In the Family Way
Your employees’ families may be the key to recruiting success
I had lunch with a friend the other day. Wanting to linger a bit longer, I offered to spring for dessert, but he looked at his watch and announced that he’d have to take a rain check. He had a golf date with his father that afternoon and he didn’t want to take a chance on missing their tee time.
He was lucky, I told him. My relationship with my own father had been so tense we could hardly stand being in the same county, let alone the same fairway. My friend expressed surprise. “What was the problem?” he asked. “You seem like a nice enough guy to me.”
I shrugged and referred my friend to Tolstoy. “Happy families are all alike,” the Russian master famously observed in his novel Anna Karenina. “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
I don’t know how many of our managers and business owners are familiar with Tolstoy these days, but I suspect most of them intuitively understand what the novelist was trying to say. Families are endlessly complex. And relationships among family members can be notoriously unpredictable. Hence, many employers are understandably wary of introducing family dynamics into the workplace.
Some employers, however, take the risk in stride and bolster their normal recruiting efforts by actively encouraging employees to refer qualified spouses, children, siblings, and cousins. The benefits, they believe, far outweigh the risks.
“Nepotism is alive and well here,” says Ike Reighard, chief people officer at Atlanta-based HomeBanc Mortgage Corp. “We have a culture where we look for something that we refer to as the HomeBanc DNA, and we have found that we can find that DNA many times by recruiting and hiring among the family members of people who already work here. If one member of a family has the right type of work ethic and honesty and those kinds of things, then there’s a high probability that their brother, sister, husband, or wife is going to share those same types of characteristics.”
Melvin Smith, professor of the practice of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management, agrees and notes that there can be additional advantages, especially when dealing with spouses and other domestic partners.
“In this day and age,” he explains, “you have a number of dual-career couples, and it often becomes difficult to recruit, hire, [and relocate] somebody who is high on your list if they have a spouse who needs to find employment as well. By hiring spouses or couples you can gain an advantage because you don’t have that issue.”
Once they are on the payroll, family members tend to reinforce each other’s sense of belonging. The company becomes, in effect, part of their extended family. “That can engender greater motivation and connection to the organization,” says Smith. “And that can lead to greater commitment to the organization.”
This sense of identification cuts both ways, however. If family members feel that one of their own has been treated unfairly by the employer, the negative effects could easily reverberate throughout the organization. This is why organizations that hire multiple members of the same family find that fairness and explicitly articulated policies are especially important.
“You don’t want to create a cause célèbre within the family by not treating somebody fairly,” says Peter Fornal, president of Human Resource Consultants in East Greenwich, R.I. “All of your treatment of the family members has got to be fair and impartial and based upon fact.”
The issue of fairness becomes especially important when looking at your organization’s chain of command. You might or might not allow members of the same family to work together on the same team or in the same department — it’s usually best decided on a case-by-case basis — but you never want to put one employee in the position of supervising a family member.
“That has to be avoided at all costs,” cautions Smith. “You need to stay out of the reporting chain. Even if the people involved are behaving in a fashion where everything is equitable, there is always the perception that that is not the case. And this can have ramifications for all the other individuals in the organization.”
Like happy families, successful organizations are alike in one sense — the individuals involved all feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. Opening your doors to family members is a great way to measure your company against this crucial benchmark.
“The greatest compliment we ever get,” says HomeBanc’s Reighard, “is when someone says, ‘I want my child to work in this company because of what this company has meant to me.’ I don’t think you can get a better recommendation in the world than that.”
— Dayton Fandray
(Read@Work)
Further Reading
There is, unfortunately, no manual that sets out the ground rules for managing family members in the workplace. But good management practices tend to apply across the board, and one of my favorite guides is The Enthusiastic Employee, by David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind, and Michael Irwin Meltzer (Wharton School Publishing, 2005).
Because so many of the issues — conflicts of interest, perceived favoritism, spillover of personal issues from the home to the office — are similar, the literature on office romances is relevant to any discussion of families in the workplace. One of the best books on the subject is Mari Florence and Ed Fortson’s Sex at Work (Silver Lake, 2001).
Family-owned businesses have likely encountered every possible permutation of the issues that arise when family members work together in the same organization. If you want to learn from their experience, business schools around the country have programs dedicated to family businesses. The UMass Family Business Center (umass.edu/fambiz) and the Loyola Family Business Center (http://sba.luc.edu/centers/fbc) are two good places to start. — D.F.
