How Employers Should Handle Workplace Romance

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Without it, small firms can be wiped out even if they've done nothing wrong and they win their cases.

You mentioned relationships between supervisors and subordinates. Do you recommend a written policy against those?

I really don't, for the same reasons we talked about. But I do recommend sexual harassment training for managers, where we show them how difficult it is even if the relationship is as amicable as possible. I want managers to know how much danger these relationships put them and the company in.

Of course, that doesn't prevent someone falling in love with a person they supervise.

No. And people should not immediately have a visceral reaction that that kind of relationship is wrong and should stop. We all know plenty of people who met their spouses at work or had relationships with the boss.

The main problem, though, is that if a supervisor and subordinate have a love relationship, their work relationship will immediately be complicated by the perception of favoritism.

What are the legal pitfalls?

Any supervisor in a romantic relationship with a subordinate is immediately vulnerable to claims of quid pro quo sexual harassment, where an employee can claim she was offered a raise or a promotion if she sleeps with her supervisor.

Most quid pro quo lawsuits are he said/she said cases, which get to a jury almost every time. It's a dangerous position to put the company in, and small businesses are all the more vulnerable because the manager may be the owner or a close family member or friend.

What should an employer's response be to the supervisor/subordinate relationship, if one develops?

I insist that clients transfer one of the employees—usually it's the subordinate—so they are not reporting to each other. You have to make it happen fast, because these relationships are usually kept secret for as long as possible.

You still want to have a conversation and get both people in the room—and again, there's no way you can tell people to stop seeing each other. If you do, the relationship will go more underground, and the parties will feel more angry and upset.

If the relationship ends, are there still liabilities for the company?

Yes. The relationship may end with the two of them being friends. But later, if that supervisor gives the subordinate a bad performance review because she's no longer doing a good job, she can claim that her reviews were fine when she was sleeping with him. Now that she's not, she doesn't get the raise. The subordinate employee can really control the scenario at that point.

And other employees can sue for sexual favoritism. "My co-worker's sleeping with the boss, and now she's getting all this great work. Everybody knew about it, so the owner of the company had to have known." That's a claim that will get past the smell test for sure. People get crazy when these situations occur.

Is the supervisor/subordinate relationship still mostly male/female?

The world hasn't changed all that much. It's more prevalent than it was 10 or 20 years ago to have a female supervisor and a man subordinate, but it's obviously just not as common. But when men do make these claims, the law treats them identically. Same-sex sexual harassment is treated exactly the same.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

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