FILE - Amy Robach and T. J. Holmes' secret romance was revealed when photos of them holding hands ... [+]
John Tory, the mayor of Toronto, resigned one hour after the Toronto Star reported his affair with a former staff member on Friday. T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach, anchors of ABC’s GMA3, were ousted late last month after their affair was exposed by the Daily Mail. A new survey reveals that, like Tory, Holmes and Robach, most of us try to keep our workplace relationships under wraps.
Tory, Holmes and Robach aren’t the only high-profile employees to have parted ways from their employers over exposed consensual relationships. In 2022, Jeff Zucker, the former president of CNN, resigned from the network after a relationship with a senior executive was revealed. Princeton University fired classics professor, Joshua Katz, over a consensual relationship. And former McDonald’s CEO, Steve Easterbrook, was fined $400,000 last month for concealing the extent of his consensual affair with a McDonald’s employee (Easterbrook was fired in 2019 over the same relationship).
The common thread to these relationships is the secrecy that surrounded them. A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reveals that a whopping 82% of those who have participated in a workplace romance did not report the affair to their employer. Workers are more comfortable disclosing to their work friends, and slightly less than half told a colleague about their affair.
One of the primary reasons for this secrecy is organizations provide little incentive for romantically involved employees to come forward. Almost three-quarters of U.S. workers say their employer does not require employees to disclose if they’re dating or engaged in a romance, according to the SHRM survey. If your employer doesn’t want to know, there is little incentive to share. And often, organizations don’t make it easy to disclose, offering no alternative to an awkward face-to-face conversation or phone call to human resources.
Workplace romance can result in favoritism, harassment, assault and retaliation, so organizations should have strong incentives to monitor these relationships. And there’s a lot of romance at work. Estimates vary from survey to survey, but between 24% and 75% of employees have engaged in a workplace romance. Yet more than 4 in 5 of these relationships play out without any oversight.
The lack of disclosure can’t entirely be blamed on the organizations. Tory, Holmes and Robach were all married at the time of their affairs. That makes disclosing tricky. Indeed, a spokesman representing Holmes and Robach told the New York Times that the pair “were waiting until they both were divorced” to disclose their relationship to management.
Except for Holmes and Robach, the other high-profile employees had some control over their partners’ careers. Often superior-subordinate relationships are forbidden, which makes it impossible to disclose the relationship if both employees want to continue working in their current roles. As for Holmes and Robach, their affair didn’t explicitly break any ABC rules but had become a distraction at the network.
As an additional incentive for employees to disclose, it may benefit their romance. Some researchers found that secrecy can create a positive obsessive preoccupation with a romantic partner, leading to greater relationship satisfaction. More recently, others have found that the burden of secrecy, the stress surrounding it, and the lack of social support hinder the relationship.
Organizations need to step up and provide incentives for disclosing romantic relationships. It needs to be easy, and it needs to become the norm. Ousting those who don’t adhere to the rules will also help enforce disclosure. And if employees are not comfortable disclosing their affair to their employer, it’s probably a good sign they should avoid the relationship altogether.
