Freada Kapor Klein's Giving Notice Mentioned in the NYT Fashion & Style Section

Boss’s Memo: Go Ahead, Date (With My Blessing)
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
New York Times, October 11, 2007

...Attempts to regulate office relationships are not just meant to avoid sexual harassment claims. Romance among colleagues can lead to unfair and unethical treatment, and to a poisonous atmosphere that affects many others. In a book to be published later this month, “Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay” (Jossey-Bass), Freada Kapor Klein explains how unproductive, even hostile, a work environment can be if there is a culture of crudeness or rampant extramarital affairs, especially those that cross lines of power and authority.

Yet Ms. Kapor Klein, the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes fairness in the workplace and in society, said that forbidding office dating, even between superiors and subordinates, is no solution. “The real issue is not that they’re sleeping with each other,” she said. “The real issue is that their emotional attachment to each other may get in the way of their business judgment.”

She advises companies to write policies stating that workers will not be fired for dating, but can be fired for not disclosing and mitigating it. If romances are outlawed, “you merely drive that situation underground,” she said. “It’s the dishonesty that poisons the work environment, not the relationship.”

Full disclosure: Ms. Kapor Klein is married to her former chief executive, Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the software application. Ms. Kapor Klein said she and Mr. Kapor did not begin dating until more than a decade after they met at the office (she was the director of organizational development and training).

“He indicated that if he weren’t married I was somebody he would be interested in,” Ms. Kapor Klein said. “I took that as a world-class compliment. Not harassing. Not coercive. And that was the end of it for 12 years.”

Today they are husband and wife. So is the woman to whom blue-chip companies turn for policy advice in favor of office love?

“Keep in mind the current success rate of marriage is about 50-50,” Ms. Kapor Klein said. “Just thinking purely in terms of probability, what do you think the odds are of an office romance working out? Has to be less than 50-50. So before you rush ahead, think about how it’s going to feel to sit in this weekly staff meeting with somebody who you had a miserable breakup with and who you actually wish didn’t exist on the planet. Think about it. And then take a reasonable risk.”

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