GETTING COMFORTABLE WITH COUPLES IN THE WORKPLACE
By Anne B. Fisher, FORTUNE, October 3, 1994.
Is love in the air at your office? A slew of social trends are
converging to encourage romance at work as never before.
Surprising new research shows that this may be good for
productivity.
LIBIDO 1. The vital impulse or energy motivating human behavior.
2. The sexual urge; lust.
--New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary of The English Language
HERE'S SOMETHING you may not know about your company's CEO. If
he's at all like the 200 chief executives surveyed this past August by
Clark Martire & Bartolomeo for Fortune, he is an unabashed
romantic. That is to say, he believes in letting love between
employees take its course, even if office amours may occasionally
give rise to trouble. And if that is indeed your boss's view,
he's onto something. A growing body of academic research suggests that
sexual attraction between coworkers, whether or not it is acted
upon, may boost people's productivity on the job. If two
employees marry, the company where they work often ends up getting a
terrific deal, including higher levels of job commitment from both spouses
than from folks whose mates toil elsewhere.
Most remarkable is that nearly three quarters of the CEOs in
FORTUNE'S poll said that romances between workers are "none of
the company's business." This even though 86% acknowledged that such
goings-on can increase the possibility of favoritism, either real
or perceived, and 77% noted that consensual flings that turn sour
can expose the company to the threat of sexual harassment
lawsuits.
Perhaps the willingness of CEOs to smile upon love at work,
regardless of the perceived risks, is in part accepting the
inevitable: More than half the chief executives surveyed said
they have noticed more married couples at the office lately than ten
years ago. Muses George P. Mitchell, CEO of Mitchell Energy &
Development Corp.: "People meet and get married, and you can't
really stop that. It's the way the world goes." Charles A.
Sullivan, CEO of Interstate Bakeries Corp., says, "We don't have
a problem with couples. In fact, we've found that father-son or
mother-daughter employee situations are much more troublesome."
Other bosses see a sharp distinction between lovebirds who have
settled calmly into a shared nest and those still caught up in
the flurry of mating rituals. "It's not marriage between employees
that causes trouble," says Orin Smith, chief executive of Engelhard
Corp. "It's what leads up to it." Ah. Who, indeed, hasn't had the
dubious pleasure of working alongside a twosome in the first
flush of passion, when the very air seems charged with fond whispers
and meaningful glances?DO YOU THINK THAT HAVING MARRIED COUPLES WORKING AT THE SAME COMPANY
IS GOOD OR BAD FOR PRODUCTIVITY?
Good 8%
Bad 16%
Doesn't Matter 63%
Not Sure 13%
Once in a while the results can be explosive. Anybody who
followed the business press in the early Eighties recalls the
epic saga of William Agee, then CEO of Bendix Corp., and Mary
Cunningham, an MBA in her late 20s who moved with stunning speed
into top management. She later married the boss. Bendix employees,
to say nothing of Agee's wife at the time, bitterly resented the
long hours Agee and Cunningham spent closeted together,
supposedly creating a corporate strategy that no one else, including other
senior Bendix managers and the board of directors, ever quite
understood. In the end, Cunningham was forced out of the company.
Agee is now CEO of Morrison Knudsen.
A number of social trends are enabling romance at work to
flourish as never before. Despite the odd Agee-esque exception,
that is probably not a bad thing. In an era when leaner
organizations and new ways of working add up to longer hours for
many people, work may be the natural place to meet a potential
mate. Says a female investment banker who commutes regularly
between London and Manhattan: "The social scene is pretty dead
now, because AIDS and other worries have made people afraid of meeting
strangers. Besides, who has time to go out?"
People who work together have, almost by definition, similar
backgrounds, talents, and aspirations. And as women move into
middle and upper management, they and their male co-workers are
more likely than ever to interact as peers. Microsoft, where
multibillionaire CEO Bill Gates wed marketing executive Melinda
French last January, is in several respects a prototypical
Nineties workplace. The company's Seattle headquarters has at least a
dozen married couples who met and courted during their 18-hour
workdays. Says Stephen Manes, co author of Gates, a book on Microsoft and
its founder: "In that kind of intense work environment, you not only
practically live at the office, but you get to use your brains on
each other, which is really the most erotic thing there is."
IN TIMES OF STRESS, love can be great for a couple's morale.
