Click here for an interesting item on the Harvard Business Review site entitled How Sex Hurts the Workplace, Especially Women.

The basic premise: workplace sex doesn’t just hurt the parties directly involved — it can also have collateral damage on the careers of high-achieving female employees who had nothing to do with the harassment.

Brand new research by the Center for Work-life Policy indicates that a woman will most likely fail to achieve executive status “unless she is sponsored by a powerful senior executive — who, more often than not, is male and married.” As the article points out, that is often “where sex enters the picture.”

Some of the key findings:

• 34% of executive women say they know a female co-worker who had an affair with her boss
• 15% of women at the director level or above say they had such an affair themselves
• 37% of those who know of an affair believe that the woman received a “career boost as a consequence”
• 70% of women (versus 61% of men) lose respect for a leader who has an affair
• 56% of women (48% of men) feel “animosity” toward the couple involved
• 65% of women (60% of men) believe that salary increases and other perks are traded for sexual favors
• 37% of women (39% of men) see a productivity drop in the wake of a workplace affair

What Should Employers Do?

You don’t have to be the workplace romance police. However, you absolutely should:

• have a policy that (1) clearly prohibits all forms of unlawful harassment and (2) contains a clear mechanism for reporting potential violations, including alternate paths when the alleged harasser is the complaining party’s boss;
• train all employees on the policy, with a special emphasis for managers on the dangers of workplace romance (particularly of the boss-subordinate variety);
• fully investigate all complaints of harassment, even if (1) the alleged harasser asks you not to and (2) the allegations are against the head of the company or a “superstar”-type employee;
• if the investigation warrants disciplinary action, take it (even if it means firing the CEO or superstar); and
• carefully consider any and all communications related to the investigation, particularly if they concern a high-profile employee (and discuss them with experienced legal and PR counsel).

If an employer fails to take any of the above action , it could easily wind up in court — possibly in a class action — and face humongous morale and productivity problems. Don’t let that happen to you.

To help ensure that you cover all the investigation bases, click here for our handy Investigation Toolkit. Click here for our handy “cheat sheet” on harassment law.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 10:20 am and is filed under Employment Law News, Harassment, Office Romance, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.