There’s someone you’re very close to at work.

Someone of the opposite sex.

There’s a lot of sexual energy in the air, but no sex is involved. You’re buddies. You tell each other everything. You depend on each other.

You are as close asthis.

“Welcome to what we might call the “office spouse’ phenomenon,” said Tina Louise Chadwick, a contributing editor to Worthwhile magazine. She’s the author of an article in its May issue titled, “Till 5 p.m. do us part.”

“Office spouses are colleagues who must spend most of their workday together so that they seem married. Their relationships are often filled with the same kind of electrical charge that marriages sometimes lose. They are intimate in an intellectual way and beyond.”

While it’s a relief to have an emotional outlet for the stress that accumulates during the long hours you spend at the office, Chadwick, who is a vice president of advertising at WestWayne Inc. in Atlanta, warns that “office spouse relationships can bring love, lust-and lots of headaches.”

She describes them as “near trysts,” which can lead to more complications than you ever dreamed of – especially if you’re married.

And especially if one of the “spouses” is the boss.

Diversity

Women and minorities rarely have a chance for promotion unless their companies have a diversity program that is enforced – and rewards top management for complying with it.

That’s why the good news is that 59 percent of 530 senior executives polled by the Association of Executive Search Consultants, based in New York, report that, yes, their companies have an official “diversity in the workplace” policy.

The not-so-good news is that 34 percent said their firms had no diversity programs at all.

Gender pay gap

The gender pay gap continues to exist:

The U.S. Bureau of the Census reports that U.S. women on average earn only 76 percent of what men earn.

There have been many explanations for the gender gap, but the blame for its continued existence is attributed by workers themselves to “employers’ assumptions about women’s attitudes about work and family,” according to the American Association of University Women, based in New York.

The association, a nonprofit national network, is an advocate for equality for women and girls.

The explanations, which a majority of the 1,200 people polled believe are behind the wage gap, include:

“Employers won’t promote young women because they assume the women will leave their jobs if they have children.”

“Women put family before work and are less committed to their careers.” And, “In hiring and promotion, employers discriminate against women because of their gender.”

Sadly, these erroneous practices – also called discrimination – by employers are even older than the Association of University Women, which was founded in 1881.

Fun is fun: “Between 2001 and 2003 the American workplace reached unprecedented levels of productivity, but at a price: People weren’t having any fun,” according to Leigh Branham, author of “The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: How to recognize the subtle signs and act before it’s too late” (Amacom, $24.95).

Branham says that “studies have actually shown that workplaces with higher “fun quotients’ have lower health-care costs, higher productivity and improved morale.”

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(Carol Kleiman is the author of “Winning the Job Game: The New Rules for Finding and Keeping the Job You Want” (Wiley, $16.95). Send e-mail to ckleimantribune.com.)

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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