Workplace romance is becoming more and more visible with the gender ratio improving across industries. As per the HR professionals, workplace romance has seen a marked increase as the number of hours that employees are spending at office has increased and they end up sharing interests, values and hobbies.
Being involved in a relationship at workplace doesn’t necessarily imply that the performance of the employee will suffer. It can lead to better energy levels, increased morale and translate into better discharge of services. TCS had a policy where it would give a sum of Rs. 50000 to a couple that got married and both of them were on the payroll of TCS.
However, as the number of cases of workplace romance increased the failures and reported cases of sexual harassment also increased. The firms were well aware that they cannot stop employees from getting involved. The ‘Love Contract’ was then conceived. This is to confirm that the involvement is voluntary and both are well versed with the sexual harassment policies.
Why is signing the contract a problem?
When the mutual trust and understanding is substantial enough to mature into love that is visible to the public, what is that stops the couple from signing the contract. If in case of problems in future, they have no right to involve the company in their mess. It is not that they were forced to be with each other by the HR. Then why involve the organization to wash your dirty linen when things go sour. If there is an instance of sexual harassment, this could have happened with any other partner whom you were dating. Only when someone is taking undue advantage of you solely because he or she is able to or subjecting you to sexual harassment, the company is a part of the issue. But, when you are a party to the relationship, whether the romance is in office or outside office, the vulnerabilities are no different. Are you trying to use the firm as a tool to use in fighting your bad relationships?
Why should a company insist on a love contract?
Apart from unwarranted sexual harassment litigation, companies also suffer from breach of confidentiality, poor quality of work when problems mushroom between the couple, unproductive work hours and long hours in the cafeteria discussing family and money and what not.
Some of the issues that must be addressed in the love contract must include no direct reporting, the employment at-will if the contract is not adhered to, and standards of behavior at workplace.
It is required that the contract is well crafted as it may face problems like non-disclosure of relationships between same sex couples, or going as far as claiming that the employee was forced to sign the contract when he or she had a critical issue like on site opportunity or promotion in the pipeline.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment