Co-Workers Left Out in the Cold By Boss's Affair
Q: The manager at the high-tech firm I work for is living with one of my co-workers. They like us to go drinking with them after work and have us socialize with them, with no distinction made between professional and private life.</br></br>Resume-enhancing assignments, technical resources, training opportunities and phony sick days accrue to the favored colleague and those others who are willing to cater a social life for the happy couple. The rest of us get the leftovers and see clearly that if we don't participate outside of work, we are excluded from the inner circle.</br></br>The manager and my co-worker appear to have simultaneous illnesses frequently, and work is not accomplished on time as a result.</br></br>My manager's superior has been unofficially informed of this situation and appears willing to tolerate it. How, without ruining our own careers, can we get the company to fix this problem? Should we just walk away, or do we owe it to the company to try harder?</br></br>A: Office romances are a fact of modern life, with the workplace often acting as a kind of dating service for young men and women launching their adult lives. A 1994 report by the American Management Association, a human resources research organization, found that 79 percent of 485 managers surveyed said they had either been aware of or participated in an office romance. A parallel survey by the Society for Human Resource Management in 1998 found that many such romances resulted in marriage.