ETHICS: An Office Romance Gone Wrong

I agree partially with the second expert in the situation. Elizabeth is in a situation where her emotions are high right now so she might not be in the best state of mind to make career-altering decisions. She should wait to see her stock options and see if the company culture will change since it seems very male-dominated at the moment. However,  I disagree with both of the experts for looking at this solely from Elizabeth’s point of view. I think for me, the person in the C-suite position acted unprofessionally without consideration of his position of power and other dynamics. I think that especially at a small start-up without an established HR department, this could be even harder to navigate. I worked in a start-up environment once where there was a situation where a male-dominated working environment made me uncomfortable, when I went to my supervisor, she didn’t know what steps to take because of the lack of clear guidelines, and I ended up leaving the company. As a manager, I think I would want to work with HR and C-suite on how to establish and handle guidelines on how to deal with personal relationships in the office and to ensure it doesn’t affect our work. The reading mentioned that a new head of HR was brought in, but it was too late at that point. I think that bringing someone in the early stages and establishing that would be extremely important and could have prevented that. For instance, HR could have made it mandatory to report office relationships and then set up periodic check-ins with both parties to avoid this situation. If I were the manager and I found out about the situation, I would make sure to check in with all parties involved first and see how they are feeling about the situation and see if this is having any impact on their work. If they share their concerns and that it is getting in the way of their work, I can look into if we can do something to limit their contact if they were to work together and also make sure that the office gossip is under control.