In any organization there is a minimum working hour’s policy wherein the employee at least had to spend that much of time working. But any employee can’t spend all of the hours working, he will definitely take cigarette breaks, chatting breaks, discussing any new policy by organization apart from coffee breaks or lunch breaks which are taken care of in his working hours. For example in Infosys you need to complete 9.1 hours from which 8.8 have to be work. So if a person wants to involve himself in other kind of leisure in that free time like talking to his girlfriend then I don’t think it is any wrong. If two employees are engaged in love relationship and it is not hampering the progress of any project then I don’t think any employer should be bothered about it. There are biannual or annual review policies in every company to monitor employee’s performance so employee himself would try to maintain it to an acceptable level if he wants to spend more time with his love in the same office. The problem can arise as my fellow friends have sited, when one is superior in position to other and in the same department.
Secondly, if the organization is quite big with more than 50000 employees is it that easy to keep a tab of each and every person working there? Especially if it is a global organization the task becomes all the more Herculean. For e.g. in Infosys (my former employer), when one of my team mate’s girlfriend was sent to onsite, he would daily come to office early morning so that he can use company’s resources to talk to his girlfriend. Secondly, this also gave him an extra hour to fill in his timesheet where in manager was made to believe that he starts his work early and do it more efficiently by devoting more time. In this case my team mate was gaining an extra hour and that too without getting noticed by anyone which shows that love contract is not full proof. HR cannot know in this case that the employee is having an affair and that is affecting the project in any way.
Thirdly, how will this love contract be able to define the limit to which a particular relationship has reached? For example it is very common to say “We are just friends and nothing more than that”. If in this case jagruti says that we are just friends and there is nothing serious about it, but the HR is not ready to listen and he throws one of them out of the company then it would be firing the employee without cause and this can have negative repercussions upon employees as well as employer. It would let them to limit their conversations with person of opposite sex thinking that axe can fall on them too. This would be just opposite to the open culture that most of the organizations try to follow now days.
Lastly, will this contract only be applicable for people with restrictive control where employer tries to control everything by his rules and mistrust is common? Can a company force such rules on people who have that kind of skill which is contributing a lot towards organisational growth? For example if a person is CFO and he is having an extra marital affair with someone in office, it will be very difficult to impose such contracts on him. It won’t be easy even to fire him and recruit someone else very easily. When Narayan Murthy started Infosys with other people, Sudha murthy was also a part of it. But he said that either one will have to resign as according to him even husband or wife could be distraction to each other. But as sweta had pointed out Infosys culture has evolved over the years and now they are promoting married couples in organization. So, I think dealing with love affairs will also evolve over the time. May be there would be more openness in accepting that in offices.
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