> I heard in an interview that 50 years ago, people used to basically used to fall in love with heir neighbours and coworkers.
Dating coworkers is now forbidden in many companies, especially if there are differences in hierarchy. In some countries it becomes a possible legal liability for the one in the higher position.
Some large organizations that require traveling even forbid dating the “local population” when deployed abroad.
> Never assume that all your employees are straight, all your employees only date one person at a time, all of your employees define dating the same way you do, or that you’ll know if your employees are dating. I think a flat prohibition of romantic relationships in your company is going to be very hard to enforce; most likely, your employees are not going to disclose their relationships.
Red Flag. Key advice: don't shit where you eat.
The problem with these sorts of things is that people have feelings and often react poorly when things implode. If you have people with their varying views of what's ok and what isn't doing their thing, you're going to have a big problem on your hands.
The corner cases are really painful to deal with. My wife had one where an ambitious female working for her was sleeping with 4-5 directors, created awkward situations, then started a lawsuit/eeoc complaint. The three months of depositions were lots of fun.
I witnessed one where two high-level director level people were engaged, which was great, until the male was discovered to be also "dating" a subordinate. He had to transfer, but there was nowhere to go due to his level, so he got canned. It was a bad situation on every dimension.
> See this childish engineer who was rejected by Horvath became angry at her and started ripping her code out.
How does not allowing dating between employees solve this situation? Regardless of whether Horvath was seeing anyone or not she could have rejected this person because she wasn't interested and the same things could have happened. If anything her trying to avoid dating anyone in the office would have led to the same result, so how exactly would a rule like that have helped in this situation?
I think the general mentality of don't date anyone from work is silly, you can't just sweep under the rug any emotions or relationships that might happen to develop with people you work with 5 days out of the week. The important thing is to make sure that no conflict of interest issues develop and make sure these relationships are known so HR can handle them properly.
Of course there are a lot of complicated scenarios that can develop, but like someone else said, we're all adults here. People should be able to handle these things in a professional manner and if they can't then really the company needs to question whether they should be working there in the first place.
I mean sure it's good advice but a prohibition of romantic relationships doesn't actually work. When people get close after working together romantic feelings can happen its only natural. A study from 2006 found 40% of office workers had a romance with someone they worked with. 40% [1]. Hell, anecdotally almost half of everyone I can think (that I know personally of course) in a relationship I know met their spouse at a place where they both worked.
Yeah there are reasons why it's a bad idea. Yeah it shouldn't happen with supriors. But it will happen and a flat out prohibition on it will cause more harm than good. If you flat out prohibit it then it won't get reported and then no one will know about the possibile conflict of instrest that needs to be handled properly.
If you have open policies regarding this and encourage people to notice management and that they won't get punished then you can make arrangements to ensure no conflicts of instrests occur (or at least minimize them).
I would be curious if there have been studies between the two schools of thought.
>While the founder is right about avoiding dating someone in your own company
This is one of my pet peeves. This is a professional setting and the employees are not 13. They should be mature enough to be able to handle their personal lives without bans or frown upons. Someone can't handle rejection? Who says he/she can handle criticism? What about disagreements?
To me this is a personality problem that should be dealt with accordingly. Company-wide bans or silent rules can hide bigger problems.
> Don't attempt romantic relationships at work. (...)The women usually get the rough end of this deal, too, because men aren't good at handling the inevitable rejection. Just don't do it. Have all the romantic relationships you want outside work, but do not bring it to work.
I find this incredibly childish - the idea that men (not some men, just men) are childish and cannot behave like grown ups, up to the point in which the company has to step in and tell them how to behave.
I'm not sold up either on the idea that I'm not allowed to date anyone in the one place where I spend most of my day, where I'm surrounded by people who share my interests and where I met most of my friends.
I'm all in for bringing in more women, but this points sounds too much like "let's protect this delicate, defenseless flower" to me.
>>Sometimes I think tech companies should set up some kind of internal dating or matchmaking site, and establish a rule that if an employee is interested in exploring romantic or sexual relationships with coworkers, they have to go through that site.
Tinder for coworkers. This.... is.... brilliant. But for some reason, someone is going to screw it up and it'll be a big fiasco and then the whole thing will be terminated. But seriously, does anyone see any negatives in this idea? I'm just assuming it'd be problematic because I'm conditioned to believe flirting/romance/dating in the workplace, 9 times out of 10, leads to disaster. But is there a more concrete potential event that'd screw this up?
> That’s exactly why romance and sexual have no place in the office, on either side.
But it so happens that I am at work pretty much all day including a lot of weekends. My work is my life. If you're going to tell me that I am simply not allowed to get involved with a person at a place where my life is, it means that I will likely be alone for a very long while. Especially since I am not a bar person (I'm petite, shy when meeting new people, and can't speak loudly, bars/clubs are a no-go and I don't have much of a social network other than from work).
