My daughter wanted to earn some money by working at my company. I turned it into a life lesson for her: Work is teaching kids responsibility.

If you’re a tech entrepreneur in today’s hybrid work, your kids see their dad working at home quite regularly. And of course, kids copy what they see from their parents.

Some time ago, my 11-year-old daughter asked me if she could boost her pocket money by working in my company, Yonder. She loves keeping lists and organizing things, so I said yes.

Fast-forward a few weeks, and she scans all our mail and enters all the supplier invoices into our accounting system.

Here are some of the steps we took to make this a success.

1. Give your kids access to the tools your team uses

The first thing my daughter said when we started setting up the work was that she needed an email address and access to OneDrive. Of course, how else could you process incoming supplier invoices? Same with the access to the accounting system. I reminded her to treat the figures she’d see confidentially — I wouldn’t want her classmates to know the salaries at Yonder.

2. Train them properly

So we got started. Questions back and forth, which is normal for a new employee.

To make life easier for both of us, we set up an Asana board where I described all her tasks in detail. Using Asana’s recurrent task feature, tasks are automatically recreated for the next week when they are completed.

Setting up that Asana board reminded me a lot of planning and grooming a sprint with my dev team: If tickets are unclear, they need to be refined until everybody has the same understanding of what needs to be done — no matter if you use Asana or JIRA. Getting to shared understanding is part of the training.

3. Give them responsibility

Since initial training is completed, my daughter completes her work mostly without help. If questions arise, she texts me, but hey, that’s how an effective team collaborates.

Not a single time did I need to remind her to process the invoices, she does it on her own initiative. Why? Because I told her that it’s her responsibility to make sure all our supplier invoices are paid on time. And that it isn’t good for a company’s reputation if supplier invoices are getting overdue.

Give your kids responsibility as soon as possible. It’s the only way for them to learn how to be responsible — to get responsibility and to feel that responsibility.

4. Pay them fairly

I explained to my daughter that in a normal company, salaries get paid out at the end of the month and not every week. That was a new thing for her.

I also told her that I wouldn’t pay her by the hour, as it would incentivize treading her feet. At the same time, I told her that I wanted to pay her fairly: If she lived up to her responsibilities, I would double the monthly pocket money — irrespective of the time she put in to meet her responsibilities.

Bonus: The business case

Kids learn from their parents, that’s not a secret. No matter if they copy Dad the entrepreneur or Dad the active reserve officer, it’s hard to deny that my kids are really mine (and I’m proud of that, just to be clear).

A few weeks after my daughter started working for Yonder, one evening she asked me if there was more work for her to earn more. She said: “Dad, you know I don’t want to go to daycare anymore after school. So I could work more for you on Mondays afternoons — in this way, I would earn more, and you’d have to pay less for daycare. That’s a win-win.”

This girl is ready for life.