TIPS
Office Sex
• If you must have sex with a coworker, wait until you can get off-site. If you get caught having sex in the workplace, embarrassment might be the least of your worries. There are very few jobs, other than porn star, where sex in the office is not a violation of company policy, and one you almost always will be fired for.
• If you really can’t wait, find an empty storage room or closet or something. Keep it on the down low. Nobody at the office needs to see the two of you in the act. (Nobody at work needs to see you undressed, under any circumstances, unless you are a nude model by profession. Do you really want to hear people talking about the mole on your backside at the water cooler?)
• Make sure everyone involved is a fully consenting adult. If there is alcohol involved, consent may be in question. (And should you really be drinking in the office without permission? That’s a whole ‘nother subject.) Same for drugs. If there’s a question of consent, there’s a question of legality. Instead of explaining yourself to Human Resources, you may be facing the police and a judge.
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
Sexual misconduct in the workplace can be a minefield. A swift, thorough, and impartial investigation by HR is essential in limiting the potential damage that such out-of-control employee behavior can wreak upon a company. It is equally, if not more, essential to act decisively in accordance with established protocol and to seek legal advice specific to the facts and circumstances, once the investigation is concluded.
CASE FILE
Cougar on the Prowl
Male employees are not the only ones guilty of sexual misbehavior. One recently divorced middle-aged female employee developed a sudden interest in young male employees. This “cougar”—let’s call her Kat2—used office email to approach these young male gazelles.
When this was brought to our attention, we warned Kat that we would be monitoring her emails. She seemed to have gotten the message at first, but months later, when a twenty-year-old man was hired, she began to email him to ask questions—such as the color of his boxers—and to invite him to meet her in a quiet part of the office so she could “feel his body up.” Incredibly, this woman even warned the man in question to be careful in his replies, “because the company told me they might be monitoring emails.” (She was not employed as a rocket scientist.)
Since she had disregarded our clear warning and resumed her bad email habits, we had no choice but to fire her. In this case, the new male employee—who had proved unable to resist temptation—got off, so to speak, with a stern warning but was not terminated.
TIPS
X-Ray Vision
• Don’t fool yourself by thinking that company emails, text messages, or any other correspondence on company time or devices are private. They’re company property, and yes, management can look at whatever you write. (Not just sexual advances—that screed against your boss might pop up to haunt you, too.)
• Same goes for anything you put in a memo or say out loud. Behave at work as though you’re being monitored all the time. Big Brother may not always be watching, but you can never be sure.
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
Employees may be adults, but that doesn’t mean they will always act that way. In the immortal words of President Ronald Reagan: “Trust but verify.”
CASE FILE
Not-So-Private Message
For a time, it seemed that inappropriate sexual behavior was spreading through Company XXX like the kind of disease you don’t want to admit to having. What’s more likely, of course, is that email and other electronic messaging systems have made it easier for companies to discover the evidence, even long after the affair is over. Such incriminating recorded behavior has been the undoing of many employees.
What triggered our investigation this time were complaints about a female employee, Tessie, who was whiling away her workdays flirting with numerous coworkers. While examining her in-house instant messages, we stumbled on a bigger problem.
One of Tessie’s correspondents, Tom, wasn’t just talking dirty to Tessie on the company’s systems.
We found a lot of evidence proving Tom was spending his days instant-messaging female coworkers, inviting them to his office during the day for assignments other than work. Unfortunately, he had several takers. Or should I say “givers.”
TIPS
Digital Don’ts
• All those emails and instant messages and anything else on your computer? It’s all backed up. You may think you deleted that incriminating email or ill-conceived text, but the backup is forever. Think before you type. Your message is for the ages.
• If you want to have private communication with coworkers, do it through private channels—your personal device and account, sent to the other party’s personal device and account. If the other person doesn’t want to share his or her email address or cell number, maybe you should take a hint.
A surprising number of women took Tom up on the offer. In fact, the message trail indicated that the action was taking place in his office not just on an almost daily basis, but in some cases, several times during a single day!
Did I mention that Tom’s manager shared an office wall with this workplace Casanova? Apparently, the office had good sound insulation because the manager never caught on.
While Tom had the good sense to keep his trysts behind closed doors, and all parties were consenting adults (we had the correspondence to prove it), this is still not what a company means when they encourage good employee relations.
And there was one interaction that put all the others to shame.
The messages showed us that Tom had invited a recently hired female employee to one of his very private meetings. She responded to his attempted seduction by telling him that she knew he was married and she was not interested in involving herself with a married man. His reply, and I quote: “In that case, I would just need to rape you—haha.”
