The Need for Romantic Relationship Policies

A great deal of attention has been paid to office romance lately, but with all of the extra focus and debate, the issue itself has become more convoluted than it needs to be.  Workplace conundrum of the century, this is not.  At least from an organizational perspective, it is not that complicated.  With just a few easy steps, and some basic ground rules, you can simplify a process and streamline an effective practice around handling personal and intimate relationships in your workplace.

1. Design and publish a policy about personal, office romance in your workplace.  It’s important to craft one that makes sense for you, your business and your employees.
2. Communicate clearly, abundantly and regularly about how the policy will be managed and enforced.  Policies are only as important as businesses make them.  So to bury them in a handbook and cross your fingers that you’ll never need them doesn’t help after the fact when you learn that you do actually need them.
3. Support the policy by building infrastructure around it.  However you choose to define dating and relationships in your organization, systems and structures will need to be in place that either ensure these situations are out in the open and easy to talk about or to ensure that they do not occur.  That may require sanctions, rewards or systems to handle different scenarios if they should arise.
4. Enforce your policy and if not, pay the consequences if it backfires.  There’s not much more you can do.

The best romantic relationship policy I ever came across was one that allowed employees to date (or do whatever) as long as their personal involvement was disclosed to the organization in some way, shape or form.  This meant that there was an explicit expectation on both the people in the relationship and anyone who knew about it to make the involvement known to the company.  To support transparency the company created contact channels internally and externally so that employees had someone to go if they felt unsafe using traditional reporting lines.  With that, it was also made crystal clear that non-disclosure on the part of the lovebirds or anyone else “in the know” was grounds for termination.  After all, the point was that there was no reason to hide it or lie because in the company’s mind, there was nothing wrong with finding love at work and pursuing a relationship as a result.  In fact, it was considered natural due to the amount of time that people spend at work.  But this company wasn’t stupid either.  They were well aware of the emotional component that comes with romance as well as the dark side of human nature. So in order to protect the business, they simply separated the two individuals who found themselves interested in one another so as to mitigate any potential negative impact just in case things soured. 

It was totally fair, well thought out and organizationally smart.  It took everyone into consideration and balanced business with humanity.  See? As I said, it’s not that hard.