Where love has gone...

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Friday , February 15, 2008 at 2134 hrs Workplace romance is on a long rope as India Inc’s HR managers choose to look the other way as long as smitten couples do what they were hired for. If the widely discussed Romance at Workplace survey commissioned by staffing firm Teamlease is to be believed, more than a third of working executives do not find romantic liaisons, even with married colleagues, objectionable.

Siddharth Sharma, a lead member in a BPO firm in Delhi, says, “Romantic flings are quite common in my office. But usually, people, especially girls, are secretive about these things. Until a long time, I didn’t know that my best friend, a girl, was having an affair with my cousin, both of whom work in my office.”

This relaxed attitude towards courting married colleagues (34% of respondents are okay with the idea) emerges in market research firm Synovate’s study that polled a sample size of 402 corporate executives spanning several companies in the metros of India. The findings are in stark contrast with those of AC Nielson-ORG-MARG India Today Youth Survey 2008. The AC Nielson-ORG-MARG survey shows that 73% of the Indian youth prefer arranged marriages to love marriages.

This contrast could have emerged due to various reasons. This could be a reflection of the disconnect between the youth in general and the corporate world. The corporate world forms a small proportion of the youth or it could be just a demonstration of the essentially contradictory personality of India, says psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar in his book Portrait of an Indian People.

The official view

But nobody is complaining. “We do not bother much on such personal fronts as long as such relationships do not impact the organisation adversely. In case of formalised relationships (through engagements or marriages), we ensure that people involved do not report to one another. We have had some married couples working with us for some time and we ensured that they didn’t have reporting relationship. Everything worked very well. In fact, it helps retain employees as they are able to ‘see’ each other for more time compared with those in different jobs,” says Ashish Dehade, MD, West Asia, First Advantage, an employment-screening services provider.