Communication is key to dealing with office romance

Companies may not like it, but offices are fertile flirting grounds. Office romance can create managerial headaches, cost people jobs and result in messy lawsuits, but ignoring it won't make it go away.

In fact, President Clinton's problems notwithstanding, office romances are flourishing, said Dennis Powers, associate professor of business law at Southern Oregon University and author of The Office Romance: Playing With Fire Without Getting Burned (Amacom, 1999, $22.95.)

Nearly 80 percent of 485 managers surveyed in 1994 by the American Management Association said they either had been aware of or had been involved in an office romance. According to a 1988 Bureau of National Affairs report, about one-third of all relationships start at work, Powers said. The American Management Association survey also found that 49 percent of workplace romances resulted in marriage or long-term relationships. "If you want a fling, go to a bar," he said. Indeed, a survey this year by the Society for Human Resource Management reported that 55 percent of human resource professionals believed marriage was the most likely outcome of office romances at their organizations over the last five years. People are spending more time at work, and less time socializing, which means the likelihood of meeting someone in the office is increasing, Powers said. But carrying on relationships in the workplace is tricky for everyone involved. Although sexual harassment cases draw attention, and sometimes headlines, very few stem from bad workplace breakups, he said. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, failed romances led to 4 percent of sexual harassment claims that ended up in court. There are, however, other pitfalls associated with office love affairs. There may be friction with co-workers who perceive favoritism at work, or fear the office mates are inappropriately sharing information, he said. The people involved in the relationship also risk getting reassigned, or transferred, sometimes derailing their careers. In the American Management Association study, about 25 percent of those who had a work relationship said it adversely affected them. Keeping it secret didn't help. About 62 percent said their co- workers knew despite their best efforts to keep quiet. The best way to handle office romance is to keep it above-board and keep the lines of communication open, Powers said. In the past, more companies had restrictive policies that said, "If you date, you're terminated." Today, only about 5 percent of companies still take that stance. Such no-fraternization policies tend to backfire, he said. "People date anyway," he said. "But because they can't say anything about it, they eventually just find another job and leave." Companies were losing some of their best-trained people that way, he said. "Now they're trying to change because that made no sense." Instead of no-fraternization policies, companies are trying to come up with workable rules that don't interfere in private behavior or dictate morality, but also keep the work environment from being disrupted by relationship matters. The most important position for a company in affairs of the heart is neutrality, he said. But that doesn't mean having no policy at all. Companies should devise a policy that addresses the issue of consensual relationships at work by specifying who employees can contact for confidential advice, and what employees should do in conflict-of-interest situations. Such policies should also set out procedures for resolving romance-related workplace problems. If a couple breaks up and the acrimony is spilling over at work, for example, the company should offer mediation to resolve the dispute before arbitrarily firing or transferring one (or both) of the parties, he said. The easiest relationships -- at least from a corporate standpoint -- are those involving single co-workers, he said. The most problematic, from a management standpoint, are those that involve boss and subordinate. In those cases, it's crucial for the subordinate to be evaluated by someone higher up than the boss, to avoid conflicts of interest.

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