Office romance

An office romance, work romance, or corporate affair is a romance that occurs between two people who work together in the same office, work location, or business. It tends to breach nonfraternization policies and is a foreseeable business expense. The relationship between affair partners at work can be as wide as intern and president; company CEO and member of the board; supervisor and supervisee; company representative and client; boss and secretary, and so on. And it can be between peers or colleagues at the same level in the organization. It can concurrently or after the fact come to be interpreted as sexual harassment. Intra-office romance between an executive and an employee can presage sexual harassment claims, to which email records bear witness.

Office romances are generally believed to be unhelpful to the welfare and effectiveness of the business and to the network of relationships that comprise it. They contain the potential for abuse, alliance, and distraction. Thus they are discouraged and even prohibited in some company policy. Describing an office relationship as a romance can be cover for a form of workplace bullying.

The suspicion that an advantage is gained by 'sleeping with the boss' in a competitive environment ensures that these transactions occur by stealth. To have a powerful influence on the opportunities placed in one's path, one does not have to engage in sexual intercourse. A special relationship could be enough to gain leverage where business opportunities are in short supply. This fuzzy boundary can be nuanced by practiced players in order to provide deniability when required. Neither does one have to be directly involved in the affair for the knowledge of it to be useful currency — discretion in exchange for advantage.

Office affairs may involve a power differential in both heterosexual and same sex liaisons. If the affair ends badly it is almost always the least powerful who gives up their job and the more powerful who stays or gets promoted out of the area as a solution.[citation needed] Increasingly employers will insert office romance disclosure clauses in employment contracts. Where the affair or its non-disclosure is in breach of that contract, the clandestine edge is heightened. Perversely this can increase both the excitement of the affair and the later damage to collegiate relationships and the company's good name. A witch hunt can ensue.

Incidence
In its 2003 nationwide survey Vault found that 47 percent of workers have participated in an office romance and an additional 19 percent would be willing to do so if the opportunity arose. Vault's 2003 Office Romance Survey is based on responses from over 1,000 professionals at companies nationwide. In addition, 13 percent of respondents said their employer had a policy regarding office dating, 51 percent said their company has no policy, and 36 percent said they didn't know whether one existed. When asked to comment about romance in the workplace, respondents replied:

• "Office romance is bound to happen. If you have people sharing common interests (work) + extended time together (40 hrs) + physical attraction = a perfect match."
• "Nothing wrong with office romance and it is actually a good thing, because I look forward to going to work to see my crush. I think that the consulting industry has the highest rate of office romance because you're constantly out on the road, and it can get pretty lonely."
• "Where else can you really see what somebody is like on a day-to-day basis? Usually office behavior/personality carries over to the private life. If someone is courteous, understanding, outgoing, etc, they will be that way in a romantic relationship as well and you typically spend 8-12 hours at work and it is a very good way to get to know someone."
• "When you work 80 hours per week, it is sometimes hard to meet anyone. You spend all your time in the office."

Power dynamics
Few companies have a defined policy against office romance according to the 2006 Workplace Romance survey of 493 HR professionals and 408 employees by the Society for Human Resource Management. Only 9% of those surveyed prohibit dating among employees, and more than 70% of organizations have no formal written or verbal policies about office romance. Some writers argue that the cost of having a formal policy may outweigh the benefits, as inevitable fraternization will be driven underground. The most common and legally enforceable policy states that supervisors cannot date employees within their direct chain of command.

An office romance is usually a breach of either formal or informal fraternization policies. It has been studied as an operation of power dynamics in romantic incubator relationships. Working closely with or living near someone and forming a romantic relationships may incubate romance through the propinquity effect. It evolves from collegiate relationship to limerence quickly and covertly - sometimes this is described as 'having a crush.' Affairs begin one conversation at a time, often without either party admitting to themselves that they intend a deeper connection. 'It just happened' may be the subsequent claim. In fact, the time between a so-called innocent beginning and the first kiss is usually considerable, but the time between that kiss and sexual intercourse is usually short. People involved in this way can appear to themselves to have landed in trouble very quickly, when in fact there was a slow fuse burning long before ignition.

The process of disengaging an office affair requires careful and non-punitive examination at every level of the organization in order to understand affair dynamics at work. That will assist in preventing breaches of employment contracts where that is possible. The challenges of that process suggest the value of family friendly employment conditions.

Paperless office

The paperless office is now considered to be a philosophy to work with minimal paper and convert all forms of documentation to a digital form. The ideal is driven by a number of motivators including productivity gains, costs savings, space saving, the need to share information etc.

Paper based documents transformed to digital based documents
One key aspect of the paperless office philosophy is the conversion of paper documents, photos, engineering plans, microfiche and all the other paper based systems to digital documents. The technologies that may be used include

1. scanners
2. high speed scanners - used for scanning very large volumes of paper.
3. book copiers - that take photos of large books and manuscripts.
4. wide format scanners - for scanning engineering drawings
5. photo scanners
6. negative scanners
7. microfiche scanner - used to convert microfiche to digital documents.
8. digitization of postal mail - online access of scanned contents
9. Fax to PDF conversion - made possible by companies such as voPaper

Each of the technologies uses software that converts the raster formats into other forms depending on need. Generally, they involve some form of compression technology that produces smaller raster images or the use of Optical character recognition, or OCR, to convert the document to text. A combination of OCR and raster is used to enable search ability while maintaining the original form of the document.

An issue faced by those wishing to take the paperless philosophy to the limit has been copyright laws. These laws restrict the transfer of documents protected by copyright from one medium to another, such as converting books to electronic format.

An important step in the paper-to-digital conversion is the need to label and catalog the scanned documents. Such labeling allows the scanned documents to be searched. Some technologies have been developed to do this, but generally involves either human cataloging or automated indexing on the OCR document.

However, scanners and software continue to improve, with small, portable scanners that are able to scan doubled-sided A4 documents at around 30-35ppm to a raster format (typically tiff fax 4 or pdf).

Issue in keeping documents digital

1. Business procedures and/or government regulations. These often slow the adoption of exclusively electronic documents.
2. The target readers' ability to receive and read the digital format.
3. The longevity of digital documents. Will they still be accessible to computer systems of the future?

Comparison of paperless vs traditional office philosophy
A traditional office consisted a paper-based filing systems, which may have included filing cabinets, folders, shelves, compactus's, microfiche systems, and drawing cabinets, all of which take up considerable space, requiring maintenance and equipment.

Meanwhile, a paperless office could simply consist of a desk, chair, computer (with a modest amount of local or network storage), scanner and printer, and the user could store all the information in digital form.

Historical prospective
The paperless office was a visionary or publicist's slogan, supposed to apply to the office of the future. The suggestion was that office automation would make paper redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping and bookkeeping. It came to prominence in the days of the introduction of the personal computer. While the prediction of a PC on every desk was remarkably prescient (or, regarding it as marketing talk, very effective), the paperless nature of office work was less prophetic. Printers and photocopiers have made it much easier to produce documents in bulk, word-processing has deskilled secretarial work involved in writing those documents, and paper proliferates.

Paperless office is also a metaphor for the touting of new technology in terms of 'modernity' rather than its actual suitability to purpose.

An early prediction of the paperless office was made in a Business Week article in 1975.