A reader writes:
Through a bit of misfortune, I had to fall back on working at the company my parents own, in order to pay my bills. It is a challenging job market, to say the least, so I am grateful that I have this safety net I can fall back on. However, it isn’t without its own league of challenges: my coworkers have taken to making complaints about me to my parents, who are the bosses, about issues that quite frankly seem petulant.
In one case, one coworker was noting what times I was clocking in and made a complaint when I clocked in three hours earlier than everybody else to finish paperwork in peace without any interruptions. (Because I am neurodivergent, it is very difficult for me to finish a task if I am constantly being distracted by requests, phone calls, and other distractions that happen during business hours.)
Another time, the same coworker lodged a complaint because she didn’t see my car in the parking lot and assumed I had not clocked out. After that, I parked my car across the street at another lot and caught her walking around outside our parking lot as if she was looking for my car despite me being at work. I can’t help but feel that this seems very targeted and purposeful because I’m the bosses’ adult child.
In another situation, I was given a stack of paperwork that my coworkers had been sitting on for weeks and was then blamed for not finishing the reports by the time they were due. Because they sat on the paperwork so long, some of them were due next day or already overdue.
I’m not new to working and have a bachelor’s with 10 years of work experience in various fields, and I’m not under-qualified in any way for my current job.
My parents don’t want to give the appearance of favoritism or nepotism, so when these people are making these complaints they’re not quite sure how to navigate it either. It is incredibly frustrating to work with people who shift blame and continue to complain about trivial or petty things when they should be minding their own business.
How can my parents and I implement a strategy for dealing with this that isn’t going to drive us all crazy?
It’s good that your parents don’t want to create the appearance (or the actuality) of favoritism, but they also shouldn’t go so far in the other direction that they’re ignoring real issues or allowing you to be mistreated.
It might be useful for you to ask — and for them to think about — how they would handle it if an employee who wasn’t related to them was being targeted in this way. Hopefully they’d shut it down, and that’s what they should do here too.
The next time someone raises a baseless or trivial complaint about you, they should do exactly what they would if you were any other employee. Presumably that means they should say to the complainer, “It’s not your job to track what time other employees clock in and out. If something is interfering with your ability to do your job, please raise it but you should not be monitoring your coworkers’ schedules.” And/or, “Jane has permission to work the schedule she’s working. Please do not continue to monitor colleagues in this way.”
If someone gives you work that they sat on for weeks and then gets upset when it’s not finished on time (or if it was already overdue by the time it came to you!), that’s something you can try addressing yourself first: “It looks like this came to us three weeks ago but wasn’t assigned to me until yesterday, which created a time crunch. Can we develop a better system so that doesn’t happen?” And if it continues to happen, escalate it — either to your manager or to theirs.
Basically, both you and your parents need to handle it exactly the way you would handle if none of you were related.
But bigger picture, they should also try to figure out what’s at the root of people’s resentment. Do they feel you got a job that you don’t deserve? Do you have knowledge gaps that are making their jobs harder? (And if so, are those gaps normal for any new hire but landing differently now because you’re the boss’s kid, or is any of that frustration legitimate?) Do they feel like you’re being held to a different set of rules than they are? (And if so, are you?) Was there already a culture problem in the organization that had people primed to be extra sensitive to any perceived unfairness? Are people frustrated with the organization’s management for other reasons and see you as a symptom of those broader problems?
In a reasonably healthy organization, it would be pretty unusual to respond to the owners’ kid the way you’ve described. People might assume you’re getting special treatment, but usually they’d assume that special treatment would make it a particularly bad idea to treat you as an enemy. The fact that they instead feel licensed to openly hassle you says something else might be going on in the culture there … which your parents should dig into, totally independent of whatever is happening around you.