Pamela and Louis Schuckman both work for Accountants on Call, an
executive recruiting firm with headquarters in Saddle Brook, New
Jersey. "We never have to question each other's motives," says
Pam. "In an intensely competitive business, how many of your
colleagues can you say are behind you 100% and sincerely want you to
succeed?" Mike Cawley and his wife, Lois, are part of a management team
building an auto parts plant in Mexico for their employer, Parker
Hannifin. "Headquarters gives us a lot of support," says Mike.
"But the stress of starting a new plant in an unfamiliar culture would
be much greater if we didn't have each other to rely on."
The spark of attraction between colleagues need not lead to
romance. Whether it does or not, it can light a fire under productivity.
David Eyler, a senior staff member at the National Center
for Higher Education in Washington, D.C., is co-author of a book
titled More Than Friends, Less Than Lovers: Managing Sexual
Attraction in the Workplace. His consulting experience in scores
of companies has led him to believe that most of what people
think they know about how men and women interact at work is, quite
simply, wrong. Many misconceptions may arise from a lingering,
and peculiarly American, strain of Puritanism--what H.L. Mencken once
described as the deep, dark suspicion that somebody somewhere is
having fun.
One canard is that if work partners are drawn to one an---other
for more than professional reasons, they'll be too distracted to
get the job done. Au contraire, according to Eyler: "Sexual
energy can drive people into a better working relationship. It doesn't
have to be destructive." Rather, by sublimating sexual tension
and directing it to the task at hand, men and women can
forge dynamic and enduring teams.
"Work is fundamentally one of the sexiest things that people
can do together," Eyler says, "and it's high time we started taking
advantage of all that energy in some constructive way." Recent
academic research bears him out. Leola Furman, an associate
professor of social work at the University of North Dakota in
Grand Forks, studied the faculty in eight departments at five
Midwestern colleges. She compared the work of teams of both male and female
members with those made up of all men or all women. She found that,
without exception, the mixed-sex teams were faster and more
imaginative at problem solving than the single-sex groups. She
concluded that sexual tension in the mixed teams made people try
harder to understand and help one another--and maybe to impress
one another too.
WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING PAIRS OF STATEMENTS
COMES CLOSEST TO YOUR OWN VIEW?
If an unmarried couple is discreet, an
office romance is not a company concern. 79%
Since an office romance has the potential
to affect productivity, morale, and even
sexual harassment suits, it is the
company's business. 19%
Not sure / No answer 2%
Couples working together, whether married
or unmarried, can undermine productivity. 39%
Couples working together can increase
productivity. 29%
Either/Both 22%
Not sure / No answer 10%
Furman did note differences in attitudes between men and women
who admitted they felt sexual attraction toward each other but
who had decided, usually because they were married to others, to keep
their friendships with co-workers strictly platonic. "Women tend
to know in their minds that this is going to remain a platonic
relationship," says Furman. "Men are somewhat more inclined to
think, 'If we keep getting along this well, it could turn into
something physical.'" Still, even the men in Furman's study who
entertained such fancies kept them to themselves. Says Furman:
"As people get more accustomed to working closely with colleagues of
the opposite sex, they realize that they don't have to act on
their impulses. It's part of being a professional adult."
When unattached professional adults do give their amorous
impulses free rein, the impact on the organization is usually
slight. James Dillard, director of the Center for Communication
Research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has done
several detailed studies of how office romances affect both the
productivity of the two workers involved and that of the
people around them.
His conclusion: "The most likely thing that will happen to
productivity is nothing--no change." The second most likely
effect, he found, is a positive one. People who are in love with a
colleague often begin coming to work earlier and leaving later.
They also embrace work with a new fervor and show an unwonted
burst of enthusiasm for life in general.
Once co-workers have married, they snuggle into a routine,
centered on the company, that allows them to get the most
possible work done with the least amount of fuss and bother. Richard
Levin, a psychologist who is chairman of Work-Life Enterprises in
Brookline, Massachusetts, says that in his consulting practice he
sees a growing number of "totally efficient couples." They
commute to work together in the morning, drop off a child or two at a
company-sponsored day-care center, and go of to their jobs. Often
they have lunch together to hash over the details of family
chores or to compare notes on what's happening at work, or simply to
spend an hour enjoying each other's company. At the end of the day they
head home together.
