Workplace romance? Many Millennials and Gen Zers would never.

We live in a deeply awkward time for workplace romance.

Some companies have adopted concrete, blanket anti-fraternization policies prohibiting romantic relationships between any given employee and a direct report or superior. Photo: iStock

Ashley Roszko, a 22-year-old sales associate at the Detroit Zoo, has a crush on one of her co-workers.

Not someone she reports to, or even works with side-by-side. Just another zoo employee she interacts with about once a week. But she has no plans to confess her feelings anytime soon.

“I basically have my dream job,” she says, “and I plan on working here for the rest of my career.” Although employee relationships aren’t totally forbidden, Ms. Roszko says her boss generally discourages them. “So I feel like if something romantic developed and he found out, it would make things really awkward. Why risk it?” Many millennial and Gen Z workers can relate. Our generations’ careers have not so much been informed by, but violently buffeted by, forces like the 2007-09 recession, the #MeToo movement and the coronavirus pandemic. With the job market so precarious and workplace harassment under the microscope, many young people see dating a colleague the way Ms. Roszko does: as a bad idea.

We live in a deeply awkward time for workplace romance. Companies have experimented recently with intense disclosure policies like one at the investment firm BlackRock requiring employees to reveal relationships not just with their 16,000 or so colleagues, but also anyone employed by the firm’s external business partners. There are even so-called “love contracts” between romantically involved co-workers who can pledge not to do things like engage in PDA at the office.

“We started to see a decline in workplace romance around 2013,” says Amy Baker, an associate psychology professor at the University of New Haven. From 1995 to 2017, the percentage of heterosexual couples who met “through or as co-workers” dropped from 19% to 11%, according to a long-running Stanford University study called “How Couples Meet and Stay Together.” Dr. Baker told me my generation -- I’m 26 -- is much more comfortable meeting people online. “And the pandemic has, of course, accelerated that.” “One of the drivers of workplace romance is working together sort of intensely, face-to-face, in close physical proximity,” Dr. Baker says. “The more we’re remote, that puts a damper on people forming relationships.” Virtual happy hours, she says, are “simply not the same.” Another nail in the coffin of the office romance: the #MeToo movement, which took off in 2017. Those in the business of regulating or studying workplace romance view that time as a turning point, driving both a reluctance to get romantically involved with colleagues and a demand for policies addressing it head-on.

Gen Z, whose oldest members are 23, entered the workforce almost entirely after the #MeToo reckoning, so it’s no surprise that many are so wary about any kind of office entanglement.

“There are these weird stigmas around workplace dating, especially for people my age, where if you have a workplace relationship, it’s seen as not professional to do so and you’re seen as not focusing on your work,” says Erin Brady, a 20-year-old college student in Melbourne, Fla., who worked at a call center earlier in the year and developed a crush on her shift leader after bonding at break times over “dark Twitter memes” about fan fiction tied to the “It” horror films.

“I don’t want to say it’s taboo, but it’s certainly frowned upon.” Still, it’s unthinkable that workplace romance will vanish completely. Over half of all workers reported having an office crush and 27% had dated a colleague in a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management published shortly before the onset of the pandemic in the U.S. So it’s worth asking: When office romances do clear the higher barriers to entry in the post-pandemic world, just how romantic can they get?

Love contracts are one recent, if clunky, intervention. These are written documents signed by a pair of employees starting a consensual workplace romance.

“When I first heard about this, around four years ago, I thought it was kind of gimmicky,” says Mark Kluger, an employment lawyer in Fairfield, N.J. He changed his mind in 2017, when a financial services firm explicitly asked for his help designing a contract to deal with a budding romance between two of its employees. “Both people were willing, and it was a safe space that gave the HR department an opportunity to manage the situation and ‘out’ the relationship under conditions that everyone could live with.” Some employers ask to add more specific provisions, like being discreet at office events. “Today, I’m seeing these contracts more in white-collar environments, like accounting firms and law firms,” Mr. Kluger says. Despite his initial skepticism, he now actively recommends such contracts to the many corporate clients who approach him about creating a more robust workplace romance policy.

Some companies have adopted concrete, blanket anti-fraternization policies prohibiting romantic relationships between any given employee and a direct report or superior. Large tech companies like Google have also experimented with a policy that lets employees ask a colleague out once and only once.

“Having a meaningful conversation about this in 2020 means leaning into the gray area,” says Anne Solmssen, chief technical officer of Ethena, a New York-based software startup trying to modernize antiharassment training for corporate clients. Office dating isn’t a mandatory subject for employers to cover, unlike sexual-harassment prevention training, which is required by law in a half-dozen states, including New York and California.

“But it’s a topic that the counsels we work with were most insistent that we address in an engaging way,” Ms. Solmssen says. (Their approach includes using timely examples from current events, like Harvey Weinstein’s trial, and teaching in short modules rather than daylong sessions.) Up to half of the average company’s employees have no idea what their dating policies are at all, Ms. Solmssen says, “so there is tremendous room for error.” Ethena basically discourages hierarchical relationships, but also encourages transparency when other kinds of dating happens -- through personal communication instead of contracts.

The upside of today’s great workplace upheavals may well be that people can finally set the terms of office dating proactively, not just reactively.

And not a moment too soon. Eight months of apocalyptic isolation have driven home the need for companionship. It’s hard to imagine even risk-averse young workers simply dismissing a promising avenue for connection in the post-pandemic world.

Some are navigating this for themselves already. Ms. Brady, in Florida, asked out her office crush in late August -- after she left her job.

“We’ve been dating since then, and it’s been great,” she says. “This is definitely the most natural relationship I’ve ever been in.”

Dow Jones Newswires