Office Romances Becoming a Fact of Company Life : Relationships: New work conditions have encouraged it. But employers could face consequences when an affair goes sour.

Chris and Roger Gamelin met in a hallway at Steelcase Inc. Both of them employees, he was installing furniture and she was on her way to the cafeteria. One thing led to another, and 12 years ago they married.

They are still married and still at the company where Roger has worked for 30 years and Chris, 20 years.

More couples like the Gamelins are cropping up at companies across the country. With corporate cost-cutting forcing employees to spend longer hours at work, colleagues are increasingly dating and marrying, observers of the trend say. And disappearing guarantees of lifetime jobs mean fewer employees are letting companies tell them how to conduct their private lives.

Although employers have mixed opinions and varied policies on office romance, they are recognizing it’s a fact of work life.

“Who has the time or energy to go out after work anymore?” said Mitchell Marks, an industrial psychologist with Delta Consulting Group.

The Society for Human Resource Management found in a survey of member companies that 83% employ husband-and-wife couples. Seventy percent said they permit and accept dating, while only 1.5% oppose it.

Academics who study office romance estimate three in five employees have had at least one affair with a colleague; as many as 40% of couples are said to have met at work.

It used to be that many companies tried to impose rules prohibiting romantic involvement, usually requiring one of the couple to resign.

Now, “the concept of re-engineering is re-engineering romance,” said N. Elizabeth Fried, a management consultant.

At AT&T; there are more than 8,000 married couples among the 250,000 U.S. employees, said spokesman Burke Stinson, who describes the company’s policy on office romance as “benign neglect.”

“The reality is that 50% of marriages end in divorce, and a good place to meet a second spouse is the workplace,” said Stinson, who met his second wife, Nancy Smith, at AT&T.;

AT&T; changed its approach to office romance in the 1980s, about the time the company began a major restructuring that involved layoffs and a shift away from a paternalistic approach to workers.

But legal experts say companies now walk a fine line between not invading employees’ privacy with policies regulating romantic behavior and leaving themselves open for sexual harassment claims when a romance goes sour.

“It’s an evolving and increasingly important issue for companies to consider,” said Jonathan Segal, a labor lawyer and partner with the Philadelphia firm Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen. “Companies are revisiting the issue.”

Like AT&T;, many firms in recent years have eliminated policies against employees becoming romantically involved, Segal said.

That is, with one notable exception: supervisors dating or marrying subordinates. Any time a supervisor is involved with an employee it could later be argued in a sexual harassment suit to have been non-consensual, Segal said.

Furthermore, romantic involvement between supervisor and subordinate could suggest to employees that the way to advance in the company is through sexual activity, Segal said.

Finally, although the supervisor might be careful not to bestow favors on his or her love interest, there may be a perception among other employees that this is happening, he said.

Even in cases where direct supervision of one of the parties involved is not an issue, there can be problems, said Al Bernstein, a psychologist and management consultant.

“Office romance is disruptive and unprofessional,” Bernstein said. At work, people are on their best behavior and at their most competent, he said. Taken out of that environment, the relationship usually does not flourish and that’s when the problems begin at work, he said.

But some research has reached the opposite conclusion: Although problems can arise from an office romance, generally they don’t.

James Dillard, a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has conducted several studies of romances on the job and how they affect the couples and those around them.

He found that when people are romantically involved at work, there is usually no impact on productivity. When there is an effect, it’s likely to be positive.

Dillard also found that when colleagues perceived the motives for involvement as reasonably pure, and when neither party was married, it did not cause problems.

Many companies now require that if two people working closely together are involved, the liaison be reported and one of the pair be transferred to another department.

Still, most companies no longer think romantic involvement between employees is harmful, said Richard Levin, a psychologist and chairman of Work-Life Enterprises.

Indeed, Steelcase, the office furniture maker, is one company that feels romantic involvement--particularly marriage--between employees can be beneficial.

The company has a bias toward hiring relatives of employees and about 10% of the work force is married to someone from the company, spokesman Peter Jeff said.

“A marriage is based on communication and trust, and so is the company’s relationship with its employees built on communication and trust,” Jeff said. “When people have that mind-set and bring it to the company, the result is a certain synergy.”

But like many companies, Steelcase does not allow married couples or those who are romantically involved to work together, Jeff said.

AT&T; employees Joan and Bob Irvine began a romance 17 years ago. Although they said it was awkward at first, with colleagues constantly asking how the relationship was going, they eventually married.

Now, she works in public relations and he in sales, and the benefits of working together outweigh any negatives, Joan said. They commute to and from work together, eat lunch together and understand each other’s work life.