Decisions regarding workplace relationships take place every day across the country. You can personally think of a number of successful businesses that goes beyond the work place. However, you can also think of a number of disaster experiences when people try to nurture and maintain relationships initiated in the workplace. Though mixing business and pleasure has potential practical benefits, there is also the potential for trouble.
1. Effective Teams
The company stands to benefit if the romantic relationship at the office is going well. Partners can make very effective teams because of their relational and productive common interests.
2. Business Is All About Friends.
You might call them colleagues or connections on one side of the spectrum and BFFs on the other, but the fact of the matter is, being great in business is about being a good friend and having a lot of friends. To be successful, you really just have to be honest, be friendly, and make good relationships.
3. People Need To Know You To Trust You.
Letting people mix themselves into your personal life means allowing people to get to know you on numerous levels, and allowing people to get to know you means they are able to trust you, something necessary in business.
4. It Creates Balance.
If no one in your professional life knows anything about your personal life, chances are they’ll assume you don’t have one. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself asked to pull those long nights and weekends hours because your colleagues are held up.. When you allow yourself to talk about priorities outside of the office, you inevitably set yourself up for a more balanced professional life.
5. Pursue A Well Balanced Version Of Your Personality.
Changing at 5 pm to become a totally different person and changing back at 8 am the next morning has to be exhausting. People who separate business and pleasure often have different sets of clothing, different makeup, different friends, different hobbies. Exhausting! By blending business and pleasure, you might find that your clothes blend from day to night and more might blend as well. You may find you become more balanced in the process.
Cons
1. Influence Peddling
Mixing business and pleasure can lead to conflicts of interest and betrayals of trust. Impartiality is the reason ethical journalists won’t take gifts from those they cover. Far from building trust, in some cases, mixing business and pleasure generates distrust.
2. Sour Romances
Possible complications of mixing business and pleasure here include exposure to sexual harassment claims, a perception of favoritism, lost productivity and retaliation. The most danger lies in relationships between superiors and subordinates.
3. Alcohol Abuse.
Office parties often include spirits. Additionally, some employers have responded to increasing work hours by providing alcohol as a regular feature. Problems can arise from blurring the business and social lines when employees forget they’re still at work, over-imbibe and damage personal reputations.
4. Mishandling Of Confidential Information.
Social networking while on the job is a fact of life. Employers find this mingling of business and pleasure troublesome for the loss of productivity, negative posts about the company from its employees, and, most dangerously, the posting of confidential company information.
5. Abuse Of Power
If the partners are at different hierarchical positions in the company abuse of power may be a problem. The person in a higher managerial position would always be at an advantage, the lower ranked person, at a disadvantage.
Cons:
1. When You Break-Up, It’s Awkward
The tension is real when you decide to finally split from your fun fling and move on. As much as you two are going to have to put on a fake smile and put up with each other until someone quits or gets fired, there may be some hostility and ugliness for a few weeks.
