AIBU to think managing family members in the Civil Service is inappropriate?

I agree it seems dodgy. Whilst I know of plenty of people whose children or parents work for the same company, they never manage each other and are often in different departments.

Being tipped off about a vacancy or giving information to help in an interview is completely different.

I'm a public servant in Ireland, this wouldn't happen. I work for an agency with lots of married couples. If one gets promoted into a position where somebody would end up managing a spouse, people are moved or teams are restructured so there's no conflict. Honestly, this has also been the case whenever I've discussed it with UK colleagues, so I'm surprised it's been allowed to happen in the OP's case.

It sounds unlikely as civil service recruitment is usually tough and I'm sure you have to declare when you apply if you have family members working there. Also it should be declared if on a interview panel. However I know people in my department who can't do the job they were recruited for.

You can discriminate if it’s justified. In this case it clearly is. No organisation I have worked in would have allowed somebody to directly or indirectly manage a family member, or somebody they were in a romantic relationship with, and if you were to do so they would all have fired you when they found out. And I saw that happen.

It’s the way of the world. Everyone knows someone who works somewhere they got in because family or friends work there, from working in the local shop to famous parents getting their child a job.

Never try to make sense of what goes on in the public sector. That way madness lies…

I'm not a civil servant but this wouldn't be allowed at my work. Saying that we have lots of teams doing similar things so it would be easy to avoid, it may not be in other places.

I can’t actually believe this is allowed

When I was a civil servant (I am retired), this wouldn’t have been allowed.

I can think of at least two occasions when managers had relationships with team members. On both occasions the team member was moved sideways into a different role.

In my civil service job this would be a breach of ethics. We have a mandatory training course about this sort of thing. He should not be managing anyone he has any form of relationship with.

I’m surprised he is allowed to directly line manage them. Someone I know in the civil service worked with their sister but was not allowed to directly manage them, even though they would usually have managed the person in that role.

Do you have some kind of anonymous whistleblowing process to raise concerns? Assuming you don’t want to raise them publicly…

The thing is that this can happen with anyone, whether friends or family. Haven't we all been somewhere the boss gets matey with someone, and treats them favourably, and in many cases, it's not easy to complain. Pretty much everyone I know has had this, and it's more usually friends than family.

I think that's a good question. She might need to restructure her team to give somebody else management responsibility over her husband. She could still be promoted and lead the team.

If I worked in the same team even if it was a bigger team I'd not be happy about this at all. There'd need to be several layers of distance between them before I could be comfortable.

I hope there's safeguards in place already eg someone else is doing their probation and performance reviews.

I am surprised this is allowed as it wouldn’t be best practise and could cause issues for all concerned. It wouldn’t be permitted where I work. However,
I wouldn’t automatically assume they aren’t professional or doing their jobs well and I’d avoid speculation or gossip about it at work. Any legitimate concerns that have a direct impact on you/your work should be raised with your line manager.

So he manages a team of five, three of whom are family members? He swung it so that all the interview panel were his bezzie mates, and despite three fifths of his team being crap, his own line manager is happy with the standard of work being produced by his team? Is that basically right?

An amazing bunch of coincidences!

How do they manage that on discrimination grounds?

E.g where I work a woman was promoted into a role where she manages her husband. She was the best candidate, should she have not been promoted? Wouldn't she have grounds to claim discrimination?

This.

I don't work in public sector but at my place we don't allow family members to manage each other. It rarely works and judgement gets compromised. We don't however require anybody to disclose a relationship in the workplace so sometimes hard to identify.

It all comes down to whether he could defend his actions if challenged. Was the recruitment process correctly followed? If the employees are not delivering to expectations, is he following the correct procedure.

We had two family members joining our team. I was involved in the shortlisting and interview process of one. We received very few responses (not the most exciting job), and only three were even worth considering for interview. One didn't show up, the other one had clearly done no preparation at all. The family member acted professionally and showed research and initiatives. Yes, they probably got help to prepare but there were instances they had to think in their feet and they managed well. Both were much more wary of working for their family member than the team was of them joining. We now don't think about it at all. They've integrated brilliantly.

It really depends on the situation.

Dodgy as fuck

Dont you just love nepotism ?

There's no reason not where everyone is professional and there are appropriate controls in place. E.g I wouldn't expect him to be solely responsible for their appointment, and I'd expect them to be policies in place to prevent that.

If you think polices are being incorrectly applied, that's what the whistle blowing policy is for.