Hard as it may be to believe, it’s very nearly Christmas. A quick check at your local shopping centre should confirm this fact. Decorations, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and enormous crowds of frenzied shoppers are the dead giveaways.
Hard as it may be to believe, it’s very nearly Christmas. A quick check at your local shopping centre should confirm this fact. Decorations, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and enormous crowds of frenzied shoppers are the dead giveaways.
In our office, the Christmas Party invitations have already started rolling in. In fact, by the time you read this column, half of my staff will have commenced rolling up to work late with hangovers as the marathon that is Christmas as a journalist begins.
For HR, the office Christmas party inevitably leads to a number of headaches. In this column, however, I would like to focus on one problem that often starts at the office Christmas party – the office romance.
Now, I’m not sure if you’ve ever been privy to an office romance, indeed if you’ve actually been one of the guilty parties, but I’m going to confess up front that I met my wife at work, and yes we started getting to know each other a lot better at the office Christmas Party. However, I would also like to state that we did not start dating until I had left the company.
Apart from the dating service that is teenage casual employment, my first experience of an office romance was when I was a cadet journalist. The thing that was most striking to we observers was the absolute obviousness with which the affair was conducted.
While it was no doubt thought by the perpetrators to be a well-kept secret, the very fact that a position was made for one of the two, using the other’s influence as an editor was the first dead giveaway. This was then compounded by the pair of them locking themselves up in the editor’s office for long, private meetings – as far as the rest of us could tell, they really had no reason for these daily dalliances.
Of course the clincher to turn the rumour into folklore came at one of the many Christmas parties t owhich we were invited, when the consumption of liberal amounts of alcohol stripped away the urgency in keeping the affair secret.
This tail ended when the editor stepped off to greener pastures – we never did establish exactly why – and the replacement editor was less enamoured with the other individual’s work talents.
While this affair may have had implications for the individuals involved outside of work – both parties were married – the ramifications inside the office were also quite significant. Firstly, another staff member had been pushed out of the role she had occupied and performed flawlessly for years. While she out-survived her replacement, she refused to take up her old role again and did soon leave the company. Secondly, the inappropriate placement of one of our two lovers, created an enormous amount of friction among those reporting to that role. I was one of those people.
Another affair that occurred in the very same publishing house, albeit a few years later, was conducted in an open and obvious fashion from the word go. Being the creative environment that it is, publishing is one of those industries where you work very closely with a small team of individuals often for long and stressful hours. It’s also very often all consuming, resulting in social events outside work being conducted with work colleagues. So it’s not that surprising that when two people have sat next to each other and shared the same problems, heartaches and victories, as well as many a drink after work, they may suddenly find that their interest in each other goes beyond the professional.
This romance went for years culminating in the two living together, working together, buying a house together and eventually becoming engaged to each other. The office environment was one big happy family and the rest of us basked in the sunshine of their romance.
The problem, of course, was that nothing lasts forever. The two of them had no respite from each other and when love turned bad, the fervour of their hatred for each other was rivalled only by their previous love.
To this day, this was the messiest break up I’ve ever witnessed. And, along with six or seven of my other work comrades, I had a ringside seat to the fireworks, screaming matches, stony silences and tears. It was like living in a TV soapy. The problems with this affair was that while it was good, it was very, very good, but when it turned bad, it literally brought a magazine to its knees.
It’s a real problem, yet how do you tell individuals in a free country who they can and can’t have relationships with? Some firms – management accounting firms spring to mind – actively encourage it, reasoning that the more people they have together, the more they will stay at work. The question is, what do you do when it goes wrong?