I have a suspicion that you work in a field and in an area where you are afforded the luxury of time and resources to be able to operate within the constraints you now stipulate. Many do not, and they cannot find their human need for romance met if you suddenly say that romance-at-work is off-limits.
Well, I don't think that's true really. Nobody cares if you're close friends with your co-workers. Many co-workers are close friends.
But, I get that you meant romantic relationships.
The problem of course being that there's so much negative baggage that often accompanies unsuccessful or unrequited romantic interest, all of it detrimental to the company. For example: If a subordinate rejects a superior's advances, and there's even a whiff of unfair treatment (being passed over for promotion, for example), the subordinate has a legitimate grievance that they didn't before.
The woman in the article, for example, that rejected her boss's advances and then was later let go for "poor performance": Maybe she really was performing extremely poorly! And maybe the boss really was totally over it immediately. But she now has a pretty solid case that it was retaliation, forever.
It just puts the company in a position where they have to be hyper-vigilant about monitoring things like this, and it's a huge waste of resources. Regardless of how valuable you are to the company, you're almost certainly not worth the huge headache that you just caused.
That's why you never date your co-worker. And if you couldn't help it and fell in love then you should quit your job first and ask him/her on date later.
> The idea that young men and women who work together should be forbidden from exploring relationships with with classmates or coworkers is a kind of bizarre neo-puritanism.
The problem with that is, what happens if the relationship goes south as relationships tend to do over time. Then the two of you have to work every day with someone they hate. It's just more sensible to keep things professional to begin with.
> That's true, but I've given this a lot of thought, and I've come to the conclusion that it's simply impractical and inhumane to forbid romantic/sexual interest in a professional setting. Let's face it, most new people you meet in your adult life, you meet through your job, and many people start relationships and even marriages with their coworkers.
Romance in the workplace shouldn't be forbidden under any and all circumstances but there should be a number of definite parameters:
I don't think there is anything wrong with politely inviting someone to hang out after work to see if the interest is mutual. If the answer is no, that's it, you don't ask again.
Expressing 'sexual interest' at work to me means communicating that you want to have sex with someone, which I don't think is appropriate at work. That would be along the lines of inviting someone to spend the night, sexual innuendos, or other forms of flirting. All of that is problematic in the workplace.
Some people will argue, "What if the interest is mutual?" Sure, but many people don't/won't perceive when it is not, and work is not for finding sexual partners.
'Romantic interest' is more along the lines of communicating you'd want to date someone. Even that is not something that should be going on at work. If two coworkers establish a connection and pursue that outside of work, ok.
Even then, a superior should never date subordinates. And in a sales or investment situation, it should be off limits to proposition someone seeking the sale/investment. Someone pitching their startup shouldn't feel pressure to reciprocate someone else's advances in order to preserve a chance for funding.
> I think we should encourage emotional maturity and sensible behaviour instead. Although this too is difficult, because most people can't achieve the former, and the latter is extremely elusive especially in the current climate.
I would agree, but what does 'sensible' mean? I think many times the offender didn't think they were doing anything wrong. I think people need to speak directly to what is ok and what is not ok so that there's a shared understanding.
> Not once did I encounter an employee who regularly interacted with another outside of work related functions.
No offense to you but statistically 40% of people have dated a coworker at least once and people hold on average 12 jobs in their life so if you interacted with 1000 persons there is a good chance that at least 30 of them were definitely interacting with a coworker outside of work related function.
> You can end up hanging out privately with your superiors or subordinates and this can eventually lead to various personal and romantic entanglements.
That's typically a bad idea anyway. I know that we in the hip, cool developer world like to pretend that an organisation can be flat and rankless—but it really can't.
I think it's completely appropriate for superiors and subordinates to socialise in groups (and kudos to the tech world for keeping that tradition alive when so many organisational cultures are stomping it out), but private socialisation should be limited to those who are on the same level.
As for specifically sex-related issues, the only thing I can think makes sense is to scrupulously treat every team member the same, and don't date within the organisation—and if, despite one's best intentions, one does form a relationship, then one or both parties should leave.
> your employees won't stop having sex with each other
Haven't there been studies indicating that our environment and physical proximity to a person greatly factors into our sexual attraction?
It is a little paradoxical that companies try to bring everyone together after work for fun and bonding but then discourage workplace relationships. Many lasting relationships I know of share some type of polarity or power dynamic, so it's not too surprising how the recipe is there for consensual intimacy. Harassment, goes without saying, but even consensual relationships with business power dynamics can be a legal and ethical disaster for the parties involved and the business.
> You work at a technology company. You are attracted to another coworker, who is NOT your subordinate. Is there some manner in which it is acceptable to express your interest? Or is this just not OK at all?
Yes, there are plenty of manners to express it, just like at any company. That said, there are a lot of ways to express it that are just making someone's work life terrible.
Dating coworkers is now forbidden in many companies, especially if there are differences in hierarchy. In some countries it becomes a possible legal liability for the one in the higher position.
Some large organizations that require traveling even forbid dating the “local population” when deployed abroad.
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