DO YOU APPROVE OR DISAPPROVE OF
OFFICE ROMANCES BETWEEN UNMARRIED EMPLOYEES--
OR WOULD YOU SAY IT IS NONE OF THE COMPANY'S BUSINESS?
Approve 3%
Disapprove 12%
None of the Company's Business 70%
Not sure 15%
A practical advantage to the company is that two heads really
are better than one. The Schuckmans, who grew up near each other in
New Jersey, first met in San Diego two years ago, at a Superstars
junket for Accountants on Call's highest achievers. Pam, now 28,
eventually moved to the West Coast to be with Lou, 32, and
they've been married for nine months. Lou is a branch manager in San
Jose, Pam a supervisor 17 miles away in Palo Alto. They often sit
talking until ten or 11 at night about what's going- on at work. Says
Pam: "We both know all the players and all the issues involved, so we
can bounce ideas off each other without having to go through a
lot of preliminary explanations."
Lou's more extensive experience negotiating compensation
packages for his clients has helped Pam make better deals for hers. He
seeks out her views too, and says of their late-night confabs: "No
matter how well you know a particular situation, you can still get a
really unexpected answer." It helps that the Schuckmans' union
has the endorsement of their employer. Accountants on Call was begun
in 1979 by a husband-and-wife team, Stewart and Dory Libes, who
still run it. The privately held company, which now has 65 branch
offices, including one each in Canada, Australia, and England, is
the second largest of its kind in the world. An in-house
newsletter item announcing the Schuckmans' nuptials read, "The couple that
bills together, thrills together."
Or how about the couple that builds auto parts together? In
Monterrey, Mexico, about 160 miles south of the Texas border,
Mike and Lois Cawley are part of the management team starting a new
plant that makes air-conditioner components for customers GM and
Chrysler. The Cawleys' employer, Cleveland-based Parker Hannifin
Corp., takes marriages between employees so much in stride that
the human-resources department has even coined a name for in-house
couples: Parker-Parkers. Nobody is quite sure how many there are,
but a good guess is 300. Again, marriage is something of a
company tradition. The $2.5-billion-a year manufacturer of motion-control
devices was founded by Arthur Parker in 1918. He married his
secretary, Helen. Their son Patrick is now chairman of the board.
Like the Schuckmans, the Cawleys met at an off-site wingding.
At the time, Lois, now 40, lived in Dallas. When she transferred to
headquarters in Ohio a couple of years later, she and Mike, 39,
started dating. They married four years ago. Her background is in
quality control and management training; he's an engineer. "Our
skills happen to mesh so well that the company probably would
have sent us both to Mexico whether we were married or not," says
Lois. "But as it is they get a 'twofer'--moving one family down here
instead of two."
PSYCHOLOGISTS and consultants who have studied couples like the
Schuckmans and the Cawleys say they are typical, in that their
unions work to the good of both them and their employers. But
before you rush down the aisle with your favorite colleague, be
aware that the experts are unanimous on one further point: In
cases where someone must pay the price of a conflict between love and
work, the couple--not the company--is most often the loser.
Being part of a twofer can damage a manager's career if
higher-ups stop seeing him or her as an individual. In FORTUNE'S
poll of CEOs, 53% cited this as a potential hazard, particularly
since circumstances sometimes dictate it. "We recently had a
situation where we promoted and transferred a wife. Her husband
accepted a lower position to accommodate the change," reports
Kerry Killinger, chief executive of Washington Mutual Savings Bank in
Seattle. N. Elizabeth Fried, a consultant and author of the book
Sex, Laws & Stereotypes, says such threats to connubial bliss can
be hard for corporate couples to avoid: "Once you're half of a
pair, it is sometimes an unspoken, unconscious assumption that
you really don't have two separate-but-equal careers anymore."
Just ask Patricia Alcorn, 46. She and her former husband spent
two decades working side by side. They built a Midwest-based
trade association from a tiny outfit with ten employees into an
influential research organization with $15 million in annual
revenues and a staff of 80. The couple divorced in May 1991. In
September disaster struck. The association was accused of over-billing
the government for staffers' time on some research
projects funded by The Environmental Protection Agency. Alcorn's
ex-husband, who was then executive director, was fired. Shortly
later, he was convicted of fraud and served a six-month prison
term. Alcorn, who wasn't involved in any malfeasance and had
been completely in the dark about her ex-husband's, spent 18 months
with a phalanx of lawyers trying to resolve the government's
claims. She also helped the board of directors recruit a new
chief. A few months after he took over, he fired her.
