Employees in offices or Workers in Factories are an important resource for any organization to move forward in their visions and missions of business needs. As the people grow so does the organization as well as many innovative and productive employees/workers who possess visionary leadership occupy important leadership positions and reach the top at some point in their careers. This is normally the perception of reality which is normally not the case in most organizations. The practice of choosing and promoting people like friends, relatives or paramours which is normally termed as NEPOTISM OR FAVORITISM is something which happens across the country in most of the companies.
Favoritism- As the word implies means favoring someone. In a workplace environment it would mean to favor someone outside of their job performance. For instance, Managers offering highly sensitive and high value projects to team members who are less deserving and less productive or even offering promotions to someone less experienced and has spent considerably less time in the company over others. The root cause of all favoritism is when a Manager and employee have developed a bonding beyond the workplace. It could be a situation where the two would have worked as colleagues in the past or have been friends since long over common interests like sports, movies and so on.
Whatever it is, Nepotism is a dangerous culture which if left unattended, will slowly stunt the organization in the long run. Employees often have been victims of lack of fairness in terms of promotions, incentives and even increments. Motivation levels reduce to such an extent that employees start under performing their responsibilities & become less productive which is detrimental to any organization. In many instances, employees start looking for new employment where their talents are recognized. An employee who is already lacking in confidence would further start feeling worse when someone else from his own camaraderie is favored instead of him/her. Many times, to deal with this kind of nepotism and to get noticed, people tend to be somebody else (which in reality they are not) causing long term harm to themselves and to the organization as well.
Nepotism normally leads to a bad mediocre work culture. Most of the time employees who are promoted and rewarded positions due to their relationship with the top management, lack the core competencies and leadership skills which are needed for those roles. This most of the time leads to a rotting of leadership skills at the top level of the organization and demoralizes the deserving candidates.
Favoritism and nepotism can never positively influence the office environment, they are like a time bomb and when it comes to zero time, not only the office environment suffers, but the foundations of the organization’s culture may collapse. Favoritism and nepotism ruins everything which has been created and developed in the organization – trust, loyalty and understanding.
Nonetheless, in order to ensure that employees do not become suspicious of family promotions or quicker progressions of certain peers, business owners must step in to ensure action is taken from the top to nullify the nepotism culture.
There must be a clear and a transparent recruitment process in place. An Objective based interview and impartial decision making on choosing the right candidate without getting influence from the person who may have referred. At any point in time, there must be a clear policy on conflict of interest. Seldom is it seen that staff who have worked as colleagues in the same team get into a positive relationship like marriage and this creates an atmosphere of mistrust among other colleagues. In such cases, a clear policy must be established of no relatives working in the same department from the beginning and clearly explained to the staff on abiding by it.
It’s also important to train and educate people on being accountable for their performance and give feedback to team members on their roles and responsibilities by establishing mutually agreed KPI’s (Key performance Indicators) & goals. This way there is a clear voice established across the organization that performance would be the sole criteria for recognition and promotions.
Many times, it's seen that some of these policies, rules and regulations are only seen on paper and implementation in practicality takes a back step. There must be action on the ground in the sense that the organization must be very clear and show commitment in ensuring to adhere to the laid-out values and policies. Creating this culture and managing the dangers of any perception of unfairness would be the key to avoid nepotism at the workplace.
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