I work (~1.5 years) at a small family-run business in the allied health sector (~10 employees). The owner is the head clinician and his wife is the practice manager. Their son (M32) is also a clinician and their daughter used to be a clinician but has since moved into administration.
Being a small business, they have spread their workload across the city to maximize diversity and income, which involves a lot of driving and consulting with specialized doctors. These days can be very long due to covering city-wide distances and stressful dealing with a superior professional who has an extremely busy workload, on top of managing your own workload in a single day. Over the past ~9 months, the son has devolved in his professional capacity with both administration staff at the clinic (involving members of his own family) and the specialized doctors as well.
To name a few incidents he has:
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Left early, multiple times, due to “stress”.
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Had yelling confrontations with administration staff and other professionals.
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Called admin staff on the phone, after hours, to vent about his stresses.
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Admonished admin staff for issues that they had no control over.
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Constantly is late, both in arriving to locations and with appointments; and with delivering reports after appointments.
It has come to the point where his own family block his mobile number after hours so that they don’t have to talk to him.
Before these issues escalated, I had been wanting to leave the business due to other managerial concerns but these further concerns really have me running for the door.
I know that if I or any of the other clinicians were to act as he does, we would be seriously spoken to and given some sort of warning/threat of termination. His current behaviour is not sustainable.
However, because he is their son, he is being mostly enabled and allowed to pick his schedule to (what seems) minimize travelling longer distances and having to work these stressful days with the specialized doctors – because of the confrontations he is having and the ‘stress’ involved.
I have considered talking to the manager/his mum about these rising concerns but fear that I will be easily dismissed and I’m not sure if it’s worth the stress of having this conversation. At the moment, it has minimally affected my job but it looks like there will be further changes made to accommodate his schedule.
Basically, I’m not really looking for advice but aim this as a warning towards working for a small family-run business who refers to their workers as “thought of like a daughter/son” and who have no concept of boundaries.
I am consistently looking for new work but it is difficult due to the allied health profession I am in being rather niche.
Looking for support and well-wishes pls xxx