New Rules of Office Romance
After discovering this spring that two of his executives were involved in an adulterous sexual relationship, the owner of a Los Angeles manufacturing company acted swiftly.
But he didn’t take the time-honored tack of transferring, rebuking or firing one or both of the lovers. Instead, he asked them to sign a two-page contract--an “informed consent” agreement intended to crimp their ability to sue the company if the relationship ever turns ugly.
Monica Ballard, a Santa Monica consultant hired to meet with the two executives and help them through the legal procedure, called the incident a sign of how the workplace has changed. “In the ‘50s, people sneaked around and had affairs,” she said. “Now they have the CEO and strangers they’ve never met coming in to chat in a very adult way about their sex life.”
This is the state of office romance in the late 1990s, an era when sexual harassment and other types of workplace lawsuits have employers running scared. Fading away are the days when many companies and government agencies would look the other way and risk being hit up for sexual harassment damages later.
At the same time, other bosses who once would have acted on reflex and forced out someone suspected of having an office affair now are responding more cautiously. Rather than invite invasion-of-privacy or wrongful-termination suits, some organizations are coming up with more flexible solutions or trying to find a middle ground in dealing with love in the workplace.
Employers lately have been spurred to action by recent U.S. Supreme Court sexual harassment rulings and, perhaps to a lesser extent, by the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio. They are stepping up their harassment-prevention programs and, in the process, urging workers to alert their bosses if a workplace romance gone bad is creating problems on the job.
Many companies and public agencies have focused mainly on romances between bosses and their employees. Last month, for example, New Jersey Atty. Gen. Peter Verniero announced a so-called date-and-tell policy for his agency. Under the rule, supervisors are supposed to report any “consensual personal relationship” that they strike up with subordinates.
Although informed consent contracts such as the one used by the Los Angeles manufacturing company remain a rarity, they are drawing attention in legal circles.
Sometimes jocularly referred to as “love contracts,” these agreements are being promoted by San Francisco-based Littler Mendelson, the biggest law firm in the nation that specializes exclusively in employment issues. The pacts provide a measure of legal protection for employers who lack other options.
These developments, all told, reflect an evolution in employers’ thinking since the not-too-distant past when Ross Perot, the two-time presidential candidate, boasted that he fired adulterers while he was head of Texas-based Electronic Data Systems.
Today, employers fret that fired adulterers can sue for wrongful termination, claiming they were discriminated against because of their marital status.
The impetus for the changes hasn’t come only from the daily headlines and legal developments. It also stems from the flourishing of romance as more women have entered the labor force and mingled with men in workplaces over the last two decades.
“Workplace romances are a part of life,” said Los Angeles management attorney Mark A. McLean, a specialist in employment issues. “It happens a lot with professionals like lawyers who put in 10 or 12 hours a day and find it easiest to meet people at work.”
Frequently, these relationships lead to marriage. Others quietly flicker out without creating a stir. But office romances also commonly spawn intense gossip, teasing, jealousies and charges of favoritism that can disrupt a workplace.
Even so, most major employers still haven’t laid down formal rules for dealing with workplace romance. A January poll of 617 employers by the Society for Human Resource Management, a national professional group, found that only 13% had written policies.
Among employers that have guidelines, the main rule for romances between peers is typically that the employees involved stay focused on their jobs and avoid open displays of affection--or anger when they’re having a spat.
That flexible approach works well for Karyn Baumeister, a 31-year-old administrative assistant at Xircom Inc.’s headquarters in Thousand Oaks, and her boyfriend, Paran Hopkins, 32, a shipping clerk at the computer equipment company.
Co-workers know about their relationship, but Baumeister and Hopkins try to keep things low-key while on the job. “I could come up with 300 excuses a day to run over to his building, but I don’t,” Baumeister said.
Affairs between subordinates and bosses--particularly with bosses at the very top of an organization--are far more complicated and controversial, as Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky have learned.
In formal and informal ways, employers are banning or discouraging these relationships or, when possible, arranging for the subordinate to report to someone else.
