Finding Love at Work: How to Keep an Office Romance Professional
Meet VoIP Supply’s happily married couple – Shawn Hess in Engineering and Stephanie Hess in Accounting
In honor of Valentines Day, I’d like to share what VoIP Supply’s CEO, Ben Sayers had to say about employees hooking up at work.
Sayers was recently featured in Barbara Haislip’s Wall Street Journal article, Romance Can Disrupt a Small Firm which explores what bosses need to do to “make sure lovebirds stay professional.”
Love is Tricky – Office or No Office
VoIP Supply featured in Wall Street Journal
Haislip talked to small business owners to find out how they manage what could be a tricky situation; co-workers falling into and out of love.
How do you make sure that it doesn’t interfere with business?
What do you do if the relationship takes a bad turn because, “If a romance sours, not only can it poison the mood of the whole office, there’s also the risk of having a sexual-harassment suit filed against the company—something few small firms can afford.”
Bring Your Spouse to Work Day, Everyday
At one point VoIP Supply, a company of 30 people, had up to four married and/or engaged couples working in the same office:
Ben Sayers, chief executive and owner of VoIP Supply LLC, a 30-employee e-commerce company in Buffalo, N.Y., says he’s had lots of couples in the workplace—”at one point, exactly one-third of the whole workforce was married to or dating a co-worker.”
In most cases, he says, a simple conversation was all it took to keep the situation on track. In the chat, he would make clear that the relationship was fine as long as “it had no negative performance effect, it was not a distraction to other employees and that they kept their personal disagreements at home and not center stage at work.”
Still, gossip and lack of productivity can easily happen. Find out more by reading the full article here.
