The skinny on office romances

SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
A hot date made across the company copy machine sounds innocent enough, but although workplace twosomes often lead to marriage, the bloom of romance can make for thorny on-the-job situations.
There may be complaints of favoritism, decreased productivity and morale, or even allegations of stalking and retaliation when things do not work out.
"These are the potential ramifications that can accompany" a workplace romance, and employers have leeway to establish policies to address them, said Frank Scanlon, a spokesman for the Virginia-based Society of Human Resource Management.
"How [employees] approach that relationship depends on what the employer thinks," said Tony Lee, editor in chief and general manager of CareerJournal.com in New Jersey. "If you're lucky, your company has a written policy, and that will make it real clear: no dating between boss and subordinate, no dating between you and the vendor, no dating between two people in the same division."
A joint survey by the SHRM and CareerJournal.com showed that 74 percent of its 1,221 respondents did not have policies in place even though most said workplace romances are dangerous because they can lead to conflict in the organization.
Potential complications
Sexual harassment is the main reason organizations see office romance as something to avoid, but other concerns include lower productivity and morale by those in the relationship and the stigma of unprofessionalism, the survey showed.
"You just try to manage it and prepare for those kind of issues the best you can" by deciding how to deal with the situation and establishing across-the-board enforcement, Scanlon said. Flatly forbidding workplace romance can put the organization in a difficult position because it then has to enforce the policy to the letter, from the chief executive on down, or face claims of inequitable treatment, he said.
Drawing the lines
Some employers draw the line by trying to regulate supervisor-subordinate relationships, said David Anderson, an employment attorney for Parsons Behle & amp; Latimer in Salt Lake City.
The most aggressive approach is to forbid office romance, but that can force relationships to go "underground" to avoid detection, he said.
A second option is to require couples to inform employers of their relationship.
Chevron-Texaco has such a policy "so management can take the proper actions to protect the interests of the company and its employees," said Alison Looney-Swillinger, human-resource manager for Chevron's Salt Lake City office.
Chevron does not want to interfere in an employee's personal life, but problems may arise if one member of the couple "could supervise or influence the other party's compensation, job assignment, promotional opportunities, job placement, career development," she said.
A third approach is to require the couple to sign a document stating that the relationship is consensual and stipulating that the subordinate may report any unwelcome conduct by the supervisor to human resources.
Check out policies
Lee advises workers to find out their company's policy before becoming too romantically involved.
Most businesses with 1,000 or fewer people do not have policies about workplace dating, Lee said, and an organization's size can be a factor in enforcement.
In a supervisor-subordinate relationship, there may be fewer options to move people around in a staff of 15 or 20 where everyone works closely together.
However, a relationship between co-workers poses less danger from an employer's standpoint.
An employee who dates a competitor or customer poses more of an ethical issue, Anderson said, such as the appearance of favoritism to a vendor.
"The main thing employers should recognize is that they're in the driver's seat," Anderson said, and any policy "is driven not just by the law or legal risks they're trying to manage but also the kind of workplace they want to have."