Occasionally, top executives pay a steep price for messy romantic entanglements, particularly if harassment or other abuse is alleged.
Last year, Staples Inc. President Martin Hanaka left the office supply retailer after a female employee accused him of assaulting her during an argument at her apartment. Hanaka denied any affair and the woman later withdrew the charges, but the company concluded in an internal investigation that he violated a Staples policy restricting managers’ personal relationships with subordinates.
But other executives, including chief executives who are major shareholders in their own companies, frequently ride out the sexual controversies because no one has the power, determination or courage to stop them.
The key legal and ethical problem in boss-underling affairs at any level of an organization is that “you never really know why the romance is occurring. Is it really love or is it an abuse of power?” said Jane Bright, a human resources consultant in Los Angeles.
Lewis Maltby, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national task force on workplace issues, added that subtle coercion “is inevitable when one person has the power to fire the other.” That’s true, he said, “even if the boss wouldn’t dream of firing his secretary for turning him down for a date.”
Bright said in low-wage factories and other blue-collar settings, where workers often aren’t aware of their legal rights, abuse can be rampant. She cited a consulting assignment she had at a factory where the plant manager had gotten five assembly workers pregnant. “I don’t think all of these women fell in love with him, but they saw him as a powerful man,” Bright said.
Fear of sexual harassment suits appears to be the main force driving employers to adopt policies.
The “date-and-tell” rule for boss-subordinate romances at the New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety was announced one day after the agency lost a sexual harassment case. A jury awarded the woman, a former deputy attorney general, $350,000.
Verniero, the state’s attorney general, said his agency’s notification rule “is a preemptive policy to avoid any problems from becoming reality. . . . We’re not creating a dating police.”
At the Los Angeles company that used the Littler Mendelson “love contract,” the situation was particularly delicate when the lawyers were brought in to work matters out. The two lovers wanted to keep things as private as possible; the man involved in the romance is married.
There were other complications. Even though both of the lovers are executives, the woman was in the man’s chain of command. Given the modest size of the business, there was no convenient way to separate them.
The solution was to meet individually with the executives to make sure the relationship was welcomed by both partners, to spell out the company’s anti-harassment policy and to emphasize that if problems emerged and workplace harassment became an issue, they could report it to management. Then the two lovers signed the informed consent agreement acknowledging that they were advised of the company’s policy and their relationship was consensual.
Still, office romance policies aimed at preventing legal problems can lead to new troubles.
Some management consultants and lawyers regard the “love contract” as legal overkill that can damage morale. “It’s almost like signing your rights away, and a lot of employees are offended by companies trying to get out of future litigation by having them sign something,” said Jan Salisbury, a Boise, Idaho-based workplace practices consultant.
Employers with date-and-tell policies, critics say, could trample employee privacy. Edward Martone, executive director of the New Jersey branch of the ACLU, said the blanket policy just adopted by his state’s attorney general makes him “concerned about gay and lesbian state employees who may have to ‘out’ themselves to keep their job. It may also force people to disclose with whom they’re having an extramarital affair.”
Four years ago, IBM Corp., which requires transfers to deal with romances between bosses and subordinates, lost a $375,000 jury verdict in a case related to the policy. The suit was brought by Daniel Manicelli, an IBM manager. The 23-year veteran claimed he was unfairly pushed out of his job for dating a subordinate.
Other companies have coped with the conflicting legal pressures by relaxing restrictions on office romances, provided that sexual harassment is not involved. At EDS, where in the Perot era suspected adulterers were fired, today “people are expected to behave professionally and do what’s in the best interest of the company, but that’s really the extent of our policy,” said spokeswoman Diane Coffman.
The search for a legally astute middle ground in handling romance, companies say, remains a challenge. What’s more, some authorities believe the issue never will be completely manageable. “You can’t ban love,” said Dennis M. Powers, author of “The Office Romance,” a newly published business book.
“People fall in love regardless of the rules.”
Times staff writer Davan Maharaj contributed to this report.
