Love at work

Thanks for coming, I’m Quentin Périoux from the university Rennes 2. This morning, I’m going to be telling you about harassment at work. So, I’ll start off by filling you in on the background to love at work and its consequences. And then I’ll go on to put the situation into perspective by providing statistics regarding harassment.

Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to start a love relationship with one of your fellows at work and to hide it from others without being blamed? About everybody has, right? Well, if I started giving you some insight about the reasons why, would you be interested?

I – Overall information concerning love at work

        First of all, I’d love to outline the basic conception of love at work and the historical roots of courtship as a meaning of seducing someone. In every society in the whole world, courtship has always been considered as a constant in each of them in regards to the whole process of reproduction. Indeed, as already mentioned above, courtship is from what dating comes and a way to draw the attention of someone towards yourself. Furthermore, I want to remind you all that courtship is composed of two main forms : the first one involves a community, which would plan everything so that you’re not making a lot of efforts to meet someone and talk to him/her. The second one involves your family, which will introduce you to someone you already know : it can be your cousin, one of your relatives or someone else, who’s supposedly close to your family.

        Let’s now focus on what dating at work implies. How many of you ever heard from the beginning of the boom of controversial relationships at work? You need to know that it all started when women were allowed to work. However, does it mean that this whole occurrence made some male coworkers try to seduce them? It seems pretty crystal-clear, as there has been a noticeable increase of sexual abuse or sexual harassment at work in the U.S. from the beginning of the 50’s. Moreover, love at work is often seen as a burden by most of employees, as it also leads to jealousy, envy or revenge. Did you know that some companies in the world in Canada or Sweden decided to create no-dating policies? This is indeed a way to prevent workers from falling in love with each other thus creating a likely harmful atmosphere regarding team work. Although being useful in some circumstances, it turned out that it was very difficult for the head of a company to enforce them due to the likely violation of work ethic or stuff. Nonetheless, as I evoked this above, some relationships can turn into harassment once you break up with your husband/wife.

II – Statistics, figures about harassment

In this part, I’m going to stress what’s harassment. Indeed, harassment at work can be depicted as favouritism over someone, unfair treatments or attitude towards an employee. This doesn’t happen in a company, where a culture of respect has been implemented, as good or bad behaviours are being called out.

On the one hand, I’m going to highlight the main figures about love at work, the bright side of the raised issue. In your opinion, how many workers ever admitted having dated someone at work ? Statistics show that 38% of workers did so, while 31% reportedly went on to marry their eventual husband. Moreover, it turns out that one in five workers did date their boss or someone above them on the employement ladder of their company. 35% of women are doing so, while ‘’only’’ 23% of men are. As it seems quite logical, 37% of these people did decide to hide their relationship and prevent themselves from telling the others.

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