“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Does this apply to lending your friends money too?
While providing a helping hand (and money) may seem to be the right thing to do, it may ruin your relationship. Making a personal loan from the people around you is potentially tricky when timely repayments are not made, especially if it is at your workplace.
Here are several reasons that acceding to loan requests to your coworkers may not be ideal:
- You are there to earn a pay check, hence it is ironic to find yourself lending money that you may not be able to get back.
- Traditional lenders consider them to be too high risk to lend money to. If you lend them money, you are taking on this huge risk.
- Lending them once may lead to subsequent loan requests. Your coworkers may not be incentivised to develop good money management.
- Having to repeatedly chase for overdue payments will get awkward and hurt your professional relationship. You are not working as a debt collector after all.
Lending your coworkers money, regardless of the amount, will hurt the team synergy and trust levels at the workplace. This will adversely affect the overall company performance in the long run.
What should you do if these money-lending habits escalated to a workplace culture? How can you stop it from happening?
Contact Wise Hour on how to handle a situation of this nature.