And if you pride yourself on having a hands-on management style and being very personal and casual with your employees, then you probably know more about your employees' personal lives than even their loved ones. They probably think they know a great deal about you, too. Add in that you write the schedules, assign stations, issue reprimands and write-ups: In other words, you control the situation. Do you see a potential problem?
At some point in your career, you may find it very tempting to have a drink, then date, or in corporate language fraternize with your employees. It might start by accidentally meeting after work when you've stopped in for a drink. It may be at a casual get-together when several employees urge you to join them after a tough shift.
Whatever the circumstances, it often starts innocently enough. Even more ominous is when you find yourself attracted to one of your employees, but you believe it won't affect your work environment. You may think you'll be able to keep it a secret. After all, you are both mature and responsible. No one will find out. This is a fantasy. First, rumors will start. There are no secrets in the restaurant business.
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Eventually, someone will confront you. Panic will set in because you will have no idea what to do about it. There are really only two possible outcomes when you date an employee. One is that you will fall in love and live happily ever after. The second and most probable outcome is that you will break up.
How difficult is this to deal with? Think about the worst breakup that you've had with a significant other. Pretty bad wasn't it? Now picture that happening in front of everyone at work. At best, you'll be pitied by the staff members who are sympathetic. At the worst, you'll be the villain. And nevermind the potential for humiliating or embarrassing "episodes" To make matters worse, the employee could go to your general manager or corporate manager and accuse you of sexual harassment. She or he could say that she was only going out with you because she feared she would have been fired if she didn't.
Even if your relationship was totally consenting, you will most probably lose the sexual harassment lawsuit. Think about it; once you start dating, your employee could also claim that he or she feared losing his or her job unless you kept seeing each other. You would have a hard time finding another job in a slow economy, but I can hop over to "Brand X" and bring at least 2 million in sales with me.
Brand X says, "Great. How do you think your chances of promotion are, now? That's why intra-office dating is never a good idea.
Manager & Employee Dating
Working with a spouse is another potential disaster, but for entirely different reasons. In the case of two people who happen to be employed by the same company, but don't have any work relationship, it's mostly Ok, at least as long as their relationship is fine, and even after that, if they manage to separate cleanly - which many people manage to do, and if one or both can't, then you had troublesome people anyway.
The exception is companies that are very security conscious, for example a bank, which may have lots of protections against crooked employees, but not against two crooked employees working together. In the case of supervisor and subordinate: That is asking for serious trouble, because that supervisor is always in danger of giving preferential treatment to their relationship, which then will cause trouble for everyone involved and around them.
So a company will try to split them up. Which will hamper someone's career. Which is Ok-ish if you are getting married I would still have married my wife if it had cost one of us our jobs, and she would have married me , but for a fresh relationship that is very bad. In the case of company owner and subordinate: For the subordinate it's a very dangerous game.
Worse than supervisor and subordinate, because there is no HR or boss stopping the company owner, if things go wrong. For the boss it's a huge opportunity to demonstrate either that he or she is a decent human being, or that he or she is no such thing. In the case of supervisor: So this should only be done if both sides are really, really sure that this is the one.
On the other hand, if two people seriously want to be in a relationship, their jobs shouldn't stop them.
Prohibited by Policy?
In that case you both do your best to stay professional while persuing your relationship, and accept the consequences. By clicking "Post Your Answer", you acknowledge that you have read our updated terms of service , privacy policy and cookie policy , and that your continued use of the website is subject to these policies. Home Questions Tags Users Unanswered. Why are romantic relationships with someone who works under you discouraged?
Rachel 6, 8 42 Hi Dave, I've modified your question to address the concerns raised by Chad, and have voted to reopen it. If I've changed it too much from your original question, feel free to edit it further or roll back the changes.
Manager & Employee Dating | pcppk.com
That's easy and it can be answered in three words so I won't post it as an actual answer "Conflict of interest". Even if you are "sure" that you can handle things professionally and keep work and social life separated. Don't forget that a relationship consists of two people. I knew this PhD guy once. His wife was also a PhD in the same field. They met and started dating when she was studying under him. How could THAT go wrong, right?
They probably broke all sorts of university regulations and crossed a bunch of boundaries. But hey, happily married with 2 kids. Dating subordinates is almost always a bad idea, except when it's a great idea. Now 6 months later have you found out? Ok let's be blunt and share some of the negative consequences I have personally experienced or observed from bosses dating their subordinates: I have seen people promoted over qualifed people to jobs they were neither qualified for nor good at. I have seen an unsatisfactory performance appraisal which was well-deserved be changed to an Outstanding I have seen more qualifed people quit rather than work for the unqualifed person promoted over them I have seen a co-worker flash her sexual parts in a meeting after she and the boss had had a fight.
To say this made everyone else in the room uncomfortable is a mild understatement. I have heard them having sex in his office during work hours which made for very uncomfortable meetings later on the same offce. I have seen a subordinate who had no business knowing about a performance issue with another employee, come to work and brag about how she knew and how much trouble the other person would be in.
I have seen bad suggestions implemented because they came from the person who was in the relationship even though all the entire rest of the staff objected to the decision.
BTW some of these decisions lost the company a good deal of money. I have seen the entire staff complain to higher managers about a problem which the couple involved vehemently denied was happening. The couple almost always thinks their relationship is causing no issues whatsoever. I have seen the workplace become absolutely toxic when the relationship breaks up until the subordinate finds a another job or is fired.
I have seen clients be appalled at the unprofessional behavior a person in a relationship exhibited in front of them and the manager not care to fix the problem because it would disrupt his social life. It is risky, it is far less likely to work than not to work. It takes a special amount of ability to separate work from home and to treat the person differntly in each situation. Very few people have the ability to do that in my experience. Clearly though you want to be told, "Go for it".
Harassment Claims and Preferential Treatment
Sorry, my advice is there are plenty of people who don't work for you to date. Keep the personal and professional separate by not allowing there to be crossover.
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Just because he's Dave and he's asking about a romantic relationship, doesn't necessarily mean the other party is a her Konerak, that is true, I just used the pronouns for the most common scenario. And hey womena are expected to be fine with people using he to describe them, so men shouldn't be insulted when it goes the other way either, should they?
DaveM - Dave, Dave, Dave. If you are interpreting this answer as saying "it can work in some cases" then you are hearing what you want to hear right now. Which means you aren't sounding like someone with an exceptional ability to pull something like this off. Dating an employee is a bad idea for several reasons: Once it's out that you're dating, anything positive that you do for this employee can appear to be based on non-work-related reasons If you break up, anything bad that happens to her can appear to be based on non-work-related reasons It can bring non-work-related issues into the office In short, there's a reason that many large companies explicitly state in their employee handbooks that supervisors can't date the employees they supervise, and if you run the company, you supervise everyone.
Adam V Adam V 8, 2 28 I would change the can appear to will appear. I would also add that in some types of jobs, having partners who are dating or married in particular roles can enable a number of internal control problems that could cause substantial injury to the company. If you do something nice for someone, it can always appear to them or others as if it was instigated for non-work reasons.