged by highlighting their weaknesses consistently.

Nearly all young employees and Millennials like a pat on the back regularly to keep them going. The iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System ensures that by rating them good on what they are the most skilled at. Most employees don’t care much for a pay raise, even a few good words from the manager once a month keep them juiced.

When the employees are constantly reminded and appreciated for doing good work via iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System, it allows them to develop their potential to a great extent. They truly give their best to the organization which leads the growth story of a company.

Consistent evaluation of skills and job performance via iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System also helps the organization to identify the skills that need to be developed in each employee via learning management solutions. The result, the training & development programs of the company become more focused and result-oriented.

Last but certainly not the least, when the employees’ performance levels are constantly mapped by using iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System, they are trained and kept motivated, their loyalty towards the organization increases. Loyal employees control the attrition rate of the organization, increases employee retention and make the company a preferred employer brand.

Conclusion

All in all, it can be said that the iCount or Checkpoint Appraisal System is a good option. Though it takes more time and effort as compared to a yearly performance appraisal, the results are certainly worth it. Every organization, no matter how small or big must give it a try for at least 6 months and see the astonishing results it can achieve.

From India, Mumbai
Hare Krishna!
@Bhaverekha - If someone is well qualified then wouldn't it be unfair to him that he is being depreived of working in the company simply because his relative is also working there.
So I think a blanket rule cannot be applied here & the choice must be based on qualification.

From India, undefined
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