The reader writes:
I am the COO of our practice. One of our employees has a daughter and I am her manager. She has her 7 month old baby and works part time from home for a management job in our public company.
Recently she brought her kid to work, ran to get her things and sent her email. In that short time, her colleague took a picture of her daughter playing on the floor without our knowledge and sent it to the human resources manager of the company. She was afraid to say anything for fear of reprisal. First, that's not entirely true. She works from home and not from the office. Second, she has never experienced retaliation for anyone here. The human resources manager talked without telling who sent the photo.
I have two concerns. First, why would this employee be given permission to take pictures of other employees' children and share them with anyone? Any recommendations here? Second, my level of trust in all of our employees has gone down because I have to suspect all five people in that particular office are doing such little things without knowing who did it. Where do I get the right to access this information?
Well, first of all, you don't have to control your daughter. You must not control your daughter!
I have to repeat this a second time because this is a huge conflict of interest. At the very least, this will give other employees the impression of favoritism and ill-treatment. People tell you that you can fairly and objectively evaluate her and her work and everything from her appointments to her firing if her promotions, recalls, layoffs are needed, to whoever gets on her list. I don't believe you can treat her fairly. Or who do you trust if she has any complaints about her? And honestly, at least some of this is very likely true. There`s a reason that most companies don`t allow people to manage close relatives.
You can see it playing out in this situation, where you can`t take a stance on the situation without it sounding like you`re acting as an employee`s mom, rather than as her manager.
If you weren`t her mom, it might be easier to look at the situation this way: An employee says another employee has been bringing her baby to work in the office and she`s afraid of retribution if she speaks up about it. If you weren`t her mom, you`d probably not instantly assume that the complaint was false; you`d consider that it was possible that it was true and that you just didn`t know the full story. You wouldn`t jump to conclusions but would gather more information, and you`d also be concerned about why one of your employees was fearful of retribution, and you`d take that as a flag that something was going on that needed to be fixed. Is it possible that the complaining employee is behaving maliciously and is simply trying to cause trouble for their co-workers? yes it is possible But let's be honest, while there are times when people make unsubstantiated complaints out of malice, in most cases it's because the complaints are genuine. Especially if someone fears retaliation! (And in this case, I can understand where the fear comes from: She complains about the daughter of the man who runs the office.)
So: Can your daughter pick up her child when you don't realize it? It only happened once or twice, could this employee mistakenly think it would happen regularly? Could have just been the one time you know about but she`s seen your daughter get away with other stuff and assumed this would be happening more in the future? I don`t know what`s going on, but it sounds like at a minimum you need to talk with your daughter (as her manager, not as her mom) about whether she`s brought the baby in at other times; seek out some information from other employees too, since they may be aware of things that you`re not; and do some soul searching about whether employees might feel you treat your daughter differently than the rest of them.
Don`t get sidetracked by focusing on whether the person who complained was in the right to take a picture of the baby and send it to HR. That`s not the big issue here, and if you focus on that, you`re going to look like your relationship with your daughter is clouding your judgment.
You also can`t dismiss the person`s fear of retribution by just flatly stating “no one here has ever experienced retribution.” If you`re going to manage a family member (and you shouldn`t!), you need to be very aware that people will fear that and that you need to actively work to counteract it. And trying to track down the person who made this complaint is obviously not going to help.
In fact, don't even try to find out who complained. it's not important. (No, the company doesn't have to share this with you, and again, emphasizing it will make you look bad.)
The important thing is that one of your employees made a legitimate complaint if it was true and you cannot assume that you knew it was false without an investigation. Treat your daughter as if she doesn't work there.