AGREE DISAGREE NOT SURE
Office romances increase the
possibility of favoritism or the 86% 13% 1%
appearance of favoritism.
Office romances can create an un-
businesslike appearance. 78% 21% 1%
Office romances expose the company
to the danger of sexual harassment 77% 20% 3%
suits.
Given the number of hours managers
spend in the office nowadays, 51% 46% 3%
office romances are inevitable.
The incidence of office romance has
increase in the past ten years. 35% 39% 26%
In the long run, office romances
inevitably result in problems for 21% 75% 4%
the company.
When an office romance develops, one
of the parties should leave the 17% 78% 5%
company voluntarily.
"The board kept assuring me, through all the legal trouble,
that they saw me as an individual," Alcorn says. "But clearly that
wasn't true. Employers will see you as a unit when it suits them
to do so, and not when it doesn't." Alcorn says, for example,
that when she or her former mate approached the board for a raise
or a bonus, decisions were made based on their combined household
income, even when their individual pay was modest compared with
that of other trade association executives.
Bill and Linda Moore were both managers at Digital Equipment
Corp., where they had met in 1980, before starting their own separ-
ate businesses several years ago. They say that being treated as
Siamese twins was uncomfortable for them too, although they left
DEC for other, unrelated reasons. Both worked in marketing, and
at one point reported to the same senior executive. But Linda's star
rose more quickly than Bill's, and by the time they quit, she
outranked him by several notches. Recalls Bill, 41: "Being
married to Linda was like being a rich person. If someone was
particularly nice to me, I'd find myself wondering, 'Does this person actually
like me, or do I, via Linda, have something they want?'" What
Bill had was access to higher-level information that his peers could
only guess at.
He also felt increasingly discontented with the way DEC was
handling a variety of problems, and he worried that his
criticisms would hurt Linda's career: "We were both aware that anything
either of us did would rub off on the other. When I felt decisions were
wrong-headed, I felt I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying
so. I didn't want to embarrass her."
Adds Linda: "Our being married to each other, in such a huge
company, had no negative effect on DEC whatsoever. It did have a
big effect on us, though." And on their two small daughters. In a
company-centered family, the company can become far more all
important and all consuming than in marriages where husband and
wife work for different enterprises. Because the Moores understood
each other's jobs so thoroughly, they frequently let the demands
of the business--say, an out-of-town trip on short notice--take
precedence over the quite different imperatives of family life: a
Little League game, a piano recital, the untimely death of a
gerbil, what the kid said to the moon when he thought you weren't
listening. Now, with each of the executive Moores happily working
at a different company, their schedules are under their own
control. They see more of their children. They even have long
conversations that are blessedly unrelated to work.
One question you should ask yourself before you wed a company
colleague, especially if both of you are high-profile executives,
is, How much do you value your privacy? When Joni Evans, then an
associate publisher at Simon & Schuster, married longtime
chairman Richard Snyder (recently fired by Viacom Chairman Sumner
Redstone), it's safe to assume that neither elected to see details of their
sex life turn up in the pages of legal journals. Yet that is what
happened after the couple split up in 1987. They had married nine
years earlier in characteristic workaholic fashion, at City Hall
in Manhattan during their lunch hour. So it wasn't without irony
that Snyder later blamed the demise of the marriage on Evans's
obsession with books, authors, and manuscripts. He complained during the
court proceedings that Evans was too busy working even to go with
him to a movie.
In 1979, Evans began building her own imprint, Linden Press,
within S&S. Over the following six years, she made it into a
topnotch operation with best-sellers by well known authors like
Helen Gurley Brown, Jeffrey Archer, and John Gregory Dunne. One
of her talents as an editor was in coaxing prominent people to write
their memoirs --including erstwhile Bendix whiz kid Mary
Cunningham. In 1985, Evans was promoted to president of Simon &
Schuster's trade book division. She was legendary for her
dedication, and former S&S colleagues say that her marriage to
the chairman made no difference in the way the business ran. Recalls
an editor: "People didn't defer to her because of Dick. She wouldn't
have liked that. They had offices on the same floor, and you'd
see her waiting in line outside his door to see him, just like
everyone else. They left their personal life at home."
But once their divorce made news, little was left to the
imagination. At issue in the suit, which divorce attorneys
regarded as a landmark case, was money, and lots of it. Evans maintained
that she was entitled to a chunk of Snyder's wealth, about $18
million in all, because she had played so large a part in Simon &
Schuster's success. Snyder for his part asserted that since he
had sponsored her rise to publishing stardom, he should get a piece
of all her future earnings. The proceedings became so vitriolic that
the pair even fought about visitation rights to their dog, an
ailing schnauzer named Cahrin.
The court eventually denied both spouses' demands and divided
the marital assets pretty much down the middle. But to arrive at a
determination of whether Evans and Snyder had a real marriage
under New York State law or were simply two professionals who shared
some high-priced real estate, the judge in the case was obliged to ask
for specifics about their, um, conjugal relations.
When the judge asked when was the last time she and Snyder had
had sex, Evans said matter-of-factly, "July 4, 1986." By the
time she testified, Evans had quit Simon & Schuster for rival Random
House and was so spared having to look S&Sers in the eye when the
tabloids got hold of the story. She has since moved on to the
William Morris Agency. Although she gave several reasons for
leaving what she called her "family" at Simon & Schuster, Evans
did say that working with Snyder had simply become too painful. To
hear her former colleagues tell it, that was the publishing
house's loss. Says one, wistfully: "She was so terrific. It just hasn't
been the same without her."
Even far less spectacular split-ups have the potential to send
tremors through an organization. For this reason and others, a
few companies over the years have attempted to impose rules that
prohibit all romantic relationships between employees, usually by
requiring one party to seek employment elsewhere. Such policies
now are rare, largely because of privacy laws in many states.CAN A MARRIAGE TO A COLLEAGUE DAMAGE A MANAGER'S CAREER?
Yes 53%
No 46%
Not Sure 1%
Wal-Mart used to fire anybody who committed adultery with a
fellow worker. Last year it sacked a New York woman who had a
legal separation, and her boyfriend, who was single. Although every
state technically prohibits adultery, the stricture usually doesn't
apply to people with legal separations. New York State attorney general
Robert Abrams successfully sued Wal-Mart on the grounds that an em- ployer is prohibited by New York law from sticking its nose into
employees' private lives, as long as what they are doing is not
illegal outside the workplace. Now Wal-Mart, like some other
companies, including Parker Hannifin, turns a blind eye to
anybody dating anybody with just one exception: To prevent either the
appearance or the reality of favoritism between sweetheart "one
of the two may not be in a direct supervisory position over the
other.
- Beyond that, most human-resource departments make no attempt to
stay the hand of Cupid. (They do, of course, strictly prohibit
the kind of unwelcome, one-sided pursuit that is sexual harassment.)
In a survey of its membership three years ago, the Society for Human
Resource Management (formerly known as the American Society for
Personnel Administration) found that 92% had no policy at all
regarding love at work. Over 70% said that indeed they "permit
and accept" it, while only a tiny 1.5% minority were bent on banning
romance.
Such tolerance is partly because nobody wants a Wal-Mart-style
suit. But human-resource managers also recognize that, as
researcher James Dillard points out, "Human beings are each
unique, and their relationships are infinitely various. It would be a
mistake to try and prevent a few isolated problems by making
restrictions that cover everybody." Or, as Garrison Keillor implored the National Press Club in a speech last spring in
Washington, D.C., "Let us be careful not to make a world so fine
and good that none of us can enjoy living in it." Telling people
with whom they may fall in love is, well, futile. It's like
explaining golf to your dog. He will gaze respectfully at you
and then, as soon as you have stopped talking, grab the ball and run
gleefully into the woods with it.
Corporations are evolving. As the old lifetime employment
guarantee fades into history, employees--particularly the best
and brightest ones--are less willing to let a company dictate the
terms of their private lives. Even with the divorce rate at decidedly
post-Ozzie-and Harriet levels, a marriage these days is likely to
last longer than a job. It may be more satisfying too, a bulwark
of comfort in a swelling sea of economic uncertainty. The 1.5% of
employers still struggling to wrestle Eros to the ground will
find, if they haven't already, that they can no more stamp out sex than
they can enforce rules against gossip, day-dreaming, or wine with
lunch. Life on the job is full of such glorious distractions.
Would we really want it any other way?
| 
