NEW YORK — For all the potential peril of a workplace romance, the most common source of trouble, experts say, is allowing it to remain a secret.
A case in point was this week’s abrupt ouster of longtime CNN chief executive Jeff Zucker, who said he was ’’wrong” in not being upfront with the network about a consensual relationship he was having with another executive.
Zucker only acknowledged his relationship with CNN chief marketing officer Allison Gollust after being questioned about it during an investigation of now-fired anchor Chris Cuomo. The executive shakeup comes at a pivotal moment for CNN, and prominent employees have expressed dismay that things weren’t handled differently.
Zucker is hardly alone in finding love at the office. About a third of U.S. workers say they are in a workplace relationship or have been in one — and the trend has been on the rise since the start of the pandemic, according to trade association Society for Human Resource Management.
Most big corporations have a policy on workplace romance, but the majority of U.S. businesses do not, according to SHRM. Corporate policies can vary from forbidding all relationships to just those between managers and subordinates. Some simply require disclosure.
Among smaller businesses, there are rarely rules at all. Nearly 80% of U.S. workers say that their employer does not require them to disclose a workplace romance, according to the most recent data from SHRM.
And that can cause just as much trouble as employees keeping relationships secret from a company that actually has a policy.
A policy protects workers from “quid pro quo” relationships, it protects a company’s morale, and ideally protects against lawsuits and scandals.
“Companies that choose to look the other way are the ones that are allowing a smoldering fire to turn into an inferno,” said David Lewis, CEO of Operations Inc., a human resources consulting firm. “Countless organizations have chosen to not deal with these head on and have paid dearly as a result.”
Hidden consensual romances present their own problems for companies, especially when top executives are involved. Because of the potential for power dynamics to come into play, a relationship with a lower-level employee is usually against policy, even if it is consensual.
When such a relationship comes to light, it often causes a public relations nightmare. In 2019, McDonald’s fired CEO Steve Easterbrook after he acknowledged exchanging videos and text messages in a non-physical, consensual relationship with an employee. McDonald’s forbids managers from having romantic relationships with direct or indirect subordinates. Then, the company sued him in 2020 when other relationships came to light that he had lied about. Easterbrook ended up returning $105 million to settle the suit.
