Abstract
Occupational health practitioners may acknowledge attraction as natural and innate instinct but must regulate it when difficulty in separating personal and professional lives is endangering sanity and survival of modern workplaces.
My Opinion
The existential question is why attraction exists. Evolutionarily, it can be called a precursor to procreation that essentially helps individual organisms survive through generations (Ryan, 2018). Moreover, attraction supplements with non-procreation benefits facilitating sharing of attained power for individual organisms’ survival (De Waal, 2006). Therefore, we can agree that attraction is a natural and innate instinct in individual organisms.
Thence the question is why workplaces have boundaries because in modern workplaces, the open debates about rampant attraction and its consequences are often missing despite its known obvious association with expanding work hours cutting into personal time (Byrne, & Neuman, 1992; Elsesser, 2019; Gautier, 2015). It becomes obvious when one considers that evolutionarily survival has not precluded but rather perpetuated the creation of boundaries within the species, families and societies. Henceforth, modern living revolving mostly around modern workplaces as “unofficial-families” is required to define workplace boundaries for its survival (Gupta, 2019). Ironically, the core goal of living is survival of most resilient selfish genes replicating within, even when it may paradoxically seem that survival instincts are favoring larger organisms like species, families and societies (and now workplaces) over smaller organisms like individual beings (Dawkins, 1976).
Finally, while modern workplaces value purity and predictability in professionalism and productivity, the scorching question remains that how to subtract attraction to keep workplaces healthier by overcoming the universal law of blurring and blinding attraction (Eyler, & Baridon, 1992; Six Sigma Online, 2013). Repressed or confessed feelings may go wrong. Conversation with supervisors/peers may fail. Assistance by family/friends may not help. Counselors/physicians may seem distant.
Fundamentally, the ideal scenario will be modern workplaces allowing their workers sufficient home-time devoid of all workplace-responsibilities so that their natural and innate instinctual needs can be physically-psychologically-socioeconomically-spiritually met far away from their workplaces. However, workhours’ restrictions like six-hours-workday or four-workdays-week may not succeed due to limited resources (Glaveski, 2018; Graham-McLay, 2018). Alternatively, work-from-home may be impossible at most workplaces; and wherever possible, it may paradoxically keep workers more connected to workplaces as compared to homes. Even non-rescue/non-emergency workers’ jobs are evolving unrealistic time-sensitive work-profiles secondary to breathless connectivity via emails/texts/calls. Although workplaces can officially ban work-related emails/texts/calls during after-hours, workplaces may seem helpless if workers choose to remain more connected to their coworkers than to their families and friends (Anderson, 2017). Essentially, although investment in social relationships may keep workers happy and contain their burnout, workplace safety warrants cost-efficient strategies to separate dysfunctionally attracted coworkers (Achor, 2010).
Summarily, it is important to understand “what if everybody did that” in modern workplaces so that modern beings can understand why attraction must be subtracted for the sanity of modern workplaces (Javernick, 1990; Stover, 1960). Herein lays the role of occupational health practitioners who may acknowledge attraction as natural and innate instinct but must regulate it when difficulty in separating personal and professional lives is endangering sanity and survival of modern workplaces.
Reference(s)
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Competing Interests
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