EFFICACY OF LOVE CONTRACTS???

Every organization wants its employees to always perform efficiently. And so organizations try to build an atmosphere where employees are rewarded on the basis of their work and commitment. This atmosphere gets disrupted when any employee is granted a favor just because he/she has romantic relation with any other senior employee. This affects the morale of other employees. Also, such relationships may even result in cases of sexual harassment where company might be sued.

Hence, love contracts are used by the companies basically to limit their liability and to ensure proper levels of performance on the part of the employees. But these contracts fail to address many issues. Like what happens when after a Love contract is signed and sexual harassment does take place? In this case would it be feasible to take the help of law. And what happens when suppose anyone who has already signed a love contract along with some other employee now develops a relationship with any other co-worker? Will he be required to sign one more contract? How many such contracts a person would be required to sign? And why can’t the employer just include these clauses in the initial employee contract for every employee? Why a separate love contract? There are many other issues as pointed out by Rajat that reflect the shortcomings of such a contract.

Human beings are not robots. They have feelings and just by signing contracts they can’t get away with their feelings of affection towards anyone at workplace. And apart from romantic relationship they develop other relations also – how many of them can be governed by contracts? There is always a possibility of nepotism, favoritism and corruption.

Besides not all relationships should be a cause of concern. Is it really not a possibility that two persons who are attracted to each other and work in same teams will deliver excellent results? Even organizations want people to work as a team and recruit people who are good team player.

So we see that there are a lot of issues involved and management has to take care of all the possible situations. Love contracts are not self sufficient and HR of the organizations is required to handle all these issues effectively. If HR can handle these effectively I think there will not be requirement of any Love Contracts.