Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Opinion

Corporate overreach: BP’s demand for disclosure of office romances

As Jawab Iqubal summed up BP’s move in the Times recently, “The oil and gas giant appears to have lost its corporate marbles”.

6 min read
Share
Corporate overreach: BP’s demand for disclosure of office romances
ADVERTISEMENT

BP should let its workers’ private lives stay private according to a recent poll on LinkedIn. This followed in the wake of BP issuing new guidelines demanding its entire 90,000-strong workforce come clean about office romances or risk getting sacked.

The poll asked “Should BP let its workers’ private lives stay private?”.  100 per cent of the respondents said it should.

BP’s tightening of its policy around workplace relationships also means senior leaders — numbering about 4,500 executives — have been given three months to report any intimate relationships that have occurred at work during the past three years.  The justification is that the new disclosure rules allow employers to take pre-emptive steps to avoid conflicts of interest and issues of confidentiality. 

This strikes me as positively sinister — BP is trying to launch a corporate snoopers’ charter on its workforce.  The company would be better served keeping its corporate nose out of the private lives of its staff.  It’s a misguided intervention.  I was worried I was being a complete reactionary — hence the LinkedIn poll ― but the results of the survey suggest I am not alone.

I spoke to Adam Nicoll, a marketing expert specialising in the recruitment and HR space, to get his view on the move.  If anything, he was more forthright, “Not so long ago, when it came to the nexus of corporate comms and HR policy, the orthodoxy was never to veer into the political — never piggyback on global events, cultural movements or media noise. You played things with a straight bat, neither pro- nor anti- anything. In so being, corporates remained fair, neutral and inclusive environments in the main.

“However, something has happened in the last decade: it’s seemingly corporate duty to delve into how people choose to get their sexual kicks, to record that, and spreadsheet around it for inclusion and recruitment purposes; to spend time and money setting up policies and procedures to ‘find stuff out’ about their people and hold them to account; to label them, box them, and boast about any result which may be able to be spun into an apparent inclusivity victory; to dig around the business for the story to tell which is out of the ordinary, the first staff trans wedding to be uncovered by a nosy HR gang, to request a snippet of their wedding video to be stuck on the company intranet as a badge of reflected inclusivity glory.  Frankly, I find it all a bit unsavoury at best — and, at worst, a bit… Stalinist.” Quite.  

Not only is this insidious prying pretty odious, I don’t think it will work.

First, I think a lot of staff will choose not to disclose their office relationships . After all, there is no law that compels them to do so. Many people meet their eventual partners through work: that is not — nor should it be — a reportable offence. 

ADVERTISEMENT

As Nicoll put it, “In the earlier part of this century, 12 per cent of people married someone who they had, at one time or another, worked with — and that was a wonderful thing.  This kind of corporate incursion — as well as the rise of remote working — means that number is plummeting.  People are more isolated than ever as a result.  Indeed, nine million Britons declare themselves as ‘lonely’ or ‘very lonely’ today.  That’s a sad mental health pandemic not helped by policies like this.”

Second, the reality is that the guidelines will create more problems than they solve. Who, for example, gets to define what is considered a reportable office “relationship”?  What if someone maliciously declares an imaginary office dalliance with a colleague? How would the other person even know? What if two employees disagree about whether to declare a former or current relationship? It is equally unclear how the company’s human resources department is expected to keep tabs on the “confessions” of thousands of employees.

Third, the idea that sexual relationships in the office are the only ones that create issues of confidentiality or potential abuses of power is itself flawed.

ADVERTISEMENT

A better solution, it strikes me, would be a code of conduct for staff that treated BP’s employees like adults, capable of exercising their own judgement and discretion. Obviously, poorly handled workplace relationships — whether sexual or not — can create a culture of favouritism that silences people and saps productivity. 

What BP needs is guidance that requires employees to disclose and record family or intimate relationships at work but only if they felt there could be a conflict of interest. A code of conduct that did not ban relationships with colleagues, but highlighted the risk of conflicts of interest, particularly if the relationships were not appropriately disclosed, would be eminently reasonable.  It is, in fact, what BP had before they introduced the new rules.

But “sensible” isn’t the point is it?  BP isn’t trying to create a reasonable code of conduct.  The company is just reacting to the Looney scandal.  Bernard Looney was, of course, BP’s CEO until last September, when he was dismissed for failing to disclose workplace relationships.  But let’s not forget that, at the time, he fell foul of their existing, internal rules. The latest guidance feels even madder given that, since Looney left, the energy major has presented his departure as an isolated incident: the result of one man’s failure to disclose to the board past relationships with colleagues.  

That makes this a public relations stunt — one that I don’t think will reflect well on the BP employer brand or its wider reputation.

Because, far from being progressive, these new workplace intimacy rules strike me as nothing short of Orwellian. BP is diving headfirst into the private lives of its employees, not out of genuine concern for conflicts of interest, but as part of an over-reaction to losing yet another CEO. 

But the loss of Lord Browne, Tony Hayward, then Looney doesn’t excuse such draconian corporate overreach.  Instead of fostering an environment of trust and professionalism, BP will be instilling fear and paranoia among its workforce.  By demanding employees disclose their personal relationships under the threat of dismissal, BP is not just crossing a line; it is obliterating it. 

This misguided attempt to preempt another scandal is deeply invasive and unnecessary. It suggests that BP’s leadership has lost touch with the values of respect and privacy that should underpin any modern workplace. 

The company needs to step back and reconsider, before it alienates its workforce completely.  If it doesn’t, the only winners will be Shell, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, and Chevron — as they hoover up an entire cohort of BP’s top talent.

As Jawab Iqubal summed up BP’s move in the Times recently, “The oil and gas giant appears to have lost its corporate marbles”.

James Staunton is a media commentator and communications expert writing about HR, jobs, recruitment, labour shortages, talent management, and the wider world of work. 

Related

ADVERTISEMENT