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There is no doubt that it is less appealing to text a colleague with a flashing emoji than to exchange a cozy glance at the coffee machine.
The fleeting interactions that once triggered office romances have become impossible during the pandemic, where many have gone home to work.
Despite this, workers have found ways to continue flirting with their colleagues, a fact that suggests the inevitability of office or workplace romance.
Data from February 2022 from the American Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) suggest that romance in the workplace may have increased even while working from home.
One-third of the 550 respondents said they had formed or maintained a relationship with a colleague during the pandemic, a 6% increase since the days before the global health crisis.
The workplace is the breeding ground for love and fleeting love. Still, many companies wrinkle their noses at peer matching and see it as an HR nightmare.
Experts say there are specific reasons why employees simply cannot stop engaging with their peers, even when isolated during a global health crisis.
Something as old as time
Although the topic is considered taboo, 75% of respondents to the SHRM survey said they were okay with their colleagues’ dating. After all, half of them said they liked a colleague at one point.
And while fraternization is a headache for many businesses, the romance between colleagues has existed for decades, even centuries.
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Loves in the office can still flourish outside this space, certain psychological prejudices can still push us towards colleagues …
“Even going back to the industrial age, there was already discussion about the attraction of people to the workplace,” explains Amy Nicole Baker, a professor at the University of New Haven in the United States who studies these phenomena and organizational psychology.
As early as the 19th century, romantic interactions took place in early administrative work, with women and men in offices engaging in “unnamed behavior,” according to critics of the time.
But many couples meet at work, and it does not necessarily end in scandal (on the contrary, it can end in an adventure, like the Obama family, who met at a law firm in Chicago when they were in their twenties).
Data from 2017 shows that one in 10 heterosexual couples in the United States says they have met each other at work.
There is some data showing that people between the ages of 20 and 50 spend almost four times as much time with colleagues as they do with friends, so it seems to happen naturally.
“It’s no surprise that so many people notice people at work,” because work “takes up more and more of our time” over the years, “said Vanessa Bohns, professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University (USA), who studies dynamics. in love relationships between colleagues.
While the most common methods of finding a partner fluctuate (more people meet via the Internet, for example, and fewer people meet through family friends), those who find love at work are “a constant” in the statistics, according to Ms. Baker.
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Michelle and Barack Obama met at a law firm in Chicago.
This constantly continued until the pandemic, a time when interaction with colleagues may actually seem less risky because you are not under the watchful eye of your boss or teammates.
Some colleagues even work in secret with one or the other while getting used to working externally.
“As long as people interact in a shared work environment, you will see the basic mechanics of human attraction happen,” Baker says. Whether the environment is physical or virtual.
And the psychology behind these mechanisms inevitably draws colleagues to something else, even during a pandemic.
Intimacy and intimacy
According to Amie Gordon, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan (USA), who studies the psychology of relationships, the workplace is a privileged place for the development of two key factors for attraction.
Spending so much time with someone “could possibly pave the way for romance because of all the factors we know contribute to desire: intimacy and intimacy,” she says.
First, the more we see something (or someone), the more likely we are to like it. This trait of intimacy is a psychological bias called the mere exposure effect: “Just seeing someone repeatedly” can generate attraction, Gordon says.
Research has shown that being near someone for a long time can help stimulate a preference for them; the more we see a person physically, and the more interactions we have with them, the faster interpersonal attraction develops.
This bias may even apply to managers who favor employees who spend more time with them.
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Both psychologists and human resource experts agree that peer romance is inevitable and should be managed wisely rather than forbidden or taboo.
But this prejudice is not limited to physical proximity.
“It’s also about emotional closeness and intellectual closeness,” Ms Baker says. Whether it’s email or Zoom, “they always interact with each other,” she says.
This constant exposure and interaction breeds preferences regardless of physical location, which may explain why office romance has survived the era of telecommuting.
Another factor that transcends the physical office is people’s preference for people who are similar to them, which could extend to work, given that colleagues have chosen the same career and business.
“If you are both lawyers, or if you both have the same background, or think of the world in the same way, that similarity will also promote sympathy and understanding,” Ms. Baker said.
It’s inevitable, what now?
Although office romance is almost inevitable and widely accepted, it is still complicated.
First, it can increase the risk of sexual harassment, hostile work environments and create conflicts of interest.
More commonly, an office romance can also make the rest of the team uncomfortable and affect performance.
“Once a team member has a relationship and they are no longer just a colleague, it changes the norm in an uncomfortable way,” Bohns notes. “You do not know what is appropriate anymore.”
But since office love does not disappear, some experts believe that smart companies will allow their employees to date, while ensuring that professional boundaries are not exceeded.
“The best approach is to deal with the problem instead of pretending it does not exist or should not exist,” said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., SHRM’s CEO.
If you are starting an office romance, experts encourage you to think about your motivations and weigh the pros and cons.
If you have a relationship with a boss or subordinate, they strongly recommend that you notify Human Resources immediately and request a reassignment from the supervisor.
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But if you’re dating a partner, a situation that most people consider less risky or problematic than dating someone with a different level of power, it’s up to you to tell someone other than the human resources department, according to Ms. Baker.
You need to know that the rest of the team “will figure it out,” Taylor says.
Mrs Baker believes that this approach should be adopted as soon as possible; the longer a person waits to reveal a relationship, the more others will “feel they are hiding something” and “react negatively.”
Despite these rules and potentially precarious situations, office romances will continue to exist, and with all the psychological factors at stake, it’s hard to blame colleagues for falling in love with each other.
However, it is important that employees are aware of the consequences, no matter how relaxed the team is or how trivial the consequences are.
After all, not all office romances end in “happy ever after”, and it’s not fun to see your ex’s face on your daily Zoom call.