Office romance rules catch up to European executives

This week's ouster of Nestlé Chief Executive Laurent Freixe served as a lesson to other European executives: When it comes to office romances, expect to play by American rules.

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A more laissezfaire approach has traditionally prevailed in much of Europe. For years, companies and their boards largely viewed the private lives of employees-and even bosses as largely off limits.

European authorities, too, have traditionally imposed tighter limits on employers' abilities to monitor and investigate staffers' relationships than in the U.S.

That's changing as more European companies adopt and enforce U.S.-style governance standards-sometimes with a vengeance. Last year, BP ordered all staff to disclose intimate relationships at work and mandated that senior leaders disclose any office romances over the previous three years. The impetus was the 2023 resignation of CEO Bernard Looney, who the company said was "not fully transparent" about his past relationships with colleagues.

British broadcaster ITV also introduced a stricter policy on personal relationships at work after a 2023 incident in which a morning-show presenter admitted to a relationship with another staffer. This year, Filipe Silva, the CEO of Portuguese oil company Galp Energia, stepped down after av report by the news outlet Eco that the company's ethics committee had investigated an anonymous tip of a relationship between Silva and a senior manager.

Driving the shift, in part, is a push among investors and shareholder groups to globalize corporate standards in managing risks to a company's reputation or financial performance. A European Union directive established several years ago to better protect workers also requires that companies establish whistleblowing programs to receive reports of wrongdoing or questionable conduct.

The result, legal specialists say, has been a convergence of workplace standards across both sides of the Atlantic.