Pyar, Ishq aur Mohabbat....

Many companies are stern in their attitude towards the employees and resisting to bring their personal matter to workplace or to get it diluted with the professional life. They clearly assert employees to keep their personal life /problems aloof from office hours so that the productivity level of the company does not hamper. But when the personal life and relationships is germinating and developing from the professional field, then how to contain this quagmire. One answer which companies came out with is ‘Love contract’. It will take care of the potential problems in the organisation of running relationship couples and also when the relationship terminates. Primary purpose of this contract is to build an amenable functional office environment especially useful in case of love affairs in reporting relationship where there are more chances of breaching the ethical code and conduct, encouraging practices like favouritism, poor productivity level, lower efficiency, etc. Co-workers may attribute the reason of favouritism in receiving differential treatment with respect to assignment of job, tasks, etc. It will further attenuate the company’s liability in case of sexual harassment or any such mishaps in case the relationship ends, and Subordinate can even go to an extent of claiming that they were being sexually harassed by their supervisor. Once the relationship ends, then the reporting relationship between the manager and the employees gets affected and that may have an impact on the company’s balance sheet. Even though company’s cannot completely detach itself from the litigation caused by this, but certainly it will have a check on these potential problems. But it should always be remembered that Love contract should not be used as a substitutability of an anti sexual harassment contract.
Infact, if we see many companies wants both the spouses to work in the same organisation as it will ensure a sign of commitment and loyalty to the company. Actually, getting love contract signed is not a new thing what Intermediaries Technology Ltd. is doing but the main issue is that the contract is coming at a very sensitive time when Pritam was expecting his chance of promotion and also the time given to him to go through the contract was very less. Maybe because GM (HR) does not want to lose either Pritam or Jagruti also at the same time wanted to have control on the behaviour of these employees.
One more thing I observed was that It was written in the contract - “We also assure the management that in no way our reporting relationship would be influenced by personal romantic relationship....”, but the point here is what is the yardstick to judge whether a particular task assessment was influenced by romantic relationship or not. I feel that to administer the contract is the biggest problem.
One more thing, if the company is of the view that in a reporting relationship, love affairs and all hampers the productivity level of the company, then why not to have “Family (chacha, mamaji, tauji, bhaiya, bhabhi, Jijaji,etc,etc) contracts” , ‘Friends contract’, ‘crush contracts’, etc as there will always be Halo effect, personal relation biased effect, etc. in these relationship as well.
Pucho na us kagaz se, jis pe hum dil ke bayan likhte hain.
Tanhayino me beeti baate tamam likhte hain,
Wo Kalam bhi dewani ho gayi,
jis se hum AAP ka Naam likhte hain.