The woman to whom this “joke” was addressed did not report it to HR. She did, however, leave her job soon afterward for a better-paying position.
In fact, no one had ever complained about this man officially. His adventures only came to light because of the complaints about Tess.
When Tom was called on the carpet for his threat to sexually assault a coworker, he insisted that he had only been joking. We weren’t laughing. He was fired.
As I escorted him out of the office, he said, “Welcome to a day in my life—women are always throwing themselves at me!”
TIPS
Advance and Retreat
• If you’re on the receiving end of an unwanted advance at the workplace, report the incident to your supervisor or HR manager. There are rules against this, and it’s up to management to stop it.
• Even if an employee attempts to laugh off his or her advances as a joke, if you feel at all uncomfortable or threatened, report the incident to HR. It’s not okay for coworkers to make you feel uncomfortable in this way.
• On the other hand, if it is a “wanted” advance, arrange for the tryst to happen off company premises and after hours. What you do on your own time is up to you.
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
It is not enough to have policies about harassment in place. Employees must know and understand them. Wise and prudent management will ensure that all employees understand what company policy is and what steps they should take to protect themselves—and the company—from scandal, liability, and worse.
CASE FILE
Leather Barred
Company XXX wasn’t alone. At a different company, a high-level male executive was extremely proud of the posh leather couch in his office. All that talk about the couch, which wasn’t just about the status symbol, but also had a nudge-nudge-wink-wink tone to it, led to rumors—rumors about what our executive, Ken, was doing on office furniture. I heard from my assistant that the talk was that Ken was conducting after-hours hanky-panky with certain female employees.
There were names attach
ed to the rumors, which meant I could follow up. I talked to two women whose names had come up, and each admitted to spending some after-hours “quality time” with Ken on his couch.
We then confronted Ken, and he didn’t deny it. In fact, he was more than a little impressed with himself and his exploits! (Proud enough to have started the rumors himself? I never found out.)
All parties were adults. All parties consented. The sofa sex took place after hours, so it wasn’t interfering with work. But Ken was fired just the same, and not because he was canoodling on company property.
Rank Does Not Have These Privileges
Bad enough for any employee, from a janitor to a high-ranking executive, to carry on this way in the workplace. The office is not a motel, and if management looks the other way, the company is facing all kinds of risk.
But the big issue in this case was that Ken was the boss. The specter of a hostile work environment—the possibility that these women might have felt pressured into the liaison, or that playing the couch game might have been seen as the route to advancement—hangs heavy over these kinds of situations. Even if Ken never suggested that the women would get ahead by getting busy with him (or, more sinisterly, that there would be negative consequences for anyone who didn’t play along), the women might have feared that would be the case or might have claimed as much later. Or, if one of them were promoted ahead of another employee, it might be claimed that the decision was based on sexual performance rather than job performance.
Whether or not there was actual pressure or duress from Ken as the boss, the appearance and the possibility are enough to create a problem for the company.
By the way, gender didn’t factor in: we’ve dealt with similar situations where the genders were reversed, with the same outcome.
Now we know what happened to the people, but what about the (in)famous couch?
It, too, was “terminated.” Despite being cleaned and disinfected, it was ultimately discarded. No one in the company wanted it, given its storied history.
TIPS
Dirty Dating
• If you’re going to get involved with someone at work—and many people do, given that they spend so much time there—stick with people at your own level or in a different chain of command. Supervisor/supervisee sexual relations of any kind are a bad idea, even if you take it off-site. If you can’t find anyone appropriate to sleep with, you really need to get out more.
• If you’re the subordinate, you may think you have to accept a boss’s advances to stay on his or her right side. You don’t. Talk to HR if you feel at all pressured.
• Using a relationship with the boss to get ahead is just plain wrong. And do you really want to have a reputation as someone who sleeps his or her way to the top, or whose only skills are horizontal? That won’t help your vertical movement in the organization when your boss moves on and you report to someone else.
• If you’re the boss, it’s just as wrong to use your power over subordinates to get into their pants. Even the illusion of that is a career killer. Part of your responsibility as a supervisor is being alert to how your power—even when it seems like you don’t have much power at all—can be perceived.
• Even if none of that is true—nobody is pressuring anyone, nobody is looking to get anything out of the fling except a good time—the rest of the office will suspect otherwise. The damage to both your careers that office rumors can create can be just as severe.
• The office furniture is meant for business use. It doesn’t matter how nice that couch is, it’s not there for your pleasure.
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
Executive perks may include a snazzy leather couch. But they do not entitle executives to seduce subordinates upon that couch . . . or anywhere else in the office, for that matter.
If an inappropriate employee relationship comes to light, address it. And make sure employees understand what is appropriate and what isn’t.
In general, allowing a fast and loose office environment can result in accusations that upper management tolerated, or worse yet, encouraged inappropriate behavior. Be on the lookout for telltale signs of interpersonal problems at the office. Like the old saying, “Where there is smoke, there is fire,” rumors of shenanigans at the office usually have at least some element of truth to them. Diligently follow smoke trails and you will most often find some fire.
CASE FILE
Presidential Privilege
Yet another male executive claimed to be very sensitive to stress and in need of periodic “relief” during the workday. He thought the appropriate solution was to solicit—and receive—oral sex from coworkers in his office. Once again, people started talking, and eventually the talk made it to Human Resources.
When we asked this executive about the rumors, it didn’t take a congressional hearing to get him to admit what had been going on. He was shocked to hear he was being fired as a result. “If Bill Clinton could do it,” the nonplussed (and soon-to-be-former) executive told me, “I thought I could, too.”
TIPS
Executive Directive
• You are not Bill Clinton.
• President Clinton may not be the best role model when it comes to sexual behavior at the office. And if what allegedly happened in the Oval Office—one of the most secure places in the world—leaked out, why would things be any different in your own office?
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
A company should have formal HR training seminars at the office and make it mandatory that all employees attend and sign a statement confirming their attendance. These seminars should include sexual harassment and hostile workplace training issues. It is very helpful to create a paper trail of proactive measures like this in case trouble arises down the road. It is important and helpful for companies to portray and enforce a “zero tolerance” for the type of activity described in this book. Written policies and consistently implemented practices go a long way toward that goal.
CASE FILE
The Party Was a Bust
Most employees, of course, are diligent and hard-working, deserving praise rather than punishment. At one company, we rewarded the top ten sales performers of each quarter with a party at a very expensive restaurant with unlimited food and drink. We assumed that our best employees—disciplined, dedicated workers, the cream of the crop—would be able to control themselves. And mostly we were right. Mostly.
At one of these events, Sally, a normally reserved salesperson, overdid it with the unlimited alcohol. Sally had a few, then a few more. First she grew flushed, then animated, then flirtatious.
Then it went from amusing to a slow-motion car wreck.
Sally tugged her top down to display her cleavage, telling her colleagues, “Have a look at my assets.”
Then she pulled her top farther down, popped open her bra, and put those assets into plain view. But apparently flashing the team wasn’t enough. “Come on, guys, pull my top down!” she invited. “Let me show you what I’ve got.”
She wasn’t the only one who’d been drinking. She wasn’t the only one whose judgment was impaired. It’s probably needless for me to say that she found takers.
Nobody was so drunk they didn’t remember. The next day, the whole episode became an office joke, with Sally as its butt.
Afterward, Sally summoned the police and charged one of the colleagues who’d pulled her top down with assaulting her. She also filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which we felt she’d done so that she couldn’t be fired without the suspicion that the action had been in retaliation for filing charges.
Not the kind of drama any workplace needs. And not good for Sally’s career. She went from being a sales superstar to falling apart because of the aftershocks from her behavior.
She quit two months later.
That was the last of these parties we hosted.
TIPS
Truth or Dare
• Yanking off a coworker’s blouse or pants is probably not
a wise move, even with an engraved invitation! What may start as consensual “fun” with a coworker can turn ugly fast. Keep your guard up at all times. When a person’s job is in jeopardy, they may go to great lengths to save it, including hurling serious accusations.
• If you wouldn’t do it sober in the office, don’t do it drunk at a company-sponsored event. You may not be on-site or on the clock, but if the company is picking up the tab, you will probably pay for any bad behavior. Do you really want to be known as the office boob?
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
Having alcohol at a company event, on or off premises, can lead to trouble. No matter how carefully you monitor such situations, there is always the potential for a messy, combustible outcome.
CASE FILE
Showing Himself a Little Love
Sex at the office doesn’t have to be a two-way street! One high-level manager at one of the firms I worked at kept his office stocked with several bottles of liquor, a DVD player, and a library of pornographic videos. When he was bored or didn’t feel like working, he closed his door, poured himself a drink, chose a movie from his extensive X-rated video collection, and, shall we say, entertained himself.
At least he closed the door before his private party. At least he had a door to close.
It is amazing how often employees are caught downloading and/or watching porn at the office, even in open work areas in plain view of everyone.
Employees Gone Wild Page 2