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Somewhere in your business, at this very moment, love is blooming between two of your employees. Their coworkers know about the relationship and may be watching it with interest, resentment and assorted other reactions. The question is, do you know about the relationship? And, if so, is it any of your business what two consenting adults do on their own time?
In these claims--crazy times, you should indeed know when employees are involved in personal relationships. Life wasn't always so complicated, but today a little "office romance" can quickly become a charge of favoritism, sexual harassment, sexual discrimination or wrongful discharge. If you don't know that the relationship exists, then you can't weigh your exposure to such claims and decide if preventive measures are in order.
What might those measures be? That's the tricky part. While it makes no sense to ignore this sensitive issue, you also must be careful not to invade employees' privacy and prompt yet another type of lawsuit. This is another of those "razor's edge" situations where you can find yourself with a problem if you do nothing at all or if you take action but then go overboard.
LOVE HURTS
About one-third of romantic relationships begin in the workplace, according to a survey by The Bureau of National Affairs. That means your company, like any other, is susceptible to the quagmire of business and personal issues an office romance can create. Here are just a few examples of the tangled web a romance may weave:
* Favoritism. When one employee in a relationship supervises the other, the chances are good that other staffers, watching from the sidelines, will not like what they see. Your company may be able to defend itself against an isolated charge from one of these employees that he or she has been discriminated against because the paramour received better treatment, but not without a big outlay of time and money.
In one such case, a telephone company manager complained that she was transferred from her store--which was a great location--to "Siberia" because her supervisor wanted his girlfriend in the better location. (The two, in fact, were soon married.) But a federal district court judge ruled that the claimant's transfer was not a violation of any...