Rules for Office Romance

You know how to delegate. You mentor your staff. You identify workflow inefficiencies and promptly correct them.

But do you know what to do when Jim (or Jane) from down the hall starts dating a member of your team?

Most companies nationwide do not have office-romance policies. In fact, 47 percent of employees polled in the 2007 Office Romance Survey by career publisher Vault Inc. had been in an office romance, despite the potential risks to productivity and morale.

Given the shortage of formal guidelines and the prevalence of office dating, many managers are on their own when it comes to keeping their love-struck employees on track—and out of trouble if the romance ends.

We collected office-romance anecdotes from Southwest Florida workers, and presented four typical scenarios to the policy pros. Donna Flammang, a partner at Roetzel & Andress whose specialties include employment law, and Charlotte Mack King, CEO of Resource Innovations Inc., a human-resources and employee-relations consulting firm, suggest the best approaches for working with Cupid.

Scenario 1: Cupid shot your credibility
Months after my amicable, office-romance breakup, I was assigned to be the supervisor of a new employee whose work was shoddy. When I took the issue to my boss, she suggested I was jealous that the new employee was dating my ex in the department—a detail I hadn’t known.

It was like saying, "You won’t like the food in this restaurant because the menus are blue, and you don’t like blue."

I think my response was to play dumb, and say that I hadn’t heard about the romance. If I had told her that I suspected those two were dating, then my boss’s opinion would have been "proven," so to speak.

News of my complaints to the boss spread fast, and soon I had to defend my position about the new employee to other doubting colleagues.