employee openly cheated on her partner at our company party

A reader writes:

I manage a team of 8-12 people at any one time in an entry-level role. Every year, we have a Christmas party at a local hotel and bar. It’s always an open bar — recipe for disaster, but the staff love it.

This year, a member of my team who has a long-term partner, who she talks about regularly, spent the evening kissing a member of another team, out in the open. They were then seen going up to this person’s hotel room at the end of the night, and did not try to hide this.

As her manager, I know my responsibilities and am not letting this impact the way I treat this staff member on a day-to-day basis. I have recent experience of being cheated on myself, so I have found this challenging, but I know how important it is to treat everyone fairly based on their professional contributions.

What’s bothering me is how I feel about her professional judgment following this. Surely someone who would act like this, out in the open, at a work event has questionable judgment at best? Would you let this influence, for example, advancement opportunities where more judgment could be required, or where reputation of the organization becomes more of a factor? We have opportunities to move out of this entry-level role quite regularly, but I now have reservations about passing her on to another department or asking her to represent our department at a more senior level.

Eh, she’s entry-level, so more likely to be young and have less mature judgment.

But let’s back up. First, while the vast majority of the time what people’s sex lives are their own business and should stay out of work considerations, that changes if they bring it into the office. And as a general rule, if someone openly cheats on their partner at a work event, I’m not sure you’re obligated to refuse to let it ever enter your thinking.

However, I’d be more concerned about your employee’s judgment if this were on an ongoing affair being brought into work, versus a one-time error in judgment at a party.

It’s also true that you don’t necessarily know what you saw. For all we know, maybe she wasn’t breaking any rules in her relationship (although it’s still bad judgment to appear to be in front of colleagues). There’s also the impact of alcohol; while no one at a work event should be drinking to the point of sleeping with colleagues they wouldn’t otherwise sleep with, it’s also true that people early in their careers are sometimes still figuring out their limits in that regard. 

Also, what about the other person? Are they anywhere in her chain of command? If so, you’ve got a different and far more pressing issue.

Assuming none of those things are issues, though, then the biggest factor to me is that she’s in an entry-level role. I’d put much more weight on this if she were higher up and in a leadership position. At entry level, the obligations and expectations just aren’t the same, and I would not factor this in when thinking about her advancement unless it’s part of a pattern of bad judgment (in which case it would be the pattern that was the issue, not the party incident on its own).

Last — it’s probably time to reconsider the “recipe for disaster, but the staff love it” open bar.

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