My husband works with a pair of siblings and they also make a great team.

You hire people based on their ability, expertise, professionalism and potential, if a member of your family falls into this category and there is not a better candidate, then hire them.

In years gone by, I met and married my wife in a High Street Bank in the UK.
Not only did it mean I was happier at work, my work was checked more carefully as it was typed.

The real key to making it successful is whether or not the people concerned are collaborators or competitors. We chose to collaborate and were always fiercely loyal to our then employers {shame they could not have been like us} and as such the work done by us was at a better level.

If however we were intensely competitive in nature, recruiting us in an organisation / department could have created unnecessary time wasting or needless undermining of each others efforts.

Summary, depends on personality traits.

I had some intersting experiences on this.

a) In one of the old foundry where I worked (established in 1960′s) since they did not get the manpower during the initial period, the managment recruited people not only form one family but many of them from same familiy and the same village. The effect used to be disastrous during the death of any family member and marriages. Absenteism used to be 75% !!

2) While encouraging employment of children of employees in an engineering company it so hapened that the son with a graduation in engineering was placed as a supervisor of the shop where in his father had to work under him as a assembly workman. Son giving daliy work insructions to father!!! Used to be a joke and it was difficult as the Son was specifically chosen for the position beacuse of his qualification and experience in the assembly!!

The PROs are the reduction in attrition and the same is a double edged sword with instances of both members being compelled to seek out.

Also just by the human tendancy it creates a kind of inconvenience to know if the spouse are workingin the same unit / department.

Kind regards

Dayanand L Guddin

The main ‘con’ I foresee is family rivalry, where one member of a family may have a better or ‘higher’ position than another. This could lead to friction and cause dissent amongst the family members.

Short answer: OK in the middle east, not OK in the west.

Now an attempt at a long answer why its perceived as more of a pro from a middle eastern perspective.

PRO: Loyalty.
CON: Hiring is not merit based and there is no aspiration to move up because positions are reserved for family members.

Big capital family run businesses are plentiful in the middle east, and make the bulk of the private sector, and a lot are reluctant to turn public through IPOs, many that went public performed worst then when they were privately held family run.

Seriously though, it doesn’t work. Family is one thing, business is another. Very few people have the capability to interact with the same person on two different relationship levels, without carrying over bias from one interaction level to the other.

e.g. husband and wife working together would (normally) spend more time arguing about trivial matters – like the husband looking at a female colleague for too long, or the wife smiling too much at a client during lunch. Similarly, siblings sometimes carry over their living room rivalries into work, which can hardly prove to be productive. All this leaves very little time for actual work ( these examples are kinda exaggerated, but you get the picture).

z