Produced by | Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
Author | Wooden boy
Edit 丨 Slag County
Caption | "The love affair between the minister and the social animal is anxious"
This article was first published on the tiger sniff young content public account "That NG" (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the face, stories and attitudes of today's young people.
Another domineering president, collapsed under the stumbling block of office romance.
Earlier this month, Jeff Zucker, CNN's global president, was forced to announce his resignation after his close relationship with a company executive was exposed.
Jeff Zucker (left) and Allison Gollust (right)
Because the beauty lost the country, far more than zach.
But what makes me curious is: When did the office romance begin to become a resignation sin?
"Don't fall in love! Don't fall in love! Don't fall in love! ”
In the advice package prepared for newcomers in the workplace, every KOL who teaches you to be a person does not forget to emphasize that you must not fall in love with your office colleagues, otherwise the company's regulations will make you regret it in minutes.
But no matter how many "severe punishments" there are, they can't control the young people's excitement towards the colleagues around them.
The "2021 Workplace Love Atlas" released by DT Finance shows that nearly 60% of the workplace people have had throbbing feelings for colleagues, of which the proportion of male heartbeats is close to 60%, women are slightly lower than men, and half of them have secretly agreed.
"2021 Workplace Love Picture Book"
The "2018 Workplace Marriage and Love Survey Report" released by Zhen'ai Network and Zhaopin Recruitment also pointed out that more than 70% of single professionals support office romance. Among them, 6 adults proposed that enterprises need to provide single benefits, 34.82% of them hoped that the company would recruit more high-quality colleagues, and 31.62% hoped to have more networking activities.
"2018 Workplace Marriage and Love Research Report"
Knowing that there are tigers in the mountains that are biased towards the tiger mountain line, I don't blame young people for not being interesting, but the office scene is too charming.
Above the workplace, there are many long-term bodies.
According to the "Five Views of Workplace Love Survey Report" released by Zhaopin Recruitment and Zhen'ai Network, in 2020, 49.8% of the people in the workplace have been single for more than 3 years, and all respondents have not received love for an average of 24.55 months.
More than half of them have a strong desire to get rid of the single, but they suffer from the fact that the circle of life is too small, and it is difficult to meet the excellent opposite sex.
"Five Views of Workplace Love Research Report"
At first, they had some unrealistic fantasies about love.
According to the report, the most respected channel of understanding of the opposite sex among people in the workplace is "natural encounters".
But life is not a movie, where are there so many opportunities for romantic encounters?
Soon someone came back to taste, Xinxin hit the worker, which deserves to talk about what "natural encounter".
24 hours a day, remove 8 hours of rest, the remaining 16 hours of waking time, at least 8 hours spent in the company, and then subtract 2 hours of commuting, 2 hours of life trivial, the real time of their own is counted, brush mobile phone is fleeting.
Not to mention the overtime fighters of 996 and 007, people almost live in the company, and colleagues are the biggest intersection between us and the real opposite sex.
The "2021 Domestic Youth Love and Dating White Paper" shows that more than 60% of young people with objects are found from "colleagues/classmates/friends".
Don't look at the dating software hype, in fact, the people around you who can see and touch are the most likely potential partners.
"2021 Domestic Youth Love and Dating White Paper"
The most common "people around" in the workplace are naturally colleagues in the office.
Looking up and not looking down, the challenges of all aspects of work are more like human trials, unreliable unobstructed glances, eye-catching work data, or a cup of hand-warming coffee that works overtime late at night, which is always more convincing than the self-aggrandizement at the blind date dinner table.
"The Winner is Justice"
After a year of office love, Lin Wen, a mechanical engineer who has just achieved positive results with colleagues, told me:
Office romance is an economical and affordable option.
The most intuitive thing is to save the time cost in love. In the past, when I was in love with my previous girlfriend, it was "Jun lives in Chaoyangtou, I live in Haidianwei", each date will take more than two hours of one-way time, if you catch overtime, at most have a meal together, without saying two sentences, you have to return, making you physically and mentally exhausted.
And falling in love with a colleague, there is no such trouble. Where love is concerned, one eye can convey the signal of love, in and out of the company, lunch together, not only save time, but also reduce the cost of money on the date.
"Newlywed Sweethearts Are Colleagues"
And the two are in the same company, invisibly adding a lot of common topics.
"Walking through the window together, carrying a gun together", the four major irons in the world, all come from the common life experience.
Exchange work troubles, gossip about colleagues' news, spit together, comfort each other, even if the personal interests are different, office couples have never lacked chat topics that both parties are interested in.
The common experience at work is more conducive to the deepening of understanding between the two sides.
Couples always need a long trip to test each other, take advantage of the accidents in the journey, and peel off the disguise in the comfortable environment.
And the office couple does not need to be so troublesome, the ditches and bumps in the work are enough to make a person's temper come out.
If other restrictions are not taken into account, the office can be said to be a "love resort" that has been on the pain points of workers.
"Kai's New Life"
However, in the eyes of company managers, the office tainted by love is more like a depraved "Sodom", chaotic and heinous.
A senior HR told me that the criteria for HR judgment are:
"If a company's office romance is prevalent, then the company must be unhealthy, and there is a high probability that something will go wrong."
The Wonderful Story of the World
Managers worry that love stirring into work will have an impact on the company's identity order.
Things become especially dangerous when romances occur between middle and senior leaders and subordinates.
"It's a bit of a competition."
Zhang Xin, vice principal of a preschool education institution, found that when her relationship with her boyfriend was made public in the office, the attitude of colleagues underwent a subtle change, some of the once unscrupulous conversations disappeared, and there were many more taboos in daily topics.
Although she tried to use the highest standards to evaluate her boyfriend's work as much as possible, and tried to maintain the image of business and selflessness, her colleagues were obviously skeptical.
"The Wonderful Story of the World": The superior-subordinate love that can happen in the office is in the spotlight
Colleagues are not surprised by their suspicions, and HR friends told me that in many small companies, it is very common for leaders to use their authority to help their lovers and subordinates get big orders, raise salaries, and quickly promote.
"If you can get a promotion and a high salary by falling in love, then who wants to work well?" 」
Seeing a lot of workplace environments that have become smoky because of office romances, she can't help but bring some indignation when talking about this matter.
Once the cross-level workplace love is discovered, the leader and other subordinates will fall into an insoluble crisis of trust.
Suspicion is like a small seed buried deep into the team, nothing happens, and once it encounters a little wind and waves, it will quickly take root, drill the levees, and become a vent of anger.
Therefore, the cross-level love from the middle and high levels, in any company, is the "number one suspect" who is strictly guarded.
World of Wonders: Admit it, you're obsessed with your colleagues
In comparison, the love environment at the same level and grassroots level is relatively relaxed, and sometimes the company will turn a blind eye.
But grassroots couples can also cause trouble for the company.
With the blessing of intimate relationships, many lovers will temporarily forget their professional identities and leak secrets from different departments to each other.
Imagine that when an HR who is overwhelmed by love reveals the salary composition of everyone in the company to his partner, and the partner tells his colleagues and friends in the pantry, this may become the biggest nightmare that the HR department will never forget.
"The love affair between the minister and the social animal is anxious"
In addition, the office polyamorous jealousy, mutual revenge after the breakdown of the relationship, and the sexual harassment complaints that accompany the true and false love affairs are difficult to distinguish... The complexity of the troubles that office romance can bring to the company can be imagined by watching any workplace drama that has been serialized for more than 5 seasons.
One of the most intractable is the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace.
In 2017, Susan, a former software engineer at Uber, accused Uber of sheltering her boss who sexually harassed her for performance reasons. Triggering the "remove Uber" campaign, the company's reputation was greatly damaged, and 200,000 users uninstalled Uber within a week. The incident eventually led to the resignation of former CEO Travis Kalanick and a change of blood at the top.
In 2018, thousands of Google employees in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and around the world went on strike to protest the company's sexual harassment in the workplace and the cover-up of executives' extramarital affairs.
Google employees protest march
Sexual harassment in the workplace is most likely to be packaged as an office romance before it is revealed. After the couple breaks up, some people also file sexual harassment complaints against their exs out of revenge.
True and false, true and false, true and false are difficult to distinguish, whether true or false, in the increasingly sensitive moment, as long as the three words "sexual harassment" are mentioned, it is a public opinion storm that makes the company headache.
To this end, many companies at home and abroad have set a clear ban on office romance.
According to a 2020 harvard business review survey, about 26% of Chinese companies have a clear office romance policy.
Most of the Internet manufacturers allow cross-BU love with "blood relations" farther away, but prohibit "close marriage" between the same department and the romantic relationship between ordinary employees and HR.
Relevant regulations on the relationship between the offices of major Internet manufacturers counted by pulse users (some of which are controversial)
Some education companies with stricter requirements for private morality have completely banned any form of office romance. Even different departments do not support the development of intimate relationships.
In the United States, according to the Human Resource Management Association (SHRM), the world's largest association of human resources professionals, as early as 2013, 42% of companies in the United States had a "consensual relationship" policy to regulate romantic relationships in the office.
Among them, 99% prohibit bosses from interacting with direct subordinates, 45% prohibit workplace dramas with significant rank differences from having hegemonic relationships, and 35% prohibit employees who report to the same supervisor from dating.
SHRM: One in three Americans has experienced an office romance
Once a non-compliant relationship is discovered, one party will leave, or at worst, both will be fired.
Contemporary office romance has become a kind of "workplace loss" that can lead to the loss of work.
But if you are in love, you have to resign, when did this start the rule?
Back thirty years, office romance is not so much that everyone shouts.
Rather, it was a welcome event.
A long-running Stanford study of how partners meet and spend time together (HCMST) found that in 2017, only 11 percent of Americans found their long-term partner in the office, up from nearly double in 1995 as in 2017.
China's environment is more relaxed.
One of the most popular TV series in 1990, "Longing", began with the wind and snow moon in the factory. Liu Huifang, a young and beautiful female worker, was also pursued by Song Dacheng, deputy director of the workshop, and Wang Husheng, a college graduate who came to work in the factory, not only in the workplace romantically, but also in a triangular relationship.
"Longing"
No one accused Liu Song and others of being "unscrupulous in the workplace", let alone leaders who stood up and righteously proposed expulsion.
In China in the last century, it was as common as eating and drinking in China, when workers and employees of the same unit were married.
Aunt Chen, who has introduced the object to many people in the unit, said, "The best of a unit, know the roots, and the room is still close, convenient."
The romantic weddings of that era IG@ the Beijing Silver Mine
The unit not only does not prohibit employees from developing intimate relationships, but also encourages them in all aspects.
In the old state-owned factory with good benefits, networking activities are often held; the canteen undertakes wedding business, with low fees, and specially runs seats for the workers of the factory. Before the newlyweds register their marriage with the Civil Affairs Bureau, the unit will issue a single certificate for them.
In the final analysis, the internal digestion of the marriage needs of "big factory people" is both reasonable and reasonable, and if there is no office romance, a large number of post-8090 birth certificates may have to be rewritten.
In "Hello, Li Huanying", Li Huanying and his wife are colleagues of the same unit
From strong support to chasing and blocking, why has the environment changed so much in the workplace marriage attitude of employees in the past three decades?
An interesting observation is that in China, this shift seems to have occurred with changes in the employment environment.
In the wave of marketization, more and more people choose to go from relatively stable state-owned enterprises to private enterprises that are more eager for market benefits, and the wind evaluation of office romance has quietly changed.
In fact, in the enterprises with strong genes in state-owned enterprises, there are still the traditional relics of Yucheng's good deeds in the workplace, and the human resources department personally takes the lead in organizing regular networking activities for single employees in the company.
What changes with the nature of the company is the relationship between people and the company.
In the past, the state-owned enterprises came as a family, and worked for a lifetime, from the cradle to the cemetery, the unit was eager to do it all for you.
The private enterprises that have emerged in the new millennium are more like barracks, iron battalions and flowing soldiers, employees no longer pay attention to the morality of the end, the company does not expect to be with employees for a long time, only hope that in a limited period of a meeting, can be less worry.
Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene: "We, and all other animals, are machines created by our own genes. One of the standout characteristics of the success gene is ruthless selfishness. ”
As the "survival machine" of genes, human beings seem to be free and autonomous all their lives, making wedding dresses for the monotonous goal of "gene reproduction".
Richard Dawkins
In today's era of unprecedented mobility and weakening of all stable connections, is "employee and company" not another pair of "human beings and genes"?
The "selfish company" is like an independent life, it calmly devours every employee, in a mature enterprise, nothing can override the company's development and earnings.
The complete set of scientific management theories teaches us how to make a company run more efficiently and produce more output, but we don't care whether this is in line with the life aspirations of employees.
When we—the children of our parents, the parents of our children, the husband's husband, the husband's lover—sit in the cubicle, our identities and names disappear together, and the individual melts into a screw that can be replaced at any time.
The Journalist
For ordinary employees, office romance may be a delicious spice for lighting up happiness in boring work, like a few minutes of idleness in the aroma of coffee at ten o'clock in the morning, a game in the toilet cubicle at three o'clock in the afternoon, useless, but it makes us live more popular.
But for companies that chase efficiency, it's just an inferior gene that reduces competitiveness for survival.
If every enterprise is compared to a person, then the state-owned enterprises backed by the big tree are the sons of the people with solid families and no worries, while the self-reliant private enterprises are self-made and walking on thin ice.
According to the "2020 China Enterprise Development Data Annual Report", under the pressure of the epidemic in 2020, private enterprises are struggling, and the growth of new registrations is less than 7%. State-owned enterprises with strong "anti-pressure" ability registered 13,600 enterprises in the whole year, an increase of 23.1% year-on-year.
2020 China Enterprise Development Data Annual Report
Everyone has their own calmness and has time to care about music, art, literature and love.
But Bai Ding can't, just living has done his best, he wants to fight for his own life, for this reason there can be no flaw in his body, even if it is love.
"Falling in love is like stealing."
Lin Wen told me that during the relationship with colleagues, they could only meet quietly in the pantry, pretending not to be familiar at work, and deliberately "traveling at the wrong peak" when commuting to work. The only thing that went out of the ordinary was to replace the phone case with a hazy photo of the two people.
Although some companies claim that as long as employees voluntarily declare to the company after the relationship begins and get the company's permission, they can avoid the worry of dismissal.
But the SHRM survey found that "a lot of people would rather kiss a rattlesnake than go to hr resources and say, "I've had a voluntary relationship with my colleagues." ”
Smart people have long seen through that in the office love matter, the company and employees sitting on different chairs, one pursuing jiangshan eternal solidity, one pursuing personal happiness, can never unify their positions.
Not to mention the possible ridicule and estrangement between colleagues after the exposure of the relationship.
Concealing the sky and crossing the sea and being well with each other is the most worry-free choice.
Admittedly, office romances are risky, worrying the company when they are together, embarrassing both parties after a breakup, but "its crime to death"?
In fact, from a legal point of view, the "forbidden love order" that links love and work is only a kind of "workplace lynching", and office romance does not constitute a reason to dismiss employees.
In 2020, a high-tech company fired a male employee who entered the couple late on the grounds that the employee violated the office love ban. In accordance with the contract signed at the time of entry, the male employee is required not to claim the corresponding financial compensation.
The male employee filed a lawsuit in court, arguing that the "prohibition of internal love between employees of the company" violated his marital autonomy and that this provision should be null and void.
Although the company argued that the company's "no love" clause was included in the employment contract signed by the employee, the employee was aware of this provision when he signed it.
But the court ultimately ruled that the Civil Code gave every citizen the right to marry freely. A company contract that violates this provision shall be deemed invalid. In the end, the company was sentenced to terminate the labor contract for violating the law and pay more than 50,000 yuan in compensation to the employee.
In essence, the company's vigilance against office love stems from concerns about business safety, just imagine if the procurement and cashier are a couple, it is really impossible for the operator to sleep at night. However, at a time when careers are highly subdivided, the vast majority of forbidden workplace romances may not involve this critical power node at all.
Speaking of individuals, although there are many people on the Internet who pose various problems with workplace love, there are also studies that show that office romance not only does not reduce employee productivity, but may improve their work performance.
A jiangsu university study titled "Workplace Romance and Employee Performance: Evidence from the Medical Department" conducted three rounds of surveys of 405 Chinese doctors. It turned out that office romances were positively correlated with employees' work effort.
Human behavior, guided by loyalty, camaraderie, and compassion, brings positive feedback emotionally and materially, and employees in office romances have made significant progress in work engagement, work positivity, and ultimate performance.
"Want to heat up this love affair?" 》
Office romance is "not to die", and dismissal and resignation are more like some kind of public order and good customs agreed upon in the workplace.
So, instead of asking whether an office romance is a resignation sin, ask about true love or performance, which is more important to us.
In this day and age, we tend to the latter, appearing pragmatic and rational.
In school to achieve results, in the company to achieve performance, for this reason do not hesitate to suppress emotions, say goodbye to early love, but also say goodbye to the workplace.
"The Temperature of Love"
But when is it time to suppress true love for work?
In 1930, the economist Keynes predicted in "The Economic Problems of Our Grandchildren": "At the current rate of economic accumulation and technological development, 100 years later, in the 21st century, we only need to work 3 hours a day, and the rest is leisure time." ”
He even worries that people who are accustomed to labor will be idle to the point of "mental breakdown" because they have no work.
Sir is worried.
Today, let alone 3 hours, even the 8-hour working system is difficult to be guaranteed. The Internet and mobile communication bring not the liberation of labor, but the infinite extension of working hours and space.
Keynes missed one thing, he ignored the ever-full expansion of desire.
The OKR and KPI in the company will be refreshed immediately once they are reached, never stopping, and there is no end.
"World of Wonders": Ghost employees who come back to work after death
It's hard to say whether we're driving the work or the work is driving us.
Just like the red dancing shoes in "Andersen's Fairy Tales", you can no longer take them off when you put them on, you can only dance day and night with the guidance of the shoes, even if you finally cut off your feet, the broken feet are still in the red dancing shoes, tirelessly spinning and jumping.
The development of the company is like a bicycle, once riding, it can only keep pedaling.
When we at the desk choose to suppress true love for the sake of performance, then there is no end to the work, and the suppression will never end.
World of Wonders: Hard-working employees who become ghosts after overwork
We used to praise this culture, to dedicate everything to performance, and called it The Hustle Culture.
Not late and early departure, do not turn off the mobile phone, do not refuse to work overtime, do not talk about office love, in the huge and detailed assessment scale, workers for work, live more and more standardized and unified.
But in some late nights when the screen is illuminated by the glimmer of light, and some sunlight kisses the back of the hand through the blinds, we will occasionally be afraid, and the performance is achieved, but where does the "person" go?
In 2021, Americans fed up with the Hustle Culture hit back with a wave of resignation against the never-ending performance system and the life-and-death fatigue of squeezing life.
And the advent of a relationship may make us rethink whether the small side in the hedge between people and the system should naturally become a collective sacrifice.
The HR friend who skillfully counted the guilt of office romance to me suddenly sighed at the end of our conversation:
"All companies don't allow HR to fall in love, but HR is also human."
Not long ago, I heard that one of her peers and candidates fell in love during the interview, and the peer rarely did not wield the sword to cut the love thread, but recruited the candidate into the company, and talked about love in a bright and honest manner.
"It was just then that she was ready to change companies, what a coincidence, it was so good."
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