I was listening to an interesting CrankyGeeks episode earlier today on the drive to work — the whole show was a rather lively discussion on the current mindset regarding the dreaded Office Romance, and how to handle it, both from an employee-perspective and a management-perspective.
I actually have some very strong feelings about office romances, and essentially they boil down to: "Don’t do it." This is more of a personal rule though, and not something I enforce as a matter of company policy. There are obvious reasons why. The first (and possibly most important) is that you lose your objectivity when the person you are working with is also the person you happen to be sharing a bed with. I consider myself to be a pretty rational person, but I cannot bring myself to openly criticize the work of someone I am intimately involved with.
The second is that you lose flexibility in both professional and romantic capacities; you cannot fire that person without inevitably breaking up with him/her, and vice versa. Similarly, rewarding that person in the workplace becomes an act loaded with symbolism, regardless of whether that was your intention.
And lastly, my personal relationships are the only remaining part of my life that I can still separate from work. Even my hobbies (blogging, watching movies, listening to music) are work-related to some degree. I’d like to keep it that way, if at all possible.
… This isn’t a rant btw (or even a mild complaint), it’s just me being truthy.
A lot of old-school CEOs have much the same thoughts on this, and for the same reasons. However, one of the things I’ve been realizing over the past year or so is that it’s impossible to enforce a "no-dating" policy because of the way people tend to look at their jobs these days. We’re spending larger and larger chunks of our lives in the workplace. If you can’t date someone in your office, then who can you date? You don’t have the time to meet anyone else. This is especially true in large companies, where the dating pool is bigger and thus more likely to yield a potential match. Thus, office-dating becomes both the reason to stay at work longer, and a consequence of staying at work longer.
At syndeo::media, the solution was a bit simpler. Instead of trying to create an atmosphere in the workplace where the team can feel comfortable to interact socially (which may or may not backfire; hell I’m no a party liaison), we’ve chosen to decouple the "work" from the "workplace." Because you’re only required to be in the office 20 hours a week, you’re a lot more flexible with the relationships you develop outside of the work environment. That’s not to say that we don’t all work 40+ hours a week; we still do of course. The difference is that we don’t limit the time and place where those 40-hours worth of work are supposed to occur.
Whether or not this will turn out to be a good solution is largely dependent on the members of the team. What I tend to look for in new hires is a kind of passion that is wholly internal; meaning, you care about the work first and foremost. This is especially important in our particular line because you are often working by yourself for long stretches (say, a day or two at a time) with very little supervision. How you manage your time during that stretch should be completely up to you.