Where love has gone...

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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.

That’s been the line taken by most companies. Most have preferred to ignore the goings-on between colleagues, hoping that employees will be mature enough to handle such ties in a discreet manner. “We have no policy governing romantic relationships in the workplace. There is no explicit or implicit encouragement or discouragement of such relationships,” says Narendra Puppala, VP, global HR, Birlasoft. Puppala goes on to say that, while the company is mindful of the fact that twosomes in the office will be increasingly more common as the services sector employs a young work force, as long as it does not affect the work atmosphere, they would prefer not to interfere. “At the same time, if there are cases where such a relationship results in actual or perceived favouritism, we would intervene,” he adds.

Agrees Sharma, “In my office, this isn’t encouraged a lot and once the management gets to know, people are put in different teams.”

Mohan Kapoor, who has worked in the IT industry for 12 years in India and the US, says, “Official rules can’t prevent these affairs from happening. People won’t leave their partners. They would rather change the organisation. In the US, workplace intimacy is common in the IT industry, and it is catching on here now.”

A reality check

“Long working hours, spending continuous longer hours in close proximity among others are the major factors in this emerging trend in which married men and women are getting involved to a considerable extent. Understanding the changing view of romance in India’s new world of work is emerging as a complex challenge for companies. This involves ethical, moral and productivity issues that need to be nuanced for context, cohort and values,” says Surabhi Mathur, general manager for permanent staffing, Teamlease.

Mini Ravindran, a journalist with a leading television channel, says, “We have a policy that relatives cannot work in the same organisation. But what do you do when people enter the organisation and then get involved. There are open secrets of inter-office and intra-office affairs. As for the extramarital affairs, obviously there are no approval or rules at the organisational level.”

Handling break-ups

What happens when a romance goes sour? For the handful who have had the bliss of office romances, there are hundreds more who know the agony and the humiliation of office break-ups—where you are the lead star of an unfolding soap opera showing to a full-house of colleagues. “It’s extremely uncomfortable if you are bumping into your ex-boyfriend in the corridors when you would like to be on the other side of the world,” says an insurance executive who recently broke off with a colleague. “There are also the snide remarks you have to live with from colleagues who were jealous of your earlier rapport with the supervisor,” she adds.

It’s not just the friends-turned-foes for whom it is an embarrassment; colleagues also don’t know where to look. “Suddenly it’s a frosty atmosphere at work where people are literally not seeing eye to eye,” says Anisha Chugh, a customer executive with a bank, adding that a jilted lover, if he is a senior colleague, can be nasty if he wants to.