LOVE ON THE JOB

Given how much time people spend at work, it's no wonder that workplace romances erupt on a regular basis. The challenge for anyone trying to maintain a relationship with a co-worker, however, is how to do so without letting it interfere with either employee's work.

With the real or perceived fear of sexual-harassment lawsuits, you'd think that most companies would have thought through how to handle workplace relationships. They haven't. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 72 percent of the companies surveyed in its most recent annual poll on workplace romance had no policy covering such relationships.

At most companies, in short, employees are on their own when it comes to navigating the often-choppy waters of romance with a co-worker.

When a manager dates a subordinate, the situation is even more complicated -- complicated enough that it's reasonable to wonder if it's ever OK to date someone when you have power over that person's job security.

A reader from Manhattan writes to tell me that she is romantically involved with her boss -- who, of course, is the one who praises her to upper management and will be recommending her for promotion.

She's confident that she deserves such praise and support, being "smart, capable, competent, responsible and inherently good at what I do," but she wonders how her relationship with her superior redefines her role in the workplace. Since the relationship began, she says, they are more prone to argument and spend more time together, both at and outside of their workplace.

Her company has no written policy against relationships, but nevertheless she's worried about crossing those ethical boundaries at work.

"How can you ever recover," she asks, "once you've headed down that road?"

Except in unusual circumstances, company executives have no business telling people with whom they should or shouldn't fall in love. But I do believe that they have a responsibility to make sure that romances between employees don't have an adverse affect on the company or on its other employees. If there's a relationship between a manager and a subordinate, it's critical for someone else at the company to be informed of that fact, to make sure that the relationship is consensual and that the manager isn't using his or her position inappropriately.

The right thing to do, in short, is for anyone involved in such a relationship to make it known, at least to some extent. So long as only the participants know of the relationship, the possibility for inappropriate effects is always present.

In this case, the couple should have talked to someone at the company about their relationship before it went very far. Since her manager has power over her career, it was his responsibility to talk to his manager or to someone in human resources. In a perfect world they would have received good advice on how to proceed, and in particular how to keep their private lives separate from the company's business. One possible result, for example, might have been my reader's being reassigned to a different manager.

But this isn't a perfect world. As it happens, the manager also has a live-in girlfriend who doesn't know about the affair. He has no plans to leave his girlfriend -- though he assures my reader that she is the only one with whom he is cheating on his partner -- so, under the circumstances, he's unwilling to disclose their relationship to any third party.

The circumstances make clear that the manager is an unethical manipulator who can't be expected to do the right thing. That leaves it up to my reader, who should see his inability to respond appropriately to this question as a warning flare signaling her to detour off this particular road as quickly